Saturday

Even halfway down the drive, I wasn't entirely certain that a trip to Peet's was necessary.  The caffeine urge was only faint.  I was alert enough.  Putting up my feet in the sitting room would have been almost as enjoyable, perhaps more so.  I did not need to get away from Marlou or what was happening on this particular day.  In any case, there was no getting way.  I did not know what I wanted.  I did not know what to do with the next hour or the next minute.  I was rolling vacantly toward the familiar caffeine center without purpose or plan.

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.