February 2009 Archives
'Eh,' the Italian chemist was saying, 'this is a production society'. Mario, whatever his name was, had a cubicle up the row from mine at the scientific software company that represented my last non-freelance corporate job. He was speaking of the United States, and his insight, echoing across almost a decade and a half, is oddly comforting. We occasionally had lunch, and I do not believe that a single reference to work ever crossed our lips. What was there to say?
First, Mario had the good sense to live where anyone who could make a decent salary, spoke Italian and effortlessly pursued and caught women, would live: North Beach, San Francisco. Second, he had obvious insights into the host culture. Third, look at his cubicle. Organic molecules may fit together in a prescribed, structurally specific way, but Mario's workspace had a post-hand-grenade look about it. If our company hadn't been so desperate for his knowledge of chemistry and contacts in the European pharmaceutical world, doubtless he would have been reprimanded for disorderly corporate conduct. Instead, he didn't worry, and we had lunch.
Lunch occurred at approximately 1 PM. It could occur earlier, or later, but one thing was consistent. Lunch was not something one put down on an appointment calendar. Mario either appeared at the entrance to my cubicle, or I rolled my wheelchair over to his. He was either there or he wasn't. As for lunch, its location was much more prescribed. Our suburban offices represented a sort of wasteland to him, not that he ever said anything about it. He lived in San Francisco, a considerable commute, and he ventured to odd places around the office to find half decent pasta, a salad, a sandwich. One hole in the wall could manage some rigatoni. Another used olive oil on its lettuce. The other baked its own bread. Lunch in a production society.
What today brings Mario to mind is time. I have always had trouble with it, managing it, optimizing it, stretching it. On this particular day, it seems to have gone somewhere, and in its place are the words of Mario. This is a production society. I have enough of a work ethic to succumb to a martial sense of time efficiency. Achtung. What have you done? My German genes are overwhelming at times.
At 9 AM, I was already on the rowing machine, having collared friends of Marlou's currently visiting from Thailand and Los Angeles. They were setting out for Napa and a day of wineries, when I was preparing for Perry, the Stanford trainer/physical therapy assistant who appears a regular basis to shred my muscles into something more limber. By 9:25, I had survived the cardiovascular onslaught, rowing myself at least halfway to Cincinnati, and Perry was making ready to crank my hip joints into something like proper range. By 10:30 he was gone. And then what? Then I sank into a prolonged swoon beside Marlou on the bed. We played the radio. We hugged. I checked to see if the lifeboat was taking on water. We bobbed and drifted until noon.
Should I turn the radio off, I asked Marlou? No, she said. With the radio off, she would only obsess on the barking dog next door. This dog's bark has grown more plaintive, Marlou mused. The owners, we suspect, leave on the weekends, and their abandoned dog howls until they return. I cannot wonder if Marlou feels similarly abandoned. Cancer is slowly robbing her of many of life's pleasures, her strength, her ability to stand and walk any distance. So the radio stays on. I make myself some soup in the kitchen, shuttle back and forth to Marlou with tea, cottage cheese and prunes, shuttling dirty dishes back the kitchen. Somehow it gets to be 1:30. Marlou cannot keep the cottage cheese down. I make a mental note to buy Gatorade or some such thing with electrolytes. Too much vomiting isn't good for you. Cancer isn't good for you.
I muse upon the productive use of time. Some is now available, for Marlou is napping, and the day is a blank canvas. I'm certain that my computer screen is bursting with e-mails. Meanwhile, it occurs to me, this one small thing I'm supposed to do. There is a handyman, a guy we used sometime last year, and we need him again. But by now, my mind being something on the order of Mario's cubicle, the phone number is long lost. I search under various possibilities in my computer files. The man's first name. His nickname. The name of the friend who referred him. Information like this cannot vanish, but it has. The day is gray. The California Poppy seeds my sister and I sewed a couple of weeks ago are finally sprouting. I find the handyman's work number on the Stanford campus, but this is a Saturday, and phoning there is useless.
It occurs to me that Peet's has not seen me, nor have I seen it, in some time. Very little good can come of visiting Peet's, unless increased caffeination substitutes for life purpose. I could read the newspaper there, bump into a friend, perhaps shed my human form and shift shape. Shape Shifters roam the Native American lands of the Southwest, if I am to believe detective fiction. At the moment I believe it. I believe that people can shift shape.
