January 2009 Archives
There are not an endless number of choices once you have done the city attorney's offices. Did I mention that he has two? This seemed excessive to me, and I thought of saying something but thought better of it once we got into the pencil drumming and watch glancing stage of things. One office appeared to be the usual book-lined bastion of jurisprudence, the other a toned down version of the same. Why the taxpayer, a.k.a., me, has to support this, God only knows. In any case, I had let it pass. And now I was passing myself, out into the sunlight, leaving the city attorney to his lunch and thinking about one of my own.
From a wheelchair, our downtown opens like a vista. It is difficult to see from one end to the other. More important, rolling the distance from the bank at the western edge to the framing shop on the eastern front takes just long enough to make the experience, an experience. You think twice about flinging yourself at the coffee bar across from the bank when you are just approaching the framing shop. Hard to say why this is. Age certainly has something to do with it. The arthritic bumping of bones upon seat cushion upon wheelchair springs upon tree-root-shifting sidewalk, induces just enough discomfort to present a barrier.
It's all of five short blocks from the beginning of the town's main street to its end, and no more is necessary. Another block would, in fact, be excessive. It's big enough as it is, and any more of it would bore you, probably tire you, certainly drain your wheelchair batteries unnecessarily. Driving the blocks in a car gives you a sense of the downtown's smallness, which you really don't need to know about. Driving presents other complications. The wheelchair-van interface is a cumbersome matter. Steering and braking and accelerating with half the normal complement of limbs is more than nerve-racking. You don't want a town on the driving scale. You want something on the Lionell scale. Never mind wheelchair access or even wheelchair range. The first is a legal issue. The second can be computed in your head. It is closer to Zen.
In any case, lunch. The odd thing about downtown is that the wheelchair population is remarkably scant. I know my rolling brethren exist. I see one or two of them at the Sunday farmer's market just off the main street. One explained that he lives in a subsidized low-cost county housing facility a few streets north of the shops. For reasons that are unclear, he only appears on Sundays. I have the downtown almost exclusively to myself. The kiosk by the bakery displays important events, coming attractions, things to know. It is a static town crier, this thing, yet no one seems to take any notice. Its notices go unnoticed. I pause long enough to see what's happening at Stanford. There's a blood drive. You can recycle your batteries. As I say, five blocks of this is enough.
What I don't like to admit is that, while our downtown is benign and becalmed, I become nervous in it. Fact is, it's good having something to do. It was my pleasure, and my civic responsibility, to give the city attorney a fair share of my mind. I may have burdened the encounter with too much personal emotion, it is true. But the facts spoke for themselves. Crosswalk buttons out of reach. General vulnerability to terrorism. There was something there, and the city attorney would do well to to turn these matters over in his mind. I was certain he was doing that now, staring, or trying not to stare, over the top of those crispy chili rellenos they do so well at the better Mexican eatery. Not to worry. I would improve upon his cuisine, top it, and with great pleasure.
Eating alone holds a certain vacancy. There is the thought, more than a thought, that a person is dining at a lone table for distinct and justifiable reasons. The reasons stretch back to high school, where shunning was an everyday social policy. Yes, you entered the restaurant alone, but why? Don't you have any friends? Is there no one else in the restaurant who would like a civil companion? Doubtless there is, and you have been excluded from the running. Maybe, you are thinking, it is because you are not running. Unless running on batteries counts. You are chairing. On a wing and a prayer and a wheel and a chair. Why don't you take that table, sir, the one in the corner, behind the post, next to the men's room?
These thoughts made me shudder as though from cold, though it was July. In a weekend or two, sawhorses would appear at either end of the main street, not to mention the side streets, and the whole commercial district would degenerate into an encampment. The antiques and crafts fair, God save us. Wheelchair passage on the sidewalks would become virtually impossible. The idea, of course, was to roll up and down the street, closed to pedestrians. But that would mean getting through the barricades, overlooking the porta potties and sharing the pavement with people who were mostly strangers, and the rest distinctly out of their element, slightly disoriented to be jaywalking on a grand scale and staring at questionable merchandise.
The metal sculptor is most imaginative. He has fashioned humanoids from old gasoline tanks and alarm clocks, the figures pleasantly rusted. But what am I to do with such things in my apartment? And hand-carved classic automobiles. Another winner. Quite fascinating in their wooden detail, wheel spokes like toothpicks. Perhaps once they were toothpicks. One doesn't feel quite right asking the carver about this. One moves on. In fact, one moves out of town during that weekend.
For now, no need to worry, the street was a street, the fair a distant prospect, and lunch a more imminent battle that I had decided to lose. This is why God invented the deli or the specialized food shop. I went rolling the aisles of the latter, Trader Joe's, stopping before the display of wraps. Surely there's a better word for this cuisine. The things are closely related to burritos, yet distant enough to have their own nomenclature. And 'wraps' doesn't do it. There's something lazy about the name. And there they were, the price ranging upwards to five dollars. One second sufficed to seize the red pepper pipenade chicken. Good choice.
No matter how powerful the current, the mercantile flow narrows at the cash registers. Squeezed between counters, the shoppers reveal themselves. This one has a family, judging by the masses of Juice Squeeze and the five-bushel corn chips. That one is some sort of vegan athlete, one pint of sweetened electrolytes, plus a tofu snack, if one believes in such things. That guy either has a party or is a wino. And we are all advancing, about to be squished into brief confrontation with cash and cashier. But meanwhile there's this long and unendurable march, everything with four wheels, me and the carts, and it's all taking too long. And reading the wrapper, I can now see that this chicken thing requires heating, oven or microwave, it hardly matters. Which is why the thing really belongs back in its refrigerated home on the shelf at the back of the store. And, why didn't this occur to me before, things are much brighter and less insistent outside.
The air is fresh, the day young, the options unlimited. On the other side of the main street there remains a homey, unthemed ethnic sort of minimart. A Chinese bodega. Oaks Foods. Never mind that it makes no sense. 'The Oaks' would have been classier, giving the place the expansive feel of, say, a retirement community. 'Okie Foods' is at least grammatical. It's a bad riff on the local theme. Oaks. The town tree.
Anyway, I'm there now, rolling in the door, and John, who either owns or manages the place, is nodding his inscrutable greeting. I get you, he says. By this, he does not mean that he understands me, but that he will get something for me. It is the thing he knows I want, perhaps the thing that has been at the back of my mind all this morning, momentarily bumped to one side by thoughts of the crispy chili rellenos. But it is back in play, coming at me the way express trains do at their rush-our worst. I have neither said yes nor no, but his friendliness and enthusiasm amount to more than an invitation. There is a convivial momentum behind this and, what the hell, I'm in his establishment for a reason, and nutrition be damned. We smile my 'yes' and he is off.
This is the good part, perhaps the best. The Chinese food sitting in the steam-tray-and-heat-lamp corner of the store seems to have been there for years. Doubtless, John or someone replenishes it from time to time. Embarrassingly, I do not care. The grease content of the dish that is my absolute fave makes it more suitable for packing the rear wheels of my van. But watch John have a go at his shovel-like spoon, a flat serving thing that scoops my lunch into a white carton with a metal handle, hot and aromatic. The chicken fried rice contains the colors of the rainbow, yellow egg, green peas, brown bits and strips of something blue. I don't care. I want to buy this shameful, diet-busting mixture before common sense gets the better of me.
You'd think from the way John has dug and packed and rung up his fried rice that this was the finest moment of his day. Very good seeing you, he says. I ask for a plastic fork. He doesn't hear me, for John, being fickle in his retail attentions, is now turning on the ethnic charm for the woman with a large box of Tide. I want a fork, dammit. The fried rice is getting cold. I am getting cold feet about eating it, for the caloric load of this lunch exceeds bodily specifications.
A fork is not an interruption, or even if it is, my needs are legitimate and logically come first. Leaning over John's counter far enough to rap the surface with my wedding ring requires some fancy neurological footwork. For balance, I extend my right paralyzed arm under the counter's fabric skirting. I catch the solid wood at the top, then pull with what's left of my abdominals. Now my hand is over the Masonite counter, the ringed knuckle clicking away. 'John, please' is half out of my mouth, but only half, for there's a shriek and a knock to my arm. Followed by 'what do you think' and 'my God'.
John has done something. The woman in line is horrified by the Tide box. Looking up, I see the drawn and frozen features of someone who is actually younger than her voice. She shoves at my arm. I realize this is the second time, having filtered out the first.
'You disgusting little man'.
I am filtering this too, or trying to, but, no, she is speaking to me. Of her four carefully chosen words, the 'little' most inflames my soul. My height is currently obscured by the fact that I am seated. And this is what she means, that I am lower than she, in a wheelchair. I am little.
John has his hands in the air, like a conductor, as though he has signaled this outburst and will now cut it off. What are you going to do, the woman asks him? Her veins are standing out, face reddened, breathing sharp. She cannot have reached this emotional pitch without having already been there, or close. I have forgotten the plastic fork. The fried rice is cooling on my lap. No one is going to call me little.
'What is he supposed to do? About what?' I stare her full in the face. Alarmed, she takes a step back.
There is a woman in blue jeans leaning against the soft drink machine by the door. She moves as though fatigued, staring at the floor but listening. I catch bits of the Tide woman's breathless narrative. There's this 'slid his hand up my skirt' theme, which repeats. She was opening her wallet, she said, and this hand slid. The woman in the blue jeans walks toward us, glances down, taking in the scene, then me. I give her a dirty look. She shrugs.
'My friend says you lifted her skirt'. She is looking at me without conviction, wearied by her own question. In this opening, things lighten just enough for me to retrace my steps, as it were. This dress lifting thing is too barmy for words. But in our open court of retail inquiry, the charge is worth considering in the interest of fairness. I had leaned over John's counter, that was all. I had balanced....
A penny dropped. Okay, something may have transpired. For the woman is wearing a heavy skirt. Being short on nerve supply, my right arm cannot tell where it is, let alone what it is touching. The old-fashioned curtain hanging under John's counter felt only vaguely like yardage when my neurologically numbed hand lifted it to brace against the wood. While looking the other way, whether that fabric is part of John's store or this woman's attire is impossible for me to say. I may have lifted her skirt. Strangely, this is true. I don't know whether or not to feel proud.
'Well, if you won't, I will.' The woman places her cell phone on the Tide box. '911'. She says this out loud. Her friend frowns and crosses her arms.
Something has shifted. The woman's conversation with 911 took remarkably long. She wandered outside to get the building number, then returned, caught my eye and faced the door to wrap things up. Force, yes. Molestation, that is correct. Yes, he is still here. No attempt to flee. Thank you.
Hard to say why, but the ludicrousness of the situation seemed to spread. You could feel it moving, like crab grass in a lawn. The Tide woman clicked her mobile phone closed. A guy with glasses and tie approached with a quart of Pepsi and a packaged sandwich. John rang him up, barely saying a word. The transaction normalized things and saddened them at the same time. Now, we had only to wait. The two women leaned against a freezer which roared beneath their butts. The woman in the blue jeans turned, her eyes nowhere in particular, speaking to her friend. 'Look at his hand'.
