Not Alone

'I'm always dying in your blogs,' Marlou says of my recent writings.  By this, I think she means there is too much of her in a state of sympathy-garnering weakness.  Don't cry for me, Alameda.  Of course, I disagree.  The truth is that confronting the likely, although not entirely certain, prospect of death, is noble.  It seems to me that Marlou is facing out to sea, watching a huge wave roll in, and just standing there, bravely awaiting what happens.

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.