Why else have I spent an hour this morning on a massage table while Perry, Stanford trainer, works my limbs into a fuller stretch? So that I can make it to the home stretch. I have to hang on, because Marlou cannot. I have to hang on for some other reason that, at this moment, eludes me. I think I have more time, and really, one of these days I must work out a plan for its efficient use. I need to be productive, at least in terms of my California Poppy harvest. I have to plan. I have to remember that with a rain storm bearing down upon us, tomorrow may find me trapped indoors. Fish got to swim, and I got to lay in some supplies of food for tomorrow. Marlou and I and her parents and our friend David are, at my urging, gathering together for a mindnumbing evening of the Academy Awards. I have seen none of the films. I care about none of the proceedings. But the evening promises to take up three or four hours of my time, and that in its own way, will be highly productive. Peet's, Trader Joe's. I grab my credit cards and rush outside to beat the rain.
First, Mario had the good sense to live where anyone who could make a decent salary, spoke Italian and effortlessly pursued and caught women, would live: North Beach, San Francisco. Second, he had obvious insights into the host culture. Third, look at his cubicle. Organic molecules may fit together in a prescribed, structurally specific way, but Mario's workspace had a post-hand-grenade look about it. If our company hadn't been so desperate for his knowledge of chemistry and contacts in the European pharmaceutical world, doubtless he would have been reprimanded for disorderly corporate conduct. Instead, he didn't worry, and we had lunch.
Lunch occurred at approximately 1 PM. It could occur earlier, or later, but one thing was consistent. Lunch was not something one put down on an appointment calendar. Mario either appeared at the entrance to my cubicle, or I rolled my wheelchair over to his. He was either there or he wasn't. As for lunch, its location was much more prescribed. Our suburban offices represented a sort of wasteland to him, not that he ever said anything about it. He lived in San Francisco, a considerable commute, and he ventured to odd places around the office to find half decent pasta, a salad, a sandwich. One hole in the wall could manage some rigatoni. Another used olive oil on its lettuce. The other baked its own bread. Lunch in a production society.
What today brings Mario to mind is time. I have always had trouble with it, managing it, optimizing it, stretching it. On this particular day, it seems to have gone somewhere, and in its place are the words of Mario. This is a production society. I have enough of a work ethic to succumb to a martial sense of time efficiency. Achtung. What have you done? My German genes are overwhelming at times.
At 9 AM, I was already on the rowing machine, having collared friends of Marlou's currently visiting from Thailand and Los Angeles. They were setting out for Napa and a day of wineries, when I was preparing for Perry, the Stanford trainer/physical therapy assistant who appears a regular basis to shred my muscles into something more limber. By 9:25, I had survived the cardiovascular onslaught, rowing myself at least halfway to Cincinnati, and Perry was making ready to crank my hip joints into something like proper range. By 10:30 he was gone. And then what? Then I sank into a prolonged swoon beside Marlou on the bed. We played the radio. We hugged. I checked to see if the lifeboat was taking on water. We bobbed and drifted until noon.
Should I turn the radio off, I asked Marlou? No, she said. With the radio off, she would only obsess on the barking dog next door. This dog's bark has grown more plaintive, Marlou mused. The owners, we suspect, leave on the weekends, and their abandoned dog howls until they return. I cannot wonder if Marlou feels similarly abandoned. Cancer is slowly robbing her of many of life's pleasures, her strength, her ability to stand and walk any distance. So the radio stays on. I make myself some soup in the kitchen, shuttle back and forth to Marlou with tea, cottage cheese and prunes, shuttling dirty dishes back the kitchen. Somehow it gets to be 1:30. Marlou cannot keep the cottage cheese down. I make a mental note to buy Gatorade or some such thing with electrolytes. Too much vomiting isn't good for you. Cancer isn't good for you.
I muse upon the productive use of time. Some is now available, for Marlou is napping, and the day is a blank canvas. I'm certain that my computer screen is bursting with e-mails. Meanwhile, it occurs to me, this one small thing I'm supposed to do. There is a handyman, a guy we used sometime last year, and we need him again. But by now, my mind being something on the order of Mario's cubicle, the phone number is long lost. I search under various possibilities in my computer files. The man's first name. His nickname. The name of the friend who referred him. Information like this cannot vanish, but it has. The day is gray. The California Poppy seeds my sister and I sewed a couple of weeks ago are finally sprouting. I find the handyman's work number on the Stanford campus, but this is a Saturday, and phoning there is useless.