The two of them checked me out, eyes moving shamelessly. Miss Tide looked away. I'm used to my hand and its disturbing effects. With the fingers clawed backwards, the wrist bending abnormally inward, the overall effect is mildly grotesque. It is a point of personal pride that I am rarely disturbed by my own extremity, for the fingers, the palm, the knuckles, all of it is a neuromuscular desert. Most of the nerve supply evaporated long ago.
They were eyeing me, almost voraciously, these two women. They had declared open season, and on what I wasn't sure. Reflexively, I tried to move the hand out of sight, but this was impossible and, of course, unnecessary. An inspired moment. I now lifted the hand, raising it along its one axis. The blue-jeaned one nodded to the other. The Tide woman looked mortified and seemed to deflate.
I love those action movie chase scenes when the good guy, pursued by the bad guys, ducks into some side street. A second later, he's chasing his pursuers. Everything flips as prey pursues hunter. This is where we were, Miss Tide and I. Her friend sauntered over. There had been a mistake, she said, sorry.
I stared at her impassively. The charge was a serious one, I said. A glance at my watch. I told her the police would be there shortly. No, no, she said, her friend was phoning them now.
'Calling off the dogs?' I fumbled for my cell phone. 'The police might not like being called dogs.'
'You called them that.' She was looking hard at me.
I clamped the cell phone to my ear. '911? Hello. Actually, the incident at Oaks Foods is ongoing, and we do need the police after all. I know. But I'm involved, and it's necessary. Thank you.'
Never mind that 911 hadn't really answered, that I was listening to this endless recording about emergencies, if this and then that. I snapped the phone shut. The woman, her box of Tide still on the counter, had hitched up her handbag for departure. The two of them whispered. They made for the door.
'I would wait for the police,' I said.
'I don't know what's on your sorry little mind.' This from Miss Tide.
'It's all on film.' I pointed at the video surveillance camera above the salad dressing. 'John, the police will want your tape. They will take a statement from you. A statement from me. And they will want to know who called them and then ran off. Do you know these women?'
This slowed their exit just long enough for me to think of the killer line. 'John, even if the police don't show, we'll have to hand your tape to the city attorney.'
'Stop it.' Blue Jeans couldn't help herself. 'You're making a mountain out of a molehill.'
Without a word, I followed them out of the store. They walked straight down Cypress Street, whispers back and forth, the friend turning around to see if I was still there. I was. One of them laughed. I followed them across the parking lot. The taillights on a Volvo flashed as Blue Jeans squeezed her electronic key. Damn. I didn't have a pencil. Nothing to do but roll very close to the license plate, bend over and chant the number. Trouble is, my memory isn't very good, even with audio repetition. I didn't want to lose the license number, not that it was clear what I'd do with it. Hard to say what I'd do now.
'Would you please get away from my car.' She was standing by the driver's seat, door open, face flushed, high cheekbones getting higher by the second. Now I knew what to do. Nothing. I was blocking her car, and that was enough.
'Go away. You molested me.' A faint voice from the passenger side. Now she looked at the sky, fists clenched. 'Okay. You did nothing. Now leave.'
I stared at her. My wheelchair was turned off. No sense in wasting battery life.
'Go, you disgusting little...cripple.' She burst into tears.
I felt eyes on the back of my neck. An elderly man was staring. He was climbing out of his car. Now he was climbing back in. There was a scene under way. A public scene in a parking lot.
A wheelchair and its energy field exerts a subtle power. And speaking of power, it came to me, still staring at the license plate and knowing that whatever I retained of the number, say, a few minutes from now, would already have gone wonky, numerals reversed, scrambled, gone. Not that it mattered. For I had the power. More important, I had the power to not have the power.
'Would you fucking go away.' She pounded the roof of her car.
'Can't,' I said. 'Batteries are dead.' It flew by, a blur of navy blue officialdom, visored cap like a policeman's, paper waving like a small flag. The meter maid presented the ticket, then strode away. Miss Tide eyed the paper, turning it over, reading the back to her friend. I caught snatches of 'disorderly...disorderly conduct,' then sobbing.
No one likes to hear a woman cry. That's why I decided to help. The thought came easily, for this had been the way of things. Chasing, then being chased. Reversal. I did know the city attorney. Next time I was around the Civic Center, I would stop in. For now, I was headed back to give the wrap counter another try.
I am part of our community. Rolling at three feet off the ground I see things that many people don't. I know what's under the counter at Oaks Foods. I'm not little.
She took down Marlou's history, the onset of the cancer, the treatments and surgeries and chemotherapy holidays. Later, in recollecting the exchange, Marlou seemed embarrassed to have flubbed a few minor points of chronology. The young doctor wasn't concerned. I'm sure that in her position at Mount Zion Hospital she has interviewed some of San Francisco's loopiest and most senile. Marlou, by contrast, presented a coherent and complete oral history of her cancer. The young doctor, in the time-pressed way of overworked, under-rested medical trainees, moved things along at a brisk clip. She recorded an answer while asking the next question, simultaneously doing a quick inventory of Marlou's slides, CDs of CAT and PET scans, paper records and assorted clinical evidence.
The doctor would be in shortly. And short it was. The cancer specialist delivered a crisp overview of the disease and its progress. Marlou, he said, needed radiation next. This wasn't bad, for it would relieve the persistent pain in her hip. And coupled with a redoubtable bone strengthening remedy, not only would she be safer from falls, but the hip cancer might get beaten back. One never knew. One also never knew colon cancer to work its way into bones, until recently. Apparently this is an unanticipated side effect of the new medications. As for clinical trials of experimental pharmaceuticals, the issue of the day, well, the radiation would have to come first. Then we'd see.
I said goodbye to Mount Zion's cancer department without much regret. But the place did have certain associations. The crowded waiting room reminded me of large old hospitals in London. The patients had a more varied, urban look to them. This was no airy, spacious suburban medical haunt of executives and families. This was San Francisco, home to Mandarin and Cantonese and Spanish and Filipino cultures, mashed together without enough furniture or leg room, everyone waiting to see the doctor about their cancers. Marlou offered to pay the fee that accompanies most American medical appointments these days. Make the check payable to University of California Medical Center? No, said the receptionist, pay the UC Regents. This triggered an instant reflex, and I went looking for a spare brick and protest sign. The regents had this effect on Berkeley students in the 1960s. Half a century ago. I am not old.
The winter day was crisp and Divisadero Street full of perils. Marlou had driven her new car into San Francisco and was pushing me across the pavement, and up and down the curb ramps, in a manual wheelchair. The strain, the chance of falling...oh, what the hell. Within minutes we had driven to Lincoln Park, wedged between the golf course and the museum, and sat munching sandwiches. It was one of those searingly beautiful San Francisco days. The Bay water sparkled with blue dye. The big freighters heading in and out of the Golden Gate revealed every detail of splash and bow, flag and smokestack. Driving south along The Great Highway, hemmed in by a crush of boxy Sunset District houses on the left, bounding surf on the right, Marlou kept her eye on the road. Yes, it was pretty, but she had had enough for one day.
Not me. I was back the next day, on the #2 Sutter bus, heading right back to Mount Zion's next-door neighbor, Jewish Family Services. The bus was infrequent, but also uncrowded. In midafternoon, it carried no commuters only people like me, the lame and the halt. At Laguna Street the #2 docked for a long interval. At the bus stop, an elderly woman waited with her shopping. In each hand she carried 24 shrink-wrapped rolls of toilet paper. Nothing else. She groaned climbing the stairs, flopped into a bench and eyed the next passenger's progress. There wasn't much. The man brandished two forearm crutches, but not very well. I could tell he did not have decades of practice. First he got one leg up one step, then one crutch, then the other. Twenty bus passengers with a destination stared. Now he had a go at the second step. First the leg, then one of the crutches, then, what the hell, the other crutch.
'Why don't you lower the lift', the toilet paper lady told the driver. 'See, he needs the lift'.
I was certain this woman was also destined for Jewish Family Services. The man with the crutches was now on the top step and trying to hand one of his sticks to a passenger. He needed to pay the fare. The bus still wasn't moving. The bus hadn't been moving for minutes. The woman with the toilet paper held the man's crutch. He dropped his coins in the box, and we were off. A few more stops, and I would be off myself. Already late for my appointment, I glanced at my watch. At Divisadero Street, I flicked on my wheelchair, just as the guy with the crutches rose. He was poised to begin his descent, but so was an army of supporters. The driver ushered him onto the wheelchair lift, the toilet paper lady held his crutches, I held my breath.
Ahead was a social worker and a planning session for life without Marlou. The woman at the front desk offered me a chocolate pistachio toffee. I thanked her. She offered another. The social worker appeared. Soon, the young rabbi I had met before. It was late afternoon by the time it was all over. The #2 bus was filling with commuters. The bus driver dropped me at the edge of Chinatown for no good reason. This bus stop was less crowded, he said. The driver seemed oblivious to my destination, concerned only with this matter of stops and crowding. I decided this was fine. I wove through the late day foot traffic around Union Square, ignoring the conveniently close bus stop for #45 and the #30. Either would take me to the train station, but both would be packed with commuters. I knew what I was doing. Market Street would comb people out of these buses like a flea brush. All I had to do was cross the bustling thoroughfare and wait on the other side. Many things were unclear, the future daunting, but for now I knew where to go.
Mama told me there'd be
days like this...there'd be
days like this, Mama said. Only Mama
didn't, having too
many days like this herself. Instead, I
did get an early warning from high school freshman orientation. The class, which was mercifully brief,
attempted to prepare adolescents for adolescence. You might feel good one day and bad
another. Hard to say why, that was the
message.
I bridled and balked at
these words. From an early age I had
accompanied my father on his weekend wanderings across our desert fields, while
he tossed lighted matches into weeds and mused upon Freud. I knew there was more to good days and bad
days than the freshman orientation account.
Someone's mama said.
Which brought me to a
sunny Monday in the current January and the first business lunch I have had in
years. A
And this is my business,
the business of talking, and I'm enjoying our discussion on the outside terrace
with its midday sun, its heat feeble but quite enough. It will be good to talk to a group. A chance to tell some jokes, feel useful and,
as my host points out, make some money. Now
that the latter is near the bottom of my list of priorities, this may happen. Life is essentially ironic. After years of pursuing business, I give up,
and business pursues me. Go figure.
The pleasant feelings
surrounding the lunch contrast with my morning discussion with Fidelity, the
company that manages my Keogh retirement funds.
I need to make what seems to me is a simple change. My accountant assures me there's nothing to
it. Yet as soon as the Fidelity man
comes on the phone, my eyes glaze over.
It occurs to me that I've had this discussion before. I have called Fidelity, perhaps spoken to the
same man, about the same matter. Several
times.
