Inauguration

Sailing out of Peet's on inauguration day, hurtling down the narrow passage that leads from our Exclusive Grocery Purveyor, right where the sidewalk narrows, pinching foot traffic from the parking lot right up against wheelchairs, a black woman walked toward me.  She was tall, had a fierce no-nonsense air about her, and it came as no surprise when I offered an elaborate double-syllable hello, that she barked hi.  Actually 'bark' may be overstating it.  She didn't know me, and her mood was not expansive.  Hers was a purpose-driven walk.  Probably, like the rest of us, she was after caffeine.  I was afterburners.  The atmosphere in Peet's was more than caffeinated by the news of the day.

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.  

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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.