It occurs to me that Peet's has not seen me, nor have I seen it, in some time. Very little good can come of visiting Peet's, unless increased caffeination substitutes for life purpose. I could read the newspaper there, bump into a friend, perhaps shed my human form and shift shape. Shape Shifters roam the Native American lands of the Southwest, if I am to believe detective fiction. At the moment I believe it. I believe that people can shift shape.
Why else have I spent an hour this morning on a massage table while Perry, Stanford trainer, works my limbs into a fuller stretch? So that I can make it to the home stretch. I have to hang on, because Marlou cannot. I have to hang on for some other reason that, at this moment, eludes me. I think I have more time, and really, one of these days I must work out a plan for its efficient use. I need to be productive, at least in terms of my California Poppy harvest. I have to plan. I have to remember that with a rain storm bearing down upon us, tomorrow may find me trapped indoors. Fish got to swim, and I got to lay in some supplies of food for tomorrow. Marlou and I and her parents and our friend David are, at my urging, gathering together for a mindnumbing evening of the Academy Awards. I have seen none of the films. I care about none of the proceedings. But the evening promises to take up three or four hours of my time, and that in its own way, will be highly productive. Peet's, Trader Joe's. I grab my credit cards and rush outside to beat the rain.
It was a nighttime scene, and it seems like a dark tunnel, but that is only because the better part of 20 years has passed. In reality it was a coastal redwood forest of the sort that is common to Northern California. Recent events have reminded me of that evening, but the memory has always lingered. Today, I do understand the tunnel, more or less, for I was in one for several years. Dark, sides closing in, nothing but a small patch of light in the distance. I am talking about my first marriage, or at least its latter phase. It's history now, having long ago reached the light at the end of that marital tunnel.
Mark and Sharon were friends who transplanted quite smoothly from high school to college. In truth, I hardly knew anyone in high school, but I knew them, and they knew me, as well as conditions allowed. They were among the first couples in my life. Because coupling was emotionally impossible for me then, Mark and Sharon seemed wondrously complete in their early union. In my childhood home, marriage had seeped like a poisoned well. It would be a long time, decades, before I got the toxins out of my system.
For the time being, I was in a dim forest somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains, round about 1991 or '92. I hadn't seen Mark and Sharon for years, and a visit was long overdue. I hadn't seen a lot of people for years, and this was one of the sad and ridiculously intolerable aspects of Marriage I. So I had set out to visit them on my own, driving to Boulder Creek or Ben Lomond or one of those mountain towns, arriving at their house in the trees.
As a couple, an early attraction of Mark-Sharon lay in their visible domesticity. Even in the summer of my freshman university year, the two of them had set up marvelous house in a choice and secluded spot in the Berkeley hills. The place was on loan, as I recall, from Sharon's sister and French brother-in-law, with a craftsman or Maybeck style, glassy, redwoodsy, shingley and, best of all for a still physically fit Southern California suburbanite, upstairs. It overlooked a reservoir. The place had built-in charms, and Mark and Sharon went about improving what they had. It was the era of tie-dyed decor, of batik and chimes and colorful things in windows. Sharon knew how to cook. The two of them knew how to welcome. Their tiny front room was carpeted with sleeping bags like mine much of the summer.
By my senior year, they had rented a cottage all their own, more spacious and even more private than its predecessor. The sun entered at all angles, Sharon's fabrics fluttered everywhere and, as fate would have it, I lived only a couple of blocks away. When I visited, the three of us got stoned, ate spaghetti or some variation and talked. Sharon, indefatigably buoyant and outgoing, talked more than Mark. She had a wry perspective on things, but not a bitter one. Mark seemed much the opposite. Marijuana sent him into a stoned silence. His private broodings were opaque. Once, he told me that his gradeschool educators had thought he was stupid, treating him accordingly. He still smarted over this, but where the realization led, it was hard to say.
Meanwhile, his wife, blond and bouncy, held me in her thrall. Clearly someone else's, Sharon was safe. She would neither reject me nor overwhelm me. All I had to do was please her. Tasked with choosing the evening's LPs in the Maybeck atlier, I put on Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto in D. How nice, Sharon said. My heart swelled. Next, it was Bachianas Brasileiros #5, with Villa-Lobos cellos and soprano whipping up a romantic storm. Sharon said it was one of her favorites. My heart gulped at proof of my lovability. Next it was 'Pictures at an Exposition'. Oh, not that, Sharon laughed. I was crushed, my heart like a ballpoint pen being snapped in two.