Let us send you our
rollover kit, the Fidelity man explains.
Why not, I respond. Go for
it. Send me your kit. Lend me your ears. And let us dance the merry dance of Keoghs
and Individual Retirement Accounts. No,
I have not made a contribution to the former, I tell the man, for many a year. Pity, he says, for that is what the law
requires. Regular contributions.
I want to tell him that
the law is a fool. I want to add that
this is not an original thought, but one eloquently and repeatedly voiced over
the decades. I want to get this silly
thing over with. My wife is sick. We have legal matters. And, as everyone knows, legal matters matter.
It's my gray matter that
is currently in question. For I am
certain that this man in Boston, Fidelity's stalwart home, bastion of banking
and general probity, is looking at his computer screen. He is seeing a record of my phone calls to
his office. The man is looking at the
number of times he has mailed me the rollover kit. In fact, if I can muster the ambition, one of
these mailings will probably surface on my desk.
There is something
suspicious under the first draft of my novel.
Well, not the first, more like the 20th.
But it was the first edited draft, and that restored to it something
bordering on virginity. That is why the
draft has been there, underneath my desk lamp and next to the stapler for the
last six months. Lots of things have been
sitting around. This includes me, in my
wheelchair. I want to tell the Fidelity
guy to lighten up, but there are no grounds to do so. Mama said.
Never mind, for after
lunch and the annual visit to the ophthalmologist, Marlou and I are going to
descend on the Fidelity office in downtown
Combine trips, this is the
essential and irrevocable rule of disabled life. That is why my business luncheon occurs
almost next door to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where the ophthalmologist
awaits. See me once a year, he always
says. And I do. Evidence of my torn retina, now five years
old, continues to float around my eyeball.
The stuff is lost in ocular space, forever drifting. And I would love it to stay lost. But it's there, something like a flock of
black birds in the distance, occasionally swooping across the fields, the field
of vision. So, once a year.
She's awfully chatty, the
nurse who guides me into an examining room.
In a wheelchair, I'm at the wrong height for all the eyeball gauges and
test equipment, but there's always a way.
I sink low, hold my head high, while the nurse burbles away about what a
splendid patient I am.
It always makes me
nervous, praise for my cooperation with the medical profession. Ours is of necessity a tense relationship and
is best kept that way. They have their
agenda. I have mine. This is no time to be a good boy. In fact, being a bad one is, I am convinced,
a sign of robust health.
In the end, the nurse asks
me to wait. We are done with the
pre-exam, she says. But she needs
someone else to have, well, just a quick look at something in my eye. Oy.
This can't be good. A small river
of terror is now flooding me. And, no,
there is no explaining why someone who gets by on a neurological wing and a
prayer should worry about his eyes. But
there you are.
Another nurse appears, and
she has a go at me. Her style is more
aggressive, asking me to hold handgrips in the approximate style of a submarine
captain on a periscope. This gets me in
fighting mode, chin forward, eyes wide.
No, she tells the other nurse, he was just out of position. The room lights flick on, my head falls back,
drops flood my eyeballs, then light floods my eyeballs. The usual dilation is under way. Give it about 20 minutes, says the nurse,
ushering me back to the waiting room.
The 20 minutes turn into
90. Mama said there'd be days.... By the time the nurse returns, I am in no
mood for chatting. Good you caught me
when you did, I tell her, for I was just about to leave. She pretends not to hear this. I sit in an examining room watching my
ophthalmologist wander up and down the hall.
Finally, he comes in, presses some sort of magnifying light to my eye,
asks me to look up, down and sideways and, 90 seconds later, pronounces my
ocular health. I check my watch. The Fidelity office will close shortly. We are out of luck, I tell Marlou on my
mobile phone.
But maybe not
entirely. After all, there is a meeting
in this very building at 5:30 in the cancer care center providing 'Support for
Caregivers'. I rang the cancer center
that very morning, and yes, this was the day.
There's a flyer in the clinic lobby announcing the thing. And, the day having dragged on to this
extreme juncture, why not? Easy enough
to hang around this clinic a bit longer.
Especially if I roll back to Ophthalmology and steal two old copies of
The New Yorker. The David Sedaris
article is particularly good. Might as
well roll up to Cancer Care a few minutes early.
The waiting room at Cancer
Care is deserted. This is not a good
sign. A medical person, doctor or nurse
I cannot say, wanders by and stops to ask if I need help. I'm there for the group, I say. The woman scrutinizes me, a quick practiced
scan she has used before to determine my level of dementia. Which is high, the day being what it is. I produce the flyer. She disappears behind a door, and moments
later emerges with the news with that, well, the caregiver group had been
poorly attended and...sorry.
I ring Marlou for the
fifth time that afternoon. First to
announce that our Fidelity appointment would be late, then canceled, then the
caregivers group, and so on. The flyer
for the group had sat on my desk almost as long as the Fidelity envelope, so
this has been a long journey. '
I'm glad I made it, made
it here. For even if the caregivers
don't care, I do. I care enough to be
here. I care enough to go in search of take-away
for two at the adjoining shopping center.
The wraps place is closed. Many
options are closed, but no matter.
There's always something. The
OPEN sign is distant and glowing in old-fashioned red neon and proves to be a
sushi place. I order enormous
quantities, ascend the wheelchair lift with dinner in a squeaking Styrofoam box,
now being squeezed by the van's hydraulics...an ominous sound, but I keep my
cool. The sushi does the same. We both arrive home safe. Mama said.
Marlou is sleeping more and doing a lot less. There's no more heavy leg lifting to get me on the exercycle. And yesterday, even the light leg hoisting that comes with the rowing machine proved too much. I picked up the laundry. We scaled back plans for dinner...no making cornbread...corn tortillas from the supermarket would do. New shelfs for Marlou's new car had arrived at Stevens Creek Chrysler, but the afternoon drive to Santa Clara did not materialize. Marlou fell asleep.
Now, in the wee hours, I go through the complex neuromuscular maneuver of extracting limbs of uncertain position from their entanglement with sheets. Once freed, I swing myself to the edge of the bed, sit and no I will remain sitting. Humming, yellow light signaling, this is no time to unplug the wheelchair battery charger. I stare at the bookcase. On the bedside table I have some herbal sleeping tablets, mild things composed of chamomile and its spiritual cousins. They don't do much, but I don't need much usually. I take the pills. They taste vaguely of flowers.
Marlou and I have discovered another effective, certainly more enjoyable, insomnia remedy in the Belgian chocolate pastilles perennially on sale at Trader Joe's, their cocoa content proudly posted at 73%, much like forensic analyses of street heroin. But not tonight. Until the batteries get charged, I'm not going anywhere.
Panic. There's an underlying panic to what's happening. Things seem to be unfolding faster than imagined. I need home help. Regular daily assistance...shoes and socks...exercise machines...Marlou often can't do these any more. And is this the spread of cancer? The effects of codeine? And does it matter?
Marlou cries out in the night. 'Chocolate'. Did she actually say that? Yes, she did, the diction slightly garbled by sleep, but quite understandable. I have heard and am simply too tired to ponder what it means, for I know. The night is a jagged chasm, but one can still yell instructions. The Belgian chocolates are there on some level. Marlou is trying to reach me with this information. Chocolate. For now, enjoy it. All 73%. And now I know the thing I need to know. It was there all along, and I missed it, starting with dinner.
We had a friend, David, who joined us for chili and salad and tortillas. I made the chili, Marlou made salad, God made the tortillas, and all of us made the evening. We had had a wonderful time. David helped me get on my rowing machine, and while I huffed and strained in the carport, we discussed Leonard Cohen. I told him halfway through my exercise regime that Marlou might want to show off her new car. The red Chrysler was gleaming there before us. David wandered inside just as Marlou, bundled up for January, wandered out. Within moments, they drove away. Not far. But long enough for me to finish rowing and join them inside.
Over dinner, David unfurled sexual hijinks among Bay Area teachers, followed by the BBC's 'New Tricks'...and now it was after 4 AM, Marlou had offered a sort of virtual chocolate. Life had been going on. And even when it wasn't, in the imagined future, there would be a missing ingredient, something I had dropped from the recipe. I was not going to be alone. I was going to be safe. I had friends, knew how to take care of myself...and in the sum total of all of us I would be okay.
But there are risks. The ones I fear most involve the slipping-in-the-shower scenarios. The other ones, the sort that come at you in the night, in the wee hours, out of nowhere, those are more powerful. For there is a risk in believing in Marlou and the connection we have. What of this offer of chocolate in the night? Whatever it is, can I take it? Do we really have a mysterious communication that transcends sleep, day and night, and is really no more intermittent than anything else?
The battery charger is still humming. The clock is still moving. There are knowns and unknowns, and what I need now is sleep, and for that there is enough.
I wanted to say 'Happy Inauguration Day' to the woman striding up the street, but something made me hold the mark at hello. It was one of those moments that bedeck popular song, a there's-a-smile-on-my-face-for-the-whole-human-race sort of sensation. I felt like reaching out. In fact, I really felt like leaning off the left side of my wheelchair and giving the woman an unauthorized hug. And why? Well, because so many people had been cheering the moment, the unanticipated, almost inexplicable ascendancy of a black man to national leadership. As for the imagined hug, even on this day it would have been taken amiss. What made me feel I had the right to embrace a stranger? What made me even consider the possibility? The fact that she was black, of course. And this was a rare moment of concord. Not to mention accord. So why not yank the ripcord? Go for it, give the strange woman a big transracial greeting?
I don't know. It just seemed too much. Also, it seemed about me. After all, I did an early field study in race relations. The three black teenagers walking down the Berkeley street, my street, either took me for the enemy or, simply, the other. Whatever their motives, our races had something powerful to do with the moment. It takes more than an evening's drug use to pull out a gun and shoot a defenseless person in the neck. The experience has left me with my own racial fears and angers. I can't help it. For years, the sight of teenage black boys made me stiffen, prepared to attack or bolt.
And now we are tired of it, all of it, all of the years of racial tension and animosity, relieved and glad to see the thing, whatever it is, fade even slightly away. About 10 years ago I sat with my Seattle nephews, both pre-teenagers, and watched as they laughed at a black comic pair on Nickelodeon, the kids' cable network. It was the kind of humor that established a mutuality. Race was not an issue. The two comics were simply being funny, talking about their lives, openly using black argot. Entertaining. Race was incidental to their act. My nephews were laughing with them. I could see, in that moment, the old barriers coming down. So, I wasn't quite sure about the black woman, the one with the businesslike stride, and the apparent need for caffeine. I wasn't sure if I wanted to forgive her or be forgiven. Ours has been a long confusing struggle, white or black, and both sides have their stories.
