Mama Said

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 Silicon Valley group has pulled me from retirement to speak on the topic of 'How to Work with a Ghost Writer'.  Why not?  Until I'm a ghost myself, I might as well engage with the general public.  The group's chapter president, a former client, has seated me opposite a croque monsieur to talk business. 

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 Palo Alto.  This is the only way to handle such matters.  Arrive unannounced, state your business and let acknowledged professionals scurry about finding forms, phoning Boston and grabbing a notary.  It's better doing this along with Marlou.  She has to sign the same forms I do.  More important, she is undaunted by bureaucracy and its Lewis Carroll machinations.  A couple of decades in California state government will do that for you.

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.