But I reexperienced that sense of heart gulping affirmation just a couple of nights ago. Marlou and I had had a stressful day. Her nausea was increasing, sudden vomiting taking us both by surprise, and now her parents were newly arrived, and I was retreating to my office in search of the morning's San Francisco Chronicle. By the end of the day, pinched, drawn and angry, I wanted nothing but sleep. I rolled my wheelchair into the bedroom, worked off my shoes, wondered if I really mattered amid the illness and the in-laws. And still, personal reserves low, turned to Marlou propped up in bed and asked if she would like me to read to her the letters of E. B. White. And that's when it came, this surprising gulp of realization. And after decades, my heart was seizing at its capacity to give love, not my worthiness to receive it.
As for that evening almost 20 years ago in the Santa Cruz Mountains, it passed without incident. When Mark told me that his mother Jean, perennially youthful, was getting on in years, I realized that years had gotten on. Sharon's father and mother joined us at the table. He seemed infirm and said little. I tried my best to make conversation, but the evening was a struggle. Everything was a struggle. My wife didn't want me. After 20 years of walking with a crutch, moving on my feet had become slow, shaky and a little scary. I noticed that Sharon and Mark said little to each other. But what did I know of such things? They had been married a long time. It was embarrassing to have landed a wife of my own, yet not have her there meeting my friends.
Sharon and Mark must have divorced about the same time I did. Sharon married Jim, I discovered one day on the telephone, maybe five years after my dinner visit in the forest. And now maybe 10 years after that, I've seen Sharon in Facebook. And having just finished my own book, and stil having a face, I'll have to drive down to Santa Cruz and reconnect with Sharon and meet Jim. For it's odd about people. We need to honor their catalytic effect. And we also need to honor the dark night in the forest.
For as Marlou was saying moments ago over lunch as she shoved part of her ravioli my way, the only thing certain about love is its eventual loss. We looked at each other. A moment passed. I went for the grated Parmesan.
Mark and Sharon were friends who transplanted quite smoothly from high school to college. In truth, I hardly knew anyone in high school, but I knew them, and they knew me, as well as conditions allowed. They were among the first couples in my life. Because coupling was emotionally impossible for me then, Mark and Sharon seemed wondrously complete in their early union. In my childhood home, marriage had seeped like a poisoned well. It would be a long time, decades, before I got the toxins out of my system.
For the time being, I was in a dim forest somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains, round about 1991 or '92. I hadn't seen Mark and Sharon for years, and a visit was long overdue. I hadn't seen a lot of people for years, and this was one of the sad and ridiculously intolerable aspects of Marriage I. So I had set out to visit them on my own, driving to Boulder Creek or Ben Lomond or one of those mountain towns, arriving at their house in the trees.
As a couple, an early attraction of Mark-Sharon lay in their visible domesticity. Even in the summer of my freshman university year, the two of them had set up marvelous house in a choice and secluded spot in the Berkeley hills. The place was on loan, as I recall, from Sharon's sister and French brother-in-law, with a craftsman or Maybeck style, glassy, redwoodsy, shingley and, best of all for a still physically fit Southern California suburbanite, upstairs. It overlooked a reservoir. The place had built-in charms, and Mark and Sharon went about improving what they had. It was the era of tie-dyed decor, of batik and chimes and colorful things in windows. Sharon knew how to cook. The two of them knew how to welcome. Their tiny front room was carpeted with sleeping bags like mine much of the summer.
By my senior year, they had rented a cottage all their own, more spacious and even more private than its predecessor. The sun entered at all angles, Sharon's fabrics fluttered everywhere and, as fate would have it, I lived only a couple of blocks away. When I visited, the three of us got stoned, ate spaghetti or some variation and talked. Sharon, indefatigably buoyant and outgoing, talked more than Mark. She had a wry perspective on things, but not a bitter one. Mark seemed much the opposite. Marijuana sent him into a stoned silence. His private broodings were opaque. Once, he told me that his gradeschool educators had thought he was stupid, treating him accordingly. He still smarted over this, but where the realization led, it was hard to say.