Skeptics point out that Barack Obama grew up in a white environment, had one of the finest educations from an early age. Perfectly true. It is also perfectly true that such things only recently become possible. Mixed marriages are longer illegal, biracial kids get to go to good schools, and more important, it is possible to grow up black or half black in this country without being told you are a nigger. That's what excited on that Tuesday. It's time to bury the racial hatchet, to at least think about hugging the woman walking down the street.
* * *
That night, the sodium lights and gleaming streetcar tracks and mica sparkling in the rain washed sidewalk made the place look downright urban. My visit to San Francisco would be swift and efficient, with the 4:45 inbound, the evening train home and the briefest of highly focused meetings in the offices of the Giants. The city's baseball team works closely with Caltrain and, as an official advisor, so do I. My advice is generally the same. Provide more trains. Make them go faster. Make it easier for wheelchairs to use them.
On this occasion, sitting opposite the train company's assistant manager, all the news is good. My station, Menlo Park, will shortly get two new wheelchair ramps for fast boarding. This will happen in months, not years, probably by the summer. The news leaves me slightly stunned, but mostly buoyed. Now I'm glad I have come to this meeting. Everything else was working against it, principally my wheelchair, which still has not been repaired. Crossing King Street, bouncing over the streetcar tracks, I nervously eyed the joystick controller. No problems. Strangely, the wheelchair's controller has continued to behave itself ever since my brother gave it a slap. That was Saturday. He seems to have hidden powers, my brother.
But so does Michelle, Caltrain assistant manager. She is one of that narrow breed of person who gets things done. Moreover, when things don't get done, she unabashedly owns up. No, she told another Caltrain constituent, there will be no express trains on weekends. Repair work. Sorry. Next? Well, next is this fly-aboard wheelchair launch pad, which I've tested several times at the Palo Alto station and is so utterly swift and efficient that something in my German genes fairly shimmers.
The obvious question, the one that is so simple that it burns across the conference table: why can't Michelle get into oncology? If you can raise a small section of America's rust-belt railways into the modern era, surely you can do something with Marlou's cancer. Michelle has ceded the meeting to a very dry engineer who was going on about Positive Train Control, a long overdue technology that prevents one of the most annoying railway experiences, head-on collisions. The most recent of these only occurred a few months ago in Los Angeles and cost 25 lives. That's why I listen to the guy. All his talk of inertial control and GPS and optical fiber makes my eyes cross. But he's one of the Michelle breed. This thing will happen. He needs to consider oncology too.
I eat a sandwich on the way home. I like dining on trains. True, bits of arugula fall on my lap, for this is a San Francisco sandwich, vaguely Italianate, what with asiago baked into the bread. Menlo Park slides into the rainy evening remarkably quickly. I slide home. It's a nervous ride. The thing about my wheelchair is that its secondhand joystick controller, borrowed from the repair guy until the new part arrives, well, it's not looking very good. The plastic around the top surface is cracked. Won't rain get in, I asked the control guy? It's only temporary, he said. Be careful.
That's what I'm trying to be now, but it's hard to say what careful is. We haven't had rain in northern coastal California for a remarkably long time. This is a serious drought. Even serious droughts come to an end, if you are open to the possibility. But I am not. The driving rain, and that's what it is, pelts at me as I weave through the station parking lot. I am barely at the corner coffee bar before my trousers are soaked. Be careful. What about the rain-exposed joystick? I push the latter all the way forward, wheelchair pedal-to-metal rolling homeward at maximum warp.
Fuck it. I am tired of danger and uncertainty. Marlou is sick of it, literally. My book on my lap, the dry Annie Proulx, is getting wet. I am really pissed off. Live Oak Avenue glows in the rain. No traffic. I pull into the center of the street. My lone headlight shines like a cyclops. Just the thing one needs when a vast Chrysler sedan is turning on its headlights and obviously preparing to leave. Any sensible person would stop and wait for the car, but rain madness has seized me, and I continue. The car, if it didn't stop, would effortlessly turn into my passing wheelchair, knocking me over before the driver could grasp what had happened. Fortunately, there's someone sane behind the Chrysler wheel. And in minutes the plywood wheelchair ramp to my front door is rumbling.
Marlou frowns. I am a wet, sodden annoyance, wheelchair dripping into her evening. She tells me to dry off in the kitchen. There, she grabs a dish towel and daubs at me and my equipment. Somehow, this annoys me. I say little. At four in the morning, it all comes back to me, the present and my emotional past. We are annoyed at everything, both of us. Marlou has a low tolerance for weather. I have a low tolerance for low tolerance.
In the whispering darkness, she asks how I am. I ask her the same. She is having new symptoms, she says. Things are changing within her. I acknowledge that this is true, going purely on guesswork. I don't know what to offer, but an additional data point. You have a new car, I say. Yes. She sounds says, unimpressed. Oddly, this makes me feel better. This is my own lesson. We don't have to drive anywhere, do anything. We can lie together in the dark, hearing the rain. Which is much more enjoyable when I'm not about to get myself run over by Chryslers. The rain is good for the drought, good for the night, good enough to take us into another day.
This afternoon the two Bendix couples stood in the 70° January air and toasted each other. Marlou had never left our home. Richard and Debbie rang us from Stevens Creek Chrysler in San Jose with news of victory, and I scurried off to the supermarket. The chilled bottles all looked the same, but I knew there were subtle distinctions. I wasn't into saving money. Richard and Debbie had saved us plenty.
Buying a new car, and selling a second-hand one, require fortitude at the best of times, but these are not the best of times for Marlou. So, it was the brother and sister-in-law who drove into a large Silicon Valley auto retailer on a Sunday, as salesmen descended like a flock of crows. They had had a telephone discussion with Joe (Mexican) and now found themselves face to face with Bill (Punjabi) in the sales room, only to be gazumped by Frank (Iranian). Of course, the $10,000 special had just been sold, but for only $14,000.... At this point my brother literally pounded the table. Much good can come of table pounding. The world needs more table pounders. Unfortunately, neither I nor Marlou are up to this right now.
As they made their faux exit, Richard and Debbie were quickly surrounded by 10 pleading, wheedling sales guys. Life is tough in the car business. Life is tough, full stop. That's why the Veuve Clicqot made it into my shopping basket, cold and ready for action. That's also why, I think, Marlou went for the red PT Cruiser. Like me, she has spent much of her life being sensible and modest. This is not the time for such moderation. This is time for red.
This is time...running out. This sense underlies everything we do. Marlou looks quite beautiful in the photo my brother took of her posed in front of the new car, holding a champagne glass aloft. She also looks quite natural, as though is the real person. It is my own nature that sucks me too deep into the poignancy of such moments. For joy is joy. It is always fleeting. Life is not persecuting us, only instructing.
A psychologist recently suggested that I might just cease my travel planning. As Marlou describes it, my destiny is to prepare for the next journey, then the next one, then the one after that. I am like a shark forever swimming forward. Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, holiday homes on the coast, these things keep churning through my mind. When it is warmer we will go here, and if it is not warmer, we will go there. Book now, go then. Except that now is restricted and then is uncertain.
My recent wheelchair repair is a postgraduate course in fate acceptance. The secondhand controller cost nothing. My wheelchair has a way of braking to a terrifying halt every hundred meters or so. A flick of the on/off button gets the thing going again, but for how long? Another hundred meters is the answer. Until I rolled up the wheelchair ramp into our apartment while Marlou's old car was being sold and found that, dammit, the controller was blinking. Inside the apartment, the thing was stopping every 10 meters. My brother, just off the plane, pronounced a loose chip. He gave the controller a slap, and it instantly started working. Say what you will about corporal punishment....
Intermittent. Unpredictable. Thus my journey down the great road of life. At the end of the day we are all at the mercy of airline baggage handlers. My wheelchair, I am convinced, will never be the same again. But nothing will. Marlou's photo op by her new car was just one of those beautiful moments. The Great Baggage Handler in the Sky had temporarily put down his sledgehammer and was leaving terrestrial things alone. Flash.
This says a lot about Marlou and what she has endured in the last 2 1/2 years. There was plenty of vomiting with the chemo in the early days. But armed with, at one point, five separate anti-nausea drugs, she got on top of things and carried on. Carrying on has included two trips to Europe, four to Hawaii, not to mention Death Valley, Seattle and Phoenix. No one can say we have been stuck at home.
As for this morning's nausea, one has to forget Stegner. The vomiting came and went. The shoes went on. We started talking schedules. And I did, really did, want to get this expanse of plastic sheeting, black and thick and True Value, spread over my recently turned-under beds of cover crop. Marlou said she would give it a thought. That was enough. Whoever handles the sheeting, at least it's a household topic. As for the message in the vomiting, well what is it? That Marlou has cancer? Duh, as the young people say. Or, as Marlou herself would quote from Casablanca, 'What? Gambling at Rick's?'
In our separate ways, our different ways, Marlou and I keep finding a path through and around fear. All sorts of things, disturbing and unsettling and full of fate and decline, went through my head this morning my wife was sick in the bathroom. In the aftermath Marlou was actually more concerned about her husband seated on the bed, shoeless and stunned. She had run into the bathroom for a brief, functional moment, and she was back now, getting on with the day. And the only hitch was me, the worrying spouse. She had moved on and was hoping I would too.
Tone is everything. Here, there was no grim stoicism. No one was swallowing down bitter emotions to soldier on, stiff-upper-lip style. There was just no reason to worry, as far as Marlou was concerned. I immediately suggested that we cancel all the day's errands. But no, Marlou wouldn't hear of it. We had things to do. And now we had roles to reverse, for Marlou has been complaining of too much in our daily schedule. Too many people, events and happenings. Whatever the day held it could continue to hold. We are past the voodoo quality of cancer. We are into the day-to-day experience.
Yesterday in San Francisco, my friend Jim and I were seated outside at Café Centro, admiring South Park, aware that the day was declining and pretending that we weren't. One half of a pair at the adjoining table rose and departed, leaving the other half, a pudgy, bespectacled guy somewhat younger than myself, who wanted to talk. About anything, it was clear. Jim and I only had an hour or so together, so there was no time for this. We were talking about work and girlfriends, and this guy kept talking to us, so I decided to switch topics. Cancer. The latest on Marlou's cancer. Oh, the guy said, chemotherapy never works. I gave him a dirty look. He rose and left.
Someone wiser than me, wiser even then Susan Sonntag, is going to have to write about cancer's place in the popular mind. It is popular, that is the strange thing. It is especially popular when someone else has it. Yes, it evokes primal fear, but it also sets off nuts talking in cafés. It is part of our intimacy that Marlou and I have worked through some of this, separating ourselves from fear. And vaguely mindful of the fear of others. Whatever it takes. A hug here, a dirty look there, and we were up and off for the day.