Meanwhile, his wife, blond and bouncy, held me in her thrall. Clearly someone else's, Sharon was safe. She would neither reject me nor overwhelm me. All I had to do was please her. Tasked with choosing the evening's LPs in the Maybeck atlier, I put on Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto in D. How nice, Sharon said. My heart swelled. Next, it was Bachianas Brasileiros #5, with Villa-Lobos cellos and soprano whipping up a romantic storm. Sharon said it was one of her favorites. My heart gulped at proof of my lovability. Next it was 'Pictures at an Exposition'. Oh, not that, Sharon laughed. I was crushed, my heart like a ballpoint pen being snapped in two.
But I reexperienced that sense of heart gulping affirmation just a couple of nights ago. Marlou and I had had a stressful day. Her nausea was increasing, sudden vomiting taking us both by surprise, and now her parents were newly arrived, and I was retreating to my office in search of the morning's San Francisco Chronicle. By the end of the day, pinched, drawn and angry, I wanted nothing but sleep. I rolled my wheelchair into the bedroom, worked off my shoes, wondered if I really mattered amid the illness and the in-laws. And still, personal reserves low, turned to Marlou propped up in bed and asked if she would like me to read to her the letters of E. B. White. And that's when it came, this surprising gulp of realization. And after decades, my heart was seizing at its capacity to give love, not my worthiness to receive it.
As for that evening almost 20 years ago in the Santa Cruz Mountains, it passed without incident. When Mark told me that his mother Jean, perennially youthful, was getting on in years, I realized that years had gotten on. Sharon's father and mother joined us at the table. He seemed infirm and said little. I tried my best to make conversation, but the evening was a struggle. Everything was a struggle. My wife didn't want me. After 20 years of walking with a crutch, moving on my feet had become slow, shaky and a little scary. I noticed that Sharon and Mark said little to each other. But what did I know of such things? They had been married a long time. It was embarrassing to have landed a wife of my own, yet not have her there meeting my friends.
Sharon and Mark must have divorced about the same time I did. Sharon married Jim, I discovered one day on the telephone, maybe five years after my dinner visit in the forest. And now maybe 10 years after that, I've seen Sharon in Facebook. And having just finished my own book, and stil having a face, I'll have to drive down to Santa Cruz and reconnect with Sharon and meet Jim. For it's odd about people. We need to honor their catalytic effect. And we also need to honor the dark night in the forest.
For as Marlou was saying moments ago over lunch as she shoved part of her ravioli my way, the only thing certain about love is its eventual loss. We looked at each other. A moment passed. I went for the grated Parmesan.
As a newly ex-Berkeley student who was interested in matters spiritual, I found my way through an American friend to a group of Britons who seemed like-minded, which in 1970 placed me in a north London home talking to a five-year-old. I like kids, so it was natural that we would strike up a conversation. I am sure our exchange began with something on the level of Legos, but damned if things didn't veer off in an adult direction.
'You are not your body', the little boy announced. He was looking awfully serious and, in the way of kids, had moved into this territory without transition. Being new to the UK, I always seemed to be misunderstanding what people were saying. Sometimes I missed words, but more often it was the cultural underpinnings of British life that confused me. So, I looked at the little boy in a friendly, noncommittal way that could lead in any direction. We could revert to Legos, talk about the dog, discuss farting or find some other little-boy conversational topic. But, no, he assumed a five-year-old rhetorical height and pronounced, once again, 'You are not your body'. I remember sighing, forcing a smile and limping my way down the stairs to join the parents, the friends of my American friend, probably en route to a concert, certain that the evening would be a long one.
And now it's been a long time, 40 years, since this little boy made his pronouncement. He is still in my mind, and why? Was he actually some sort of seer reincarnated in the Finchley Road? Was he an evil spirit? Or was he just some kid rattling off adult thoughts by rote? In retrospect, I wish we had explored the matter of bodies and why we are not them, the kid and I. But in the moment, he seemed rather horrifying. Too much pseudo-insight, too little child's spirit, and the parents must have been a bundle of laughs. The strange thing is that the kid and his utterances have endured. From the mouth of a babe or a humoculus, whatever he was....
For if five-year-old body shedding seems a bit premature, eventually this thing does happen.
Marlou's appetite for food is slowly evaporating. Friends want to bring food, and they do, but their offerings disappear very slowly. The coffeecake that arrived this week, all fresh and yeasty, apples and cinnamon, boosted our spirits. It had less effect on our blood sugar, for Marlou could only eat small amounts, and I did my best to avoid large ones. Long week's journey into coffeecake.
Marlou is sleeping more and more. Does her fatigue stem from radiation or pain medication or the cancer itself? Does it matter? We live, both of us, in a shrinking world. Energy, once abundant, is like the petrochemical kind, increasingly hard to extract. Neither of us knows what we are facing. But it is possible to know our fears. And in a sense, maybe there's nothing more to know right now. I sometimes think that if we could have a daily Fear Briefing, getting everything expressed, stated and manifest, the way would be clear.
The way to what? The way to the next moment, whatever it holds. The way without the obstacle of anxiety. The way to maybe seeing things as they are, or coming closer. Our world has shrunk, our objectives simplified, and yes, as the little boy said, we are not our bodies. And whatever we are coming closer to, let us pray, could be each other.
'You are not your body', the little boy announced. He was looking awfully serious and, in the way of kids, had moved into this territory without transition. Being new to the UK, I always seemed to be misunderstanding what people were saying. Sometimes I missed words, but more often it was the cultural underpinnings of British life that confused me. So, I looked at the little boy in a friendly, noncommittal way that could lead in any direction. We could revert to Legos, talk about the dog, discuss farting or find some other little-boy conversational topic. But, no, he assumed a five-year-old rhetorical height and pronounced, once again, 'You are not your body'. I remember sighing, forcing a smile and limping my way down the stairs to join the parents, the friends of my American friend, probably en route to a concert, certain that the evening would be a long one.
And now it's been a long time, 40 years, since this little boy made his pronouncement. He is still in my mind, and why? Was he actually some sort of seer reincarnated in the Finchley Road? Was he an evil spirit? Or was he just some kid rattling off adult thoughts by rote? In retrospect, I wish we had explored the matter of bodies and why we are not them, the kid and I. But in the moment, he seemed rather horrifying. Too much pseudo-insight, too little child's spirit, and the parents must have been a bundle of laughs. The strange thing is that the kid and his utterances have endured. From the mouth of a babe or a humoculus, whatever he was....
For if five-year-old body shedding seems a bit premature, eventually this thing does happen.
Marlou's appetite for food is slowly evaporating. Friends want to bring food, and they do, but their offerings disappear very slowly. The coffeecake that arrived this week, all fresh and yeasty, apples and cinnamon, boosted our spirits. It had less effect on our blood sugar, for Marlou could only eat small amounts, and I did my best to avoid large ones. Long week's journey into coffeecake.
Marlou is sleeping more and more. Does her fatigue stem from radiation or pain medication or the cancer itself? Does it matter? We live, both of us, in a shrinking world. Energy, once abundant, is like the petrochemical kind, increasingly hard to extract. Neither of us knows what we are facing. But it is possible to know our fears. And in a sense, maybe there's nothing more to know right now. I sometimes think that if we could have a daily Fear Briefing, getting everything expressed, stated and manifest, the way would be clear.
The way to what? The way to the next moment, whatever it holds. The way without the obstacle of anxiety. The way to maybe seeing things as they are, or coming closer. Our world has shrunk, our objectives simplified, and yes, as the little boy said, we are not our bodies. And whatever we are coming closer to, let us pray, could be each other.
The morning mirror reveals that I have a face, recently I read a book, and why the two must combine to be a Facebook is anyone's guess. Not that I'm complaining. An old friend discovered my blog on the Internet...a revealing statement that a more tech-savvy person would find redundant...and now I'm on Facebook too. The significance of this still eludes me. I stumble around the site and still cannot quite comprehend its functionality. In particular, I have not been able to send a message to anyone. Well, not quite. I wrote on some's wall. Intimates of Facebook will recognize this wall writing as significant. I don't yet. That's because I can't find my own wall scrawl, or whatever it is. For the time being, I've kind of given up.
But not entirely. Giving up is a particularly bad idea these days. This morning I found Marlou in bed little too long, slouched to one side and looking rather wan. It's time to pay a visit to the clinic, I said. Marlou said she couldn't manage my anxiety. The housekeeper came. I disappeared into my office. Marlou disappeared altogether, probably upstairs. I went out for lunch.