Take a close look at the average leaf blower, observing how the device hikes snugly up the wearer's back. Once in place, you can't tell me the thing isn't a dead ringer for the jet pack James Bond wore in some film 20 years ago. Conspiracy theorists have every reason to eye legions of garden maintenance guys with suspicion. They are equipped, all of them, with high-compression systems that require noise protection gear normally seen in and around jet aircraft. And their purpose, the blowing about of leaves, pine needles, old condoms and similar organic material, tends to be masked behind a heavy reliance on Spanish. There's every reason to believe that the air duct, when pointed downward, will send any of these men airborne. Expect this soon, high over the streets of Menlo Park, 'gardeners' in V formation, blowers roaring, eyes on the horizon, their mission known only to those with the right kind of earmuffs. You heard it here first.
First, I do have to talk to the guy with the pickup. He has placed two aluminum rails at the back of his Toyota and is now rolling a lawnmower down. London cabbies employ the same trick, using collapsible inclines to load and unload wheelchairs. That's why the gardener with his lawnmower and rails has a disorienting effect at this moment. That, and the fact that the January sun is beating with the intensity of the milder tropics. We say hello, he and I. Then I propose, in the nicest and most engaging way possible, that he help me. This puts things on a personal level. I, the cripple, need his, the Japanese gardener's, assistance. Never mind that the assistant, currently not in sight, will assist. He'll be along in a few minutes, the gardener says.
A new epoch has begun. One has cleared the hurdle, and now one is into something else. It's not unlike passing through Homeland Security at the airport. The outcome is likely, and the only known variable is time. Still, when one emerges, having established non-terrorist bona fides, it's another world. Okay, it's not Alice in Wonderland. But it's duty-free in San Francisco. It's different. There's progress. Something else is about to happen.
Do I need to make it happen? This is always an issue for me. With the after image of the Unreliable Mother a more or less constant presence, I tend to nudge people too much. Are you really going to do that? When are you going to do it? Have you done it yet? Are you going to do it the way you said you were going to do it? And so on. Still, I've got a physical exam this morning, e-mails to answer, critical matters in hand, so I'm back at my desk for several cliffhanging minutes. Is it happening? Is he doing it? Should I ask the assistant myself? And what, dammit, is the assistant's name?
Desk matters in hand, I roll to the raised beds, the suburban agricultural heartland. And dammit, if Guillermo or Miguel or whatever his wife calls him, isn't hard at work. The cover crop, the combination of annual grass and legumes that Marlou's nephews helped me plant in October, is no more. The gardener's assistant has pitchforked the greenery underground, the roots skyward, and the natural, organic decomposition of vetch and rye is already under way. There are still clumps of green grass sticking out, but I grab a couple and determine that they have been properly uprooted.
I don't have to intervene. The thing has happened. The growing season has begun. The gardener's assistant, shy and self-effacing, takes my $30, and I thank him profusely. I want to tell him that lechuga y tomates will soon sprout from this soil he has tilled, but I will tell him later. In August, he will get an annual bag of vegetables, but for now its cash and goodbye. I'm off for my doctor.
Another hurdle, and I leap it without much effort. Who put this extra five pounds on my waist, I demand of the physician. Eat less, he says. Exercise in the mornings. Buy low. Sell high. There's the usual prostate impertinence, but the result is okay, and I'm out of there. In fact, within hours I am even out of Menlo Park, sitting at that other park, South Park, San Francisco. My friend Jim and I are enjoying the inexplicable 70° in an outdoor café and talking about a new age of green, energy-efficient yoga studios.
This is Jim's obsession and his discipline, which I quite understand, having one of my own. Mine is the thing that propels me, middle-aged memory be damned, from the train station in Menlo Park directly to the Romanian hardware store. I order a vast amount of black plastic sheeting and two bags of blood meal. There is garden method in this apparent madness, and yes, I have lined up a workforce. My brother and his wife appear Saturday morning. The plan will unfold. Suffice it to say that the lettuce-and-tomatoes chitchat with the gardener was all window dressing. Long before the lechuga, there will be the spinach. If all goes according to plan, the ground will be bursting with young spinach plants before my brother's plane heads back to Seattle. There will be spinach. Will Marlou have an appetite? I don't know. Someone will make a spinach garland or a wreath. Either way, it will happen, this winter crop in the non-winter. There will be spinach.
I sleep pretty soundly these days, all things considered. And when I do awaken, all it takes is a few minutes of tuning into my own mental distress to bore me back into slumber. But not this morning. I stare at nothingness for 90 minutes or so, remember that I am a 62-year-old quadriplegic in too many ways, and that Marlou has cancer. Mental progress clogged, things fester until the clock reads 6:25. The central heat kicks on. I kick into action.
Action is awfully slow. At 8:05 the train pressure mounts. Will I make the 8:23? I know the answer, and the answer doesn't matter. I'm headed southbound on an errand, perhaps a useless one. I'll have breakfast on the road.
'The road' means central Sunnyvale. There is a street, only one, with a series of shops and small eateries, and I roll into a familiar café. This is silly, this entire exercise, and its purpose eludes me. Going out is fun, a treat, something special. Only it's not. I am alone, there's no time to dine. And the compromise, ordering something quick, proves mildly disastrous. Egg on a bagel. It tastes as bad as it sounds, but it is mildly time efficient. Within a few minutes I am rolling again, heading for the familiar wheelchair repair guy. He's waiting for me. I am slightly late. What am I doing?
Marlou enjoys staying home more than I do. Or at least I think she does. In truth, I may enjoy staying home more than I realize. It's hard to say, for my feelings in this area are confused and conflicted. As someone recently pointed out, when the childhood home is a place of unpleasant tension at best, and vicious explosions at worst, quiet moments with the family threaten more than they soothe. This has become something of a habit. Let's go out. Let's do something. Why be stuck here at home? Like all compulsions, this leaves one feeling vaguely empty. As I do now, approaching the premises of California Rehabilitation Equipment, Inc.
Yes, there's nothing to be done. Wayne talks me through the state of my wheelchair repair. He has patched things. An old controller, tape over the electronic connection, and all this will hold together...for a while. I need a new wheelchair. I need a new everything. I need to get back on the train and get home, as long as I have a home. And that is what this morning, and its joyless bagel and solitary double espresso, has been all about. Pretending that home, which means Marlou, will be there forever.
Menlo Park? The train guard remembers me and where I get off. This is so profoundly touching that I almost forget the next part. It is my job to force the overlong wheelchair against the forward edge of the train's lift. 'Move forward, please'. I hear this twice before understanding. The wheelchair inches into position, the lift rises, and then, 20 minutes later, descends at Menlo Park.
I don't know why I feel obliged to get my nails done. They are a bit long. But my approach to such matters is utterly pragmatic. A little healthy biting off a nail here and there will save an entire 30 minutes at the local manicurist. But, no, I'm already wheeling in the door at Sky Nails. And here is Mai with her packet of implements. Her Vietnamese accent is considerable, and our topics few, so we mostly smile. How is business? Slow after the holidays, and how is your wife...she searches her memory...Marlou?
When I have to give a different answer regarding my wife. When I have to give the same answer again and again...how will it feel? It has always slightly embarrassed me, the amount of pride I feel in having a wife. Part of this derives from an essential sense of unworthiness. But there's a good part too, the knowledge that, for me, marriage is an achievement. I have had to learn everything about it the hard way. And the current way is the hardest.
Mai has finished with my nails and is moving onto this other stage. Without a word, she removes my watch and has a go at my arms, rubbing them with lotion and then massaging wrists and knuckles and palms and fingers. This seems utterly gratuitous. I'm here for functional nail care, something Marlou gave up early in her illness. And why not? Mai and her nail crew are only a couple of streets away. So, today's mission has been accomplished, yet there's all this lotioning and kneading up and down my forearms. I don't need any of it, yet I do. I can have my arms rubbed by someone who remembers, or only half remembers, Marlou. It's not good to fear memories. It's much worse to say goodbye to things before they say goodbye to us. I'm taking care of my nails and taking care of things and taking care of business and taking care of Marlou. And care, I am beginning to understand, doesn't go away.
The spoon idea comes from my friend Phila. This, she says, is the essence of the outdoor experience. Camping reduces the available options in a way that is unavoidable, instructive and unburdening. It is a relief to find that no one has to do the dishes after dinner at, say, Tuolumne Meadows, 3000 meters up the mountains of Yosemite. The reason couldn't be simpler. There are no dishes. There is the dish. Just as there is the spoon. There is the meal, there is the eating and, afterwards, there is the purposeful deconstruction, designed to make the spoon and the dish ready for the meal on the morrow. A.k.a. washing up, locking the butter in a bear-proof container, if there is such a thing. And that's it.
I understand what Phila means. At that altitude, I recall from my campouts as a 10-year-old, frost forms on a sleeping bag overnight. Staying warm at night, producing any kind of hot food during the day, not getting lost in the wilderness...these were the pressing concerns just below timberline. One spoon would do.
Marlou was confiding in her oncologist this very afternoon -- and it must be said that Marlou's oncologist invites confidences, such is her personal gift -- that aspects of dealing with terminal disease are an actual relief. Instead of betting on your investments' rate of return in 2011, you're not betting on 2011 at all. Will the new maple tree outgrow its spot in the garden? What about all those friends we haven't sent cards to? What about the people we owe...dinner or attention or whatever?
There is another side to not seeing tomorrow. You don't have to worry about tomorrow. That is the doctor's point. Which is actually broader. That we never have to worry about these things. Not really. Yes, certain things need to be done, but there aren't all that many. There are a few true obligations. And the rest are false. Convention, habit, guilt. These things keep us running on automatic, pleasing others, forgetting that time is always short or, at least, extremely uncertain. For Marlou, uncertainty has become certain. Frightening and confusing and endlessly unsettling, even for those around her. But we have to take good news where we can. And this is the trick. Let go.
It's also the trick with quadriplegia. Marlou has more or less sworn me to promise to never eat straight from the saucepan after she is gone. It's like Scarlet O'Hara's famous vow to never eat another root again. Problem is, saucepans have a handle. And the shallow ones look strangely like bowls. So a bachelor's logic being what it is, and one-handed life being what it is, grabbing something with a handle is a definite plus. And not having to do the manual-intensive transfer of food from one site to another is an indescribable attraction. With all these built-in benefits, the shallow stainless steel saucepan looks awfully good at dinnertime when Marlou happens to be out.
Still, a promise is a promise. My only hope is that Marlou will release me from this one. Or we'll find a compromise. This seems a distinct possibility with all the stripping down and simplifying currently underway around here. A ceramic dish with a handle. Some kind of stovetop pan that is equipped with a handle, perhaps removable, and absolutely table ready. I let go of certain niceties a long time ago. The quadriplegic's major goal in the kitchen, any kitchen, is not to burn himself too badly, unfeeling limbs being what they are.