The refrigerator is bursting with food, but at times I simply have to get out. The upstairs eatery at our local supermarket provides a predictable, if dull, selection of salads, soups and espresso drinks. But not today. The soup was gone. The salads were as familiar as my bathroom sink. I rolled downstairs to buy some sushi, headed upstairs to order a double latte, and sat at a small table fiddling with my purchase. No one knows why soy sauce is packed in military-grade plasticized aluminum foil. The packet itself easily slips between my neurologically compromised fingers. Never mind, for Petra, counter person at the supermarket eatery, would come by in moments bearing a steaming latte. I would ask her to open this thing. Except that with closer examination, the slit on the side of the package became apparent, and with it, a path forward. I gripped one side of the soy sauce packet with my teeth, the other with my fingers, and let rip. A little squeeze produced a big result. Soy sauce spurted. Mission accomplished.
I must confess a certain disappointment. Part of the restaurant experience, even a quasi-self-service one like our supermarket's lunch bar, involves service. I like being cared for. And in moments of strain, with Marlou and I lost in our separate pain, a waitress' help will do. Unless I genuinely don't need help. And in that case, to quote Billie Holiday, God bless the child who's got his own.
Fact is, Marlou is going to be able to do less and less for me. It's been nice, these years of help getting on my socks in the morning. But this era is coming to an end. Which doesn't mean that love is coming to an end. But the medium of exchange will be more direct. In the more than two years Marlou has had cancer, I've gotten used to doing things for her. I know she's tiring of the help or the need for help, but either way, it doesn't matter. Love is love, help is help, and God bless the child.
But not entirely. Giving up is a particularly bad idea these days. This morning I found Marlou in bed little too long, slouched to one side and looking rather wan. It's time to pay a visit to the clinic, I said. Marlou said she couldn't manage my anxiety. The housekeeper came. I disappeared into my office. Marlou disappeared altogether, probably upstairs. I went out for lunch.
The refrigerator is bursting with food, but at times I simply have to get out. The upstairs eatery at our local supermarket provides a predictable, if dull, selection of salads, soups and espresso drinks. But not today. The soup was gone. The salads were as familiar as my bathroom sink. I rolled downstairs to buy some sushi, headed upstairs to order a double latte, and sat at a small table fiddling with my purchase. No one knows why soy sauce is packed in military-grade plasticized aluminum foil. The packet itself easily slips between my neurologically compromised fingers. Never mind, for Petra, counter person at the supermarket eatery, would come by in moments bearing a steaming latte. I would ask her to open this thing. Except that with closer examination, the slit on the side of the package became apparent, and with it, a path forward. I gripped one side of the soy sauce packet with my teeth, the other with my fingers, and let rip. A little squeeze produced a big result. Soy sauce spurted. Mission accomplished.
I must confess a certain disappointment. Part of the restaurant experience, even a quasi-self-service one like our supermarket's lunch bar, involves service. I like being cared for. And in moments of strain, with Marlou and I lost in our separate pain, a waitress' help will do. Unless I genuinely don't need help. And in that case, to quote Billie Holiday, God bless the child who's got his own.
Fact is, Marlou is going to be able to do less and less for me. It's been nice, these years of help getting on my socks in the morning. But this era is coming to an end. Which doesn't mean that love is coming to an end. But the medium of exchange will be more direct. In the more than two years Marlou has had cancer, I've gotten used to doing things for her. I know she's tiring of the help or the need for help, but either way, it doesn't matter. Love is love, help is help, and God bless the child.
Einstein's universe may be forever expanding, but mine is both collapsing and enlarging at the same time. The simultaneity should trouble no one, for it is perfectly in sync with the relativistic theory of middle-age, which has nothing to do with the middle, but defines itself as any point short of the end...of existence. Testing, one-two-three. This is the sound of a 62-year-old mastering his Bluetooth headset. Thing is, anyone properly schooled in Grimm, will want to know who Bluetooth is, his relationship to Bluebeard, and so on. They would be barking up the wrong technological tree, of course, but never mind. No one knows why the tooth is blue or why the chicken crossed the road. The point is he is there, at last in my ear, after many months on my desk.
Thing is, the last time the voice-recognition people phoned to make me an offer I couldn't refuse, I didn't refuse. I bought the latest version of their software, one Bluetooth headset and a Philips handheld digital recorder. The software is nothing new. I once ran a business on it. I write this blog on it. It is me, and I am it. People unfamiliar with my way of non-finger typing do not understand why voice-recognition breeds a whole new breed of error. Instead of typos -- there's no typing -- there are 'voice-o's'. If you are waxing Edwardian, for example, and say that someone engaged in 'fisticuffs', the voice system likely will recognize 'fizzie fucks'. That's how it is. Warn your editor.