Which brings us to the sun. In Northern California winters it slants low, of course. And no one expects to be sipping a double latte outside in January. But that's what Marlou and I did after we emerged from Palo Alto's oncology clinic. The weather, unaccountably warm, had everyone outside. There was a Peet's coffee outpost nearby, and that's where we headed, to join others in the winter sun. Marlou and I hadn't done anything like this in quite a while. Cancer has brought Marlou a certain level of pain and the sense of incessant, unwelcome, bodily change. All this has frightened both of us. We spent the last weekend huddling inside. But now, invigorated by the oncologist's words, there was no doubt about the next destination. Sure, the pharmacist was preparing a batch of painkillers, and we could wait in his carpeted lounge for 20 minutes or so. Or hurtle in the general direction of double lattes.
It's the small things. But they aren't really small. They are simply overlooked. They get bad PR. But they are joys. Sunny warmth on the skin, a moment outdoors at a time of year when one expects to be inside with the central heating. The ability to smile at each other, to relax, and for me, to appreciate Marlou's singular beauty. It's in her face and her capacity for warmth and, yes, her extraordinary courage. Fortunately, it's also in her humor, for we were laughing at the frantic Mercedes and BMWs scurrying about the Palo Alto parking lot. What is worth honking about at 3 PM, driving between shops? These people don't have cancer. And they don't have quadriplegia. And they don't have what we do, and it's all worth laughing about, worth enjoying, worth every moment.
Urges. He stared my way, not exactly at me but in the general direction of where I was sitting. This was what I didn't like, the looking down on the client, getting all impersonal and stuffy. Maybe it was because I wasn't a client exactly. I was a citizen of the city, as many insist on calling it, of Menlo Park. In this instant, I was also a volunteer. For I had stepped forward in a public minded sort of way. And now I rolled forward, wheelchair control clicking, as though invited by his gaze to move closer. We were on the same wavelength. Team members. Something needed to be done. And by way of understanding his open annoyance, mentally I admitted that there were many things a city attorney had to get done in a day, and my urges were low on his list.
"Well," I explained, "not just press releases about traffic speeders' photos in City Hall. Other urges too."
"I'm listening."
I wanted to tell George, and I wanted to call him that, to lighten up. It's downright oppressive and conversationally deadening to go at this discussion with all this antagonism and tone of why-are-you-wasting-my-time rudeness. For that's what it was. I didn't have to be here. Didn't have to be talking to him. And I was right on the verge of telling him, fuck it, George. I'll just keep my urges to myself and roll around town expressing them. But I didn't say this. I wanted to be here, to see what George did in his office, how he passed his time and what mattered to him. This was the crux. Certain things were important to me, but probably not to him, and vice versa.
His phone buzzed. A blast from the speaker filled his office with the receptionist's voice, that FedEx was here and the Harwich & Bernstein package was going off, and was this okay? Not a word about was it was okay to interrupt us, the package being so important in all. La de da. George waved in the air. Yes, yes, the package should have gone off yesterday.
I saw now for the first time that there was something troubled about him, unfulfilled, even desperate. His gaze, for he was now sending it my way, filled the morning with sadness. It came to me right then that we could shelve this discussion. Why not do lunch? The Mexican place, and I didn't mean the old Mexican place, the one that always seemed a tad too authentic, but the contemporary one with the really good frijoles and the fusion menu, things like seafood rellenos...that was a place lots of people in Menlo Park barely knew about, because it was up a side street and the sign was modest and hard to read. Anyway, the two of us could repair there for lunch, give all this a rest, and talk about something else. Like wasn't it unique having a Mexican restaurant without hot sauce? Salsa, yes, but not those little lava bowls brimming with tomato sauce and pepper seeds.
"Urges?" He was showing his teeth now, George was. I don't know what it is about certain attorneys, but it's like they eat raw meat or shoot up on aggression steroids. Everything is an attack. I was aware that I needed to throw George a little fresh meat just to keep him occupied.
"Just rolling around downtown in my wheelchair I get these ideas."
George wasn't even listening now, but straightening up his desk the way you do when a meeting has ended
"Violent urges," I said. "Things I'm about to do. To the City of Menlo Park."
Wearily George picked up his pen again, stared at the carpet and raised his eyebrows, but only to about half-mast.
"Like I see the crosswalk button at the corner of Santa Cruz Avenue and El Camino and want to smash it."
"Mind if I ask why?" This was more the style I liked in George, authentically concerned and interested.
No, I said, not at all. I really didn't mind. He had every right to ask. And who wouldn't? There's this guy in a wheelchair and he sees a crosswalk button and has this idea about smashing it. And why? How would George know? It seemed to me a perfectly friendly matter that would go well with chili verde and warm tortillas. But I didn't suggest this. In life you have to let go of certain things.
"I can't reach it," I said, "the button. There's this little metal button, and someone has positioned it far away on a light pole. Even if I lean over, half falling out of my wheelchair, I can't press it."
"Is that it?" George was writing something on his pad. "You tell Palmer. Public Works will get on it. Okay." George was standing up. He handed me his yellow sheet with Palmer underlined.
"There's no phone number," I told him.
"Reception has it."
"I see that button, and I don't think of crosswalks. I think of plastic explosive. I think of terrorist acts against public property, or property that should be public, since I am a member of same."
George was opening the door. I didn't budge.
"I am a retired person...."
"That is abundantly clear."
"...who has a lot of nasty things on his mind and the time and will to act on them, as you've seen."
"Good luck with all that."
"Forewarned is forearmed."
He disappeared out the door. Menlo Park's city attorney just up and left in the middle of a meeting. He'd had enough. Well, so had I. I whirred into the empty hallway, looked up and down. Lunch hour. City staff was probably hogging all the tables at the good Mexican restaurant, having gotten there early, having scooted out the door conveniently ahead of their wheelchair-bound client. Because, I decided right then and there, I was their client.
At 62, my identity might be a little shaky, what with the recent cessation of moneymaking activities. But I knew a client when I saw one. And I was seeing one, right now, for I was in the men's room where the mirrors were large and abundant and free. No, not free, but paid for by taxpayers like me. No one was around, and I was in a mood to knock over the trash can with my very powerful electric wheelchair. Too risky, I decided, with my name all over the city attorney's calendar. And not necessary, for you learned a thing or two in life. That there are clients. And there are attorneys. And there are attorney-client privileges. As for the latter, what they were wasn't clear. But dammit, I was going to find out.
There is a table at Peet's with a wheelchair symbol and a printed request to surrender this spot to the next cripple. Words to that effect. A woman at a MacBook asked if I wanted the table. Yes, I said. Did I mind if she stayed? Well, no. Actually, yes. But hers was a compromise that made a sort of sense. An adaptation, not the zero-sum game of cripple arrives and able-bodied depart. These days are all about flexibility and novel approaches to familiar problems.
My double latte arrived. I stared at the San Francisco Chronicle. Newspapers are for old people like me. They are made of organic material, do not feature pop-ups or visually oscillate hundreds of times per second, defying the middle-aged brain to either experience an epileptic seizure or sink into an exhausted nap. And there was news. A young black man had been shot to death in a subway station by a member of the subway police force. There had been a riot. The riot had begun as a demonstration or vigil, then deteriorated. The cop was a gentle man. The victim was a gentle man. No one knew what had happened, but everyone was either disgraced or angry or dead.
I turned the page. There was an economic outlook. I knew no one at Peet's on this particular afternoon. I wasn't sure why I was here or whether to go home. It was hard to say what awaited me anywhere.
It is hard to stay conscious these days. It is hard to focus, to let my attention be drawn downward to the earth and its cruel rooted realities. Things seemed to get worse at night, dawn unpleasantly, then dissipate during the day. Marlou's pain seems to increase as we go to bed. Slowing down, settling in for the night, being able to change position and shift one's weight may have something to do with this. And, of course, everything intensifies as we let go of the day's distractions. Whatever the source, we have been going to bed with Marlou in pain. This morning, there was more pain, not less, some nausea and lots of fatigue. We canceled evening plans for the theater. I had breakfast with a friend. I phoned my sister. My brother phoned me. I went shopping. Marlou's requests were few. Some cottage cheese. Yogurt. And, thank God, an egg salad sandwich.
Marlou ate the latter in its entirety. The event felt like looking down the aisle on your flight to Cincinnati and watching as, way up in first class, the lavatory door opens and the Messiah steps out. He flicks a fireball at his tray table, which should be stowed and ready for landing, but isn't, and a vast (kosher) meal appears. Wings extend from the tray table, shooting in front of passengers seated left and right, other extensions unfolding straight down the aisle, so that everyone can partake of the buffet. The flight attendants are baffled, but then they join in, comment on the lox, whisk a nice plate of Stilton into the cockpit. And all is rule-breaking culinary merriment. We no longer care about Cincinnati. We don't care if our bags arrive in Tampa. Food, glorious food.
Anyway, not to put too amorphous a point on it, Marlou was eating. The cancer symptoms that clustered around this day seemed to have backed off just a bit. Perhaps both of us fear that medical doom will descend out of the flies like the backdrop for the last act of something or other. Things don't quite happen that way. But they are happening. Marlou can feel her pain spreading, energy waning. We keep rehearsing the future scenes, then there's a rewrite. One scene gets tossed out. Another arrives.
Marlou's doctors called within minutes of phoning the clinic this morning. Yes, one was on call, but the other was her actual, five-day-a-week physician. People love Marlou. It's not just me. I listened as she described her symptoms to both medicos. Factual, unembellished, a presentation of facts, and was all this a cause for alarm? Both said no. I said yes, Marlou had done a splendid job of reporting in, facing things and clearing enough fear out of the way to enable us both to get on with Saturday. And sometime Saturday is all there is, and that's enough.
Unless there is more. The film 'Moonstruck' must be 20 years old, and I recall few details. What struck me was, well, the moon. It struck the characters, of course, pulling them out of their mundane lives and toward love. The Hollywood moon was way too big, of course. The one we have in Menlo Park is much more modest. Nonetheless, Marlou began talking about it. This, she had read, was the biggest and brightest moon of the year. It was also one of the coldest nights of the year. And since Marlou is opposed to cold, bordering on the phobic, I expected my suggestion to fall on deaf ears. But, no, instantly she was bustling about, getting her slippers, cinching down her hat and we were heading out the door and into the brisk night. It was positively incandescent and just over our heads. It outshown Pacific Gas & Electric spilling from the electric lamps of our neighbors. There would not be another moon like it this year. It was our moon and our moment, and whether or not it would be our year no one could say. No one needed to say. We were Moonstruck.
Marlou has much more to worry about. And in this sense she is my current teacher and guide. Marlou is not particularly concerned about diet or exercise or anything that produces marginal benefits. She has an aggressive cancer. Chemotherapy is an aggressive remedy that is not working anymore. She quite openly says that her emphasis is on facing things. Marlou hasn't given up. She soon will talk to a doctor at the University of California Medical Center about clinical trials of some new drug. Marlou has no illusions. The trial drug may buy some time. It's worth exploring. Her expectations are limited. Her priorities are elsewhere. It's time to confront reality, do what needs to be done and enjoy what is left.
As for the quality of what is left...well, it's like things are giving way, much as ice crunches underfoot or beach sand shifts with each step. There is a quality of revelation about our conversations, our personal admissions, our days. This is what Marlou probably knows better than most of us around her. She hasn't given up the struggle, but defined it. Her cancer is moving slowly enough to reveal our relationship. To risk saying difficult things to each other. To find out what we really have, and don't have, as a couple. I've always wanted an intimate relationship. Now I've got one, and it's going. But the going is making clear what I've got. The very taking away is making the relationship what it is, or even more of what it is. Observation is affecting the observed, like something out of Heisenberg.
These days we can flare into anger quicker than ever. We retreat to our separate corners. But it is as though we both hear the same referee's bell. Round two. We come out, usually put the gloves down. Someone gets the technical knockout. It doesn't matter. Round three doesn't matter. We send the fans home. The empty arena is ours.
Things giving way. The floor dropping out. This physical sensation comes in those moments when I accept that we are discussing the end. It's not in sight, this end, but it's in the room. It's in range. It's in feeling.
It's like opening the door for Elijah during the Passover Seder. Let him in. He has supposedly good news. It's a choice, a physical move, to make this guy part of the action. If death is knocking on the door, what are you supposed to do? Get a deadbolt? We are all going to get a bolt of death. So, now my door is always open.
It's timeless, this revelatory power of mortality. I do think that in America we could do a better job of working this truth into the act. A British friend showed me a wedding invitation from some couple in Vermont. Guests were invited to hike to a mountaintop and join the couple in 'celebrating wellness'. It's a good idea to take care of the human body. But it's also a good idea to change the oil in my car. Neither experience should be elevated to the status of religion. There's no life purpose in wellness.
Some would argue there's no life purpose, full stop. Perhaps. But in those floor-dropping moments in which I acknowledge mortality and the limited time Marlou and I have together, we are too engaged to think about meaning or meaninglessness. If Sartre knocks on the door, along with Elijah, he can come in too. But he has to take off his shoes and wait until we're done watching HBO. There's too much on our plates to worry about the significance of things. Or our insignificance. What passes between us feels very significant. In fact, it seems this is all there is. This is what matters, our connection.
One thing learned in the sum of floor-dropping exchanges around matters of mortality, has to do with my emotional perspective. Life often seems crushingly sad. And yet Marlou and I still have plenty of laughs. Deep laughter, floorless laughter. Not the nervous evasive kind. Soul humor. These moments spring from all the rest. In many ways, they are the most educational. Perhaps my childhood had very long stretches of hopelessness. Sadness is a comfortable default for me. A remarkable defense, but that's what it is. One of the endless ways of avoiding the bittersweet transience of the moment. A technique for sidestepping loss, the fact that precious things of life can be taken away.
"Do we really need this?" I pointed to the device aimed at a perfect camera angle over the intersection. Marlou shook her head and said nothing. I knew the answer. We didn't need this, whatever this was. Being of opposite political stripes, we would probably disagree on the finer points. Does The Man really need to know who is driving the streets? Does The City really need another revenue scam? Never mind. I wasn't going to go there. I didn't need to go there. I needed to go to the other side of the street and have dinner.
Still, rolling up from the crosswalk, there was no resisting a quick look at the cameras. Oddly, there appeared to be two. Twin boxes on separate posts, side by side. One probably a surveillance sensor triggering the second, a flash camera. Either way, it had a costly, permanently installed look about it, two things on posts, formidable as streetlights, rising above the suburban fray. Marlou said she was cold, and though I was hungry, something made me linger a second longer, just long enough to witness a second flash as another miscreant flung himself at the changing traffic lights. This, I thought, will not stand.
Was Big Brother looming over Menlo Park? Doubtful. Big Brother didn't care about Menlo Park. He had much, well, bigger fish to fry. This town, with barely enough traffic lights to count on one's fingers, could actually use a few closed-circuit TVs around, just to give the place more of an urban feel. Still, did we need this? The answer was that in middle age, that laughably mislabeled stage of elderhood, we need less and less. We need less trends. We need less change. We need less things that demand adjustment. We do need to kvetch. I also need to nip at the heels of community politics, not making excessive moves in the direction of, say, a city council seat. But just barking now and then like any dog who wants the neighborhood to know that there is still some canine life left in him.
Where was I? Still in downtown Menlo Park, now having dinner, and now having certain thoughts. The actual ethos and justification mattered less and less the more I got into my shrimp salad. Perhaps Marlou's cancer had changed all that. Time was of the essence. If something felt like doing, it got done. And as far as I was concerned, this traffic surveillance camera was done for.
"The Menlo Park Arts Commission," I said, chomping into my baguette. Marlou raised her eyebrows.
"You wanted to revive it," I said. Marlou looked puzzled. I looked into the traffic distance, El Camino visible from the window of the restaurant, the flashing camera not in sight, but easily imagined.
"So let's revive it. At least in spirit. Better, let's invoke it." Marlou's eyes wandered to another table. She told me I wasn't making sense. True. I was making plans.
And why make plans, unless you can make news? After all, I've spent most of my life making press releases, which is almost the same thing. Later that night, while Marlou slept, I rolled into my office, switched on the PC, and the silly thing rolled straight onto the screen.
15 January -- MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA -- A photo exhibit honoring the historic work of the Menlo Park Arts Commission will open this month at the City's Burgess Recreation Center. Entitled "Drive-By," the show promises to break new ground in style and presentation.
"It's pop surveillance art," City Manager Ken Irving said. "Photos of drivers taken unawares. As they hightail through an intersection, people behind the wheel feel all sorts of things. Many of these candid shots reveal character. Some evoke a certain mood. All capture the imagination.
In the past, the goal of traffic cameras was law enforcement, capturing drivers' license numbers. Now, we're capturing drivers' expressions, turning them into art, a photographic exhibition. We still collect fines, plus revenues as the photos are sold."
Exhibit hours are....
I made up a phone number, added an exhibition tour schedule. And hit "print." City stationery was remarkably easy to come by. I am a member of the community chorus. And that is why the woman at the desk of the Recreation Center barely batted an eye when I asked about using the copy machine. Which happened to be right next to the fax machine. It was important to memorize the fax number of one of the sleaziest suburban newspapers on the Peninsula. Otherwise, the whole thing went effortlessly.
It's hard to say why I did it. You know when a thing needs to be done. Since people are so fond of saying things can't be done, a little defiance here and there is good for the circulation. Don't get around much anymore? Not us. Or me. I or my handiwork was circulating all over town by now. I grabbed a copy of the Palo Alto Gazette and had a good look. The next day I grabbed another. Then another.
By now, three days after the fax, I was drowning in disappointment. I was an accessory after the facts, and after this particular fax, one could certainly hope for something better. The cameras were there. An outrageous photo exhibit was about to open. I wasn't getting any younger. Marlou wasn't getting any healthier. The cameras had to go.
21 January -- MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA -- In a tactic borrowed from big-city vice squads, the city police announced plans to post photos of certain traffic-ticket "johns" on a special website. According to Police Chief Bruce Markham, red-light runners deserve public exposure if downtown is to become a "green light district." The website, www.trafficjohns.org, goes live....
And so on.
I probably should not have used the Recreation Department fax machine a second time. But I couldn't resist. I thought the City Attorney was pretty decent about the whole thing. We sat together in his office watching surveillance tapes, not from the street, but from the small, almost inconspicuous cameras mounted inside the recreation center lobby. Cripple rolls into copy room, date and time visible at the bottom of the screen. Cripple rolls into copy room again. I had to sign an apology, something that looked suspiciously like a confession, pay a fine and promise. I don't like promises. I do like plans. Surveillance works both ways.
Back at Oahu, the most exemplary moment came from a young couple. Not that everyone who surfs isn't more or less young, but these two were in the range of 20 years of age, perhaps the midpoint in the surfboard demographic. I watched them paddling out together and thought little of it, being of a dreamy and often less than practical disposition myself. A more grounded soul would have asked the logical question regarding two people and one surfboard. But never mind. Within moments all was revealed. They appeared on the cusp of a breaking wave, the water falling glassy in an endless roll, one kneeling in front, one behind. And then they were both up on their feet, surfing on the same board, holding hands, dipping and weaving, then jumping as the ride petered out. It was a moment from figure skating competition, except that they were remote from their small audience. The noise of the swelling sea and circling birds and breaking waves was all that the afternoon could bear. They were on their own, enjoying their own grace and achievement and, very brief, mastery of the elements.
Marlou and I are at the point of talking frankly and openly, and even frequently, about the end of life. We need to deal with wills, household items, matters outstanding and who knows what else? The details don't tell the story. The story is dealing with the end of the story, or what seems like the end. If Marlou is facing a big wave, I prefer to remember this other relationship to waves. How one can catch them, even ride them. How even a couple can do this, in tandem, fulfilling what are probably different roles at the front and rear of a nautical device. Romantic and idealized and, yes, one surfer has to jump off before the other. But, still, there it is, another way of taking a wave.
I do know that this afternoon when we began talking about dealing with Marlou's car, the carpet, the lawyer, the living will, everything felt better. My job, it has often seemed, has been to keep hope alive while facing the prospects realistically. Maybe we have both taken a cue from Marlou's oncologist. Her message was to face things. Hope? Life and disease play out in mysterious ways, she said, and one patient she had long expected to die was out cruising the Mediterranean. Her approach seemed sober and balanced and down-to-earth. That's where hope seems to lie, down. In the general direction of gravity. Marlou and I know a lot about gravity these days. But there's also such a thing as buoyancy. Waves carry you where they carry you, and along the way, for entire moments, then lift you up.
She's doing more than waiting. There are clinical drug trials to discuss at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. But Marlou describes this as buying time, nothing more. And this sober appraisal deserves nothing less than admiration. I think Marlou does a much better job of facing facts, of facing out to sea, than I do. She is the one who suggests seeing a lawyer, going over wills, bank accounts and monies. In this regard, I am not taking the lead. I keep mentally sorting through Marlou's currently mild symptoms, deciding what might or might not be cancer. It doesn't matter. We are both trying to live in the present, to acknowledge what's coming and to accept that the schedule of future events is, as always, unknown.
Trader Joe's. The cheese display. I worry that Old Amsterdam and blue brie are not sufficiently raffiné for Marlou and her ex-Bordeaux-Junior-year-abroad friend Ken. Mostly, I am glad my wife is eating. I could go for the three little goat cheeses in the precious box, but fuck it. I'm already moving on. Except for this guy, what's his name, sauntering my way. I wave, we shake hands, and I do wish I could remember what to call him. How were his holidays? How were mine? For some reason, one of us answers frankly. He had a miserable time in Colorado, he says, then came home early. Visiting family? No. A woman. Things did not work out. There was a lesson there, he says. Never mind. He learned a better lesson here at home.
A conversational pause, one of those chitchat crossroads that enable one to veer toward the lighter side or plunge headlong. What the hell. What lesson had he learned right here in Menlo Park?
It happened at Peet's. That anything can happen at Peet's, anything out of the haute-bourgeoisie ordinary, intrigues me. But these are the holidays, the silly season, and things at the local espresso bar do not seem quite the same. The work crowd is gone, of course. For at least 10 days, people have given to lounging about the place, arriving at a late hour, even after 9 AM and, I'm convinced, talking about something other than software and mutual funds. One day I even saw two classic old ladies in hats with flowers hunched over a table.
And that's what the man who stopped me at Trader Joe's saw, a guy hunched over one of the small round tables at Peet's. Something looked wrong he thought. He tapped the hunched man on the shoulder and got no response. The guy appeared to be sleeping, or put more unflatteringly, passed out, his cheek pressed to the table. My friend moved from shoulder tapping to shoving. And then everything flipped, the realization settled in. Drunk? The man's speech was slurred, but he mumbled something about a hospital.
My friend, or more exactly my acquaintance, helped the almost passed-out man to his feet, and the two staggered to a car.
The guy at the table was vaguely known to many at Peet's. He had appeared recently, within the last month or so, and had taken to strumming his guitar on the bench outside. A not bad balladeer, my friend said, and a reliable source of 70s favorites. The singer had visibly bad teeth and other signs of sleeping rough. The Menlo Park winter is milder than many, but these nights regularly dip close to zero. Not a good time of year to be sleeping outside.
The musician wanted to go to Menlo Park's Veterans Administration hospital. That one was shut, but the larger Palo Alto facility was open. They headed there. The only problem...the man was no veteran. Still, he had essential survival skills. The VA was his best shot, and he knew it. The doctors at the emergency room in Palo Alto at first balked at treating someone who had never served in the military, but not for long. His symptoms told a clear story. He told a clear enough story himself. He'd run out of insulin, thought he could get by another day...and found himself losing consciousness at a table in a coffee bar. The diabetic man had come close to dying, a doctor said. The VA kept him in their hospital for four days. Who paid his bill? Someone looked the other way, I am sure.
We do a lot of looking the other way, all of us. But not the man I ran into at Trader Joe's. Before the street musician was out of the hospital and, presumably, back on the streets, his savior took one more step. He bought a Christmas card, a large one, and asked the staff at Peet's to sign it. He walked across the street to the realtor office, the clothing boutique next door, the church across the way. All sorts of downtown people signed their names and penned their greetings. Come back, they said. Take up your position on the bench, play us music, we remember you, we acknowledge you. The man in his hospital bed read the card slowly, my friend said. No one sent money or offered housing or promised a new life. Just the message 'you are not alone'.
That was the end of the story. There was no reason for me to hang around worrying about cheese purchases. I thanked the man for his story and urged him to send an account to the Menlo Park Almanac. I offered to help him write a piece and gave him my card. My card is looking a little shopworn these days, the result of sitting in my wallet unused for several years of retirement. But it was there when I needed it. Or someone else did. Who knows? We are not alone.
Take the day in London, 1972 or thereabouts, when I wandered out of Victoria Station on the way to my somewhat laughable job with the Maharishi in Pimlico. Someone said hello, someone American, and if I recognized her at all, it was just barely. She was the girlfriend of a Chilean graduate student, Edgardo, I knew from Berkeley. I also knew Edgardo's wife and his son, Edgardo Chico, age 5, and being something of an adopted family member and rather fond of the group of them, I hadn't quite accepted this girl. For one thing, she was extremely young. If I was 24, she was maybe 19.
Edgardo, being an old man of 28 or so, seemed poorly matched with this one. But matched he was. After I had emerged from six months in the hospital in Los Angeles, Edgardo's new arrangement became part of my new life. I liked the old arrangement better, with the petite and charming wife and the rambunctious five-year-old. But there they were, in some Berkeley room, living together and serving me a peculiarly Chilean dinner of Edgardo's, not the American girlfriend's, concoction: steak tartare. Like everything else in this narrative, a hard-to-acquire taste.
Because we were all Americans, sort of, encountering each other on foreign soil, kind of, the natural thing was to get together. And the first thing I knew there we were, all three of us, in some bed sitting room Edgardo and the girl shared in some part of fairly central London. And damned if dinner didn't consist of what must have been Edgardo's absolute favorite centerpiece, steak tartare. I recall this encounter in spotty detail. How cramped things were, London being what it is and was. And how dinner and its preparation was discussed. The American girl whose name I simply can't recall, explained that she had carefully shopped for the right sort of mince, a.k.a., hamburger.
This was meant to assure me, but nothing did. Particularly, not the addition of chopped onions and raw egg. I'm rather partial to onions, but not in this context. Even then, the whole thing seemed like a petri dish, an invitation to bacterial doom. In addition, I had flirted on and off, owing to my involvement with the Maharishi and his ilk, with macrobiotic and related diets. But I'm sure I made my way through the steak tartare, and the evening. And all I really want to know now is what happened to Edgardo. Allende hadn't been toppled yet by the CIA. Edgardo's fondness for left-wing political theater wouldn't get him in trouble for another year or so. The mystery echoes across the decades.
In retrospect, Edgardo may have been stuck in the freedom of twentysomethings too long. For that's what it was, the tendency to drop everything and get together casually, spur of the moment. After all, this is a splendid idea. Today, my friends Clint and Phyllis, slightly older than I, keep the tradition alive. Dinner happens off the cuff, friends invited in at the last Palo Alto minute. And why not? You don't have to do this sort of thing all the time or with people you don't like. And by the time you're in your 60s and 70s, like Clint and Phyllis, you know who you like.
I was wandering toward the Holland Park tube station one day when I spotted an American in the distance. And this is the only remarkable thing about the 1970s London anecdote. That by then, after a couple of years in Britain, I could spot an American. What was it? Well, doubtless the clothes. One thing about the London of that era, and perhaps this era too, is that one could not dart out for a bottle of milk without paying some attention to attire. And even I got in the swing of what attire meant in early-70s London. Ralph, and that was the name of the American standing by the tube station, might have worn a shirt or something that suggested the States. But what I really recall was the body language.
This derived in part from the size of the body, for Americans of our generation were generally quite taller than Brits, a decade of postwar rationing having taken its toll on the growth of UK kids. But the absolute distinctive thing was the way he moved, the way he surveyed his surroundings. Dammit, he was American. He was an American tourist emerging from the tube and surveying the land with the-world-is-my-oyster moves and gestures that distinguished my countrymen of that era.
That Ralph turned out to be Ralph, was an utter surprise. In fact, he may have recognized me first. London was full of Americans, and just another one didn't matter. In any case, one of us a spotted the other, there were words of amazement at how we both could be so far from our University of California Riverside roots. Naturally, we got together. Getting together meant going back to my bedsit, which on that particular afternoon I was sharing with Diane. My playful next-door neighbor happened to be playing with me those days. The days did not last long, but she was around, and everyone got their tea. Until Ralph and his wife, and yes, he had one, got the idea that Diane was sitting so close to me on the bedsit's lone cot for a reason. I didn't mind how things were going, how the afternoon was trending. Diana was much more novel than Ralph. He scooted away with his wife after a fairly short hour. We would have to keep in touch. We hadn't been in touch before, and we haven't since.
Still, it was an era of throwing open doors, of casual socializing, and much of this I miss. Clint and Phyllis keep the principle going, because they have the discernment and years to know who they want around. We have all emerged from years of career and families to find ourselves at another stage of things, a time of life when we can reopen some of the social doors we've shut. I wouldn't want to be 20 again. I wouldn't want to live in a London bedsit. But I must've learned a thing or two along the way. And my door...well, it's not entirely shut.
Never mind that the first January day begins with a mindnumbing waltz of the flowers. The problem is that it's no waltz, the Rose Parade. It's a lumbering, cymbal-crashing slog down Colorado Boulevard, mostly due to poor cinematic representation and gratuitous narration. By definition, floats are massive burdensome pieces of kitsch. No one expects anything else. But these are entirely made of flowers. Not to mention leaves, stems, bark and, doubtless, roots. It's all vegetable all the time, and like any great folk art manifestation, the novelty holds interest. The angel is in the details, as it were. We need close-ups.
This very morning, as Marlou and I watched an orchid-covered Taiwanese phoenix rise above the Pasadena crowds, not to mention flower-petal-covered movie set elephants rising in homage to Cecil B. DeMille, we both had more or less the same thing in mind. How do they do the black parts? Black dahlias? Black narcissus? Or as I believe, the leaves of that very dark groundcover we see in Oahu. Some close-ups and horticultural narrative would go a long way toward making the 2009 wake-up call from Pasadena work for us, thank you very much.
And thank you's are due. Marlou and I thanked each other for being here, for making it through 2008. We spent the morning hugging and crying and laughing. Marlou says that her tears are coming in squalls these days. It's like the weather in Hawaii. Intermittent, dynamic, changeable. All one can do is adjust, moment to moment. It's good to get out of the rain. Too much sun is bad. But since I am inclined to believe the rain will never stop, and to eye the sun suspiciously for signs of giving up, throwing in its thermonuclear towel and withdrawing to red dwarf status...well, all this optimism doesn't come naturally.
Marlou's cancer is there. We know that. We also know we have each other, a fact confirmed several times a day, whether in hugs or fights. No one is going anywhere. We are heading down the same road, as long as we can. And Marlou's laughter these days is of the finest quality. It comes from the depths, as do all good things. It's something we can share.
I was donning a T-shirt yesterday morning when Marlou asked, with neither irony nor inhibition, 'are you going to wear that'? I told her the question was uniquely and utterly hers. Incredulity, unvarnished disdain...Marlou watching the slovenly spouse dress. A moment worth noting. These days, all moments are. But there's nothing profound about this. Ask any Buddhist. This moment is the moment and our moment. And when we are aware, everything is momentous. There is no other now but now.
Truly, that's how things feel. It's Marlou who has guided us to this awareness. Not by being new-agey precious or spiritual or anything other than down-to-earth. By crying, being fearful and facing cancer one day at a time. We have each other. Not everyone does. Many don't. And Marlou's sense of humor is stronger than ever. Irony is her constant companion. Along with me, of course. And I believe it may be the irony beacon, peeping and blinking across the sloughs and marshes that separate Sacramento from the San Francisco Bay delta, that pulled us together across the miles.
2009. With consciousness so expansive in one particular Menlo Park apartment, who knows what enlightenment may follow? The Rose Parade guys have an entire year to clean up their narrative. Marlou noted the prevalence of ads on our local NBC affiliate for things like selling your gold earrings on the Internet. 'I never knew what cash potential I had around the house until I opened my jewelry box and logged on to sellyourgold.com'. Personally, I was struck by the fact that the three-CD set of music from great Christian stadium events was now available, if you acted this very minute, for $9.95. Shipping not included. Batteries extra. In short, it's going to be a challenging year. We know that. We know that every moment. And every moment is what we know.