Voice-recognition requires a microphone, something worn on the head and plugged into the computer's USB port. This derives from an old military term, Un-Soldierly Behavior in Port, but never mind. The point is that the USB requires a wire, and you want to go wireless. You are 62 years old and you want to be a real cool no-wires kind of guy. You want to be like all the cool guys who stride out of high-rise buildings with inexplicable scarab beetle things stuck in their ears. You want one of these, because you think it will make you look like a bond trader. It will. Except that there aren't any bond traders anymore, but you can't master this fact until you master your headset.
Thing is, when the software package arrives, the promised Bluetooth arrives also, and without instructions. The latter are deemed unnecessary, because all the cool bond traders rip their Bluetooth headsets out of the bubble wrap, stick them in their ears and go to it. Just like my nephew knew how to work my plasma TV before I bought it. It's a young person's thing. If you're cool enough to be a bond trader, you work the trapeze without a net.
All of which explains why the Bluetooth microphone sat in its bubble wrap on my desk for six months before I summoned help. Naturally, the middle-aged friend who came by could not make the thing work either. He resorted to the web. And gradually all was revealed. The little flange on the side of the Bluetooth controls everything. Off/on, connection, volume. Press a certain way, and it works. Press wrong, and you might as well lie down in the middle of the street. But over time, trial by error teaches you the way of the Bluetooth button.
And now, this thing stuck prominently in my ear, I can roll over to Peet's and act cool. I can pretend that my discussions with the barista are actually turning up on a computer screen back home. The whole experience is cool beyond description. As for the Philips USB digital recorder, which purports to actually capture random thoughts at Peet's or anywhere, I plan to open the box and inspect this gadget sometime soon. Give it a few months.
This technology leap occurred at the same time as my sister's visit. She and her husband proved to be a marvelous catalyst in getting the two of us out. Under siege by cancer, Marlou tends to pull up the drawbridge and wait things out behind the battlements. We haven't been to a movie or gone for a purely non-medical pleasure drive in quite a while. So, the four of us made it out, Susie and her husband Andy, Marlou and me. To the Stanford Theatre. Over the hills to the coastal town of Pescadero. And out to the garden.
Of course, first came the garden center. I waited in the car while my sister purchased spinach, lettuce and flower seedlings. Back home, we prepared the beds. My raised beds inspire raised eyebrows in Marlou this time of year. The remnants of the cover crop and, worse, the non-composted remains of last year's broccoli and tomato vines stick out of the earth. Marlou always wants to tidy this stuff up, and we have an annual tug-of-war. But having given ground on all matters pertaining to carpet, I probably give off a certain vibe in the garden. Besides, my sister proved masterly at wielding of two bags of Nurseryman's Magic Nutrient Mix. She placed each on the bed, ripped the plastic open lengthwise, like a surgeon doing a simultaneous appendectomy and heart bypass, and proceeded to spread the contents. Within minutes, there was barely a trace of cover crop, living or dead. The seedlings went into the ground. And we went inside. But not before one final act.
I'm not sure what possessed me to buy an industrial quantity of California poppy seeds. But I found the stuff on the Internet, and the minimal order was enough to cover half a block. So what? My sister loaded an old spice bottle with a shaker top and sprinkled the seeds around the unplanted bed. She put the unused poppy seeds back in the cardboard box with last year's remnants. And poked around the box. Which turned up a packet of mixed poppies. Not to mention lupine. And some foxglove. The seeds dated from the first Clinton Administration. And, no, there were no jokes or even thoughts about anyone spreading their seed. It's just that the decade and a half had passed, and I was still here, and so were the seed packets. My sister opened them all, flung the contents over the bed, and then we went inside. To wait for dinner. Wait for the rain. To see what would come up.
Thing is, the last time the voice-recognition people phoned to make me an offer I couldn't refuse, I didn't refuse. I bought the latest version of their software, one Bluetooth headset and a Philips handheld digital recorder. The software is nothing new. I once ran a business on it. I write this blog on it. It is me, and I am it. People unfamiliar with my way of non-finger typing do not understand why voice-recognition breeds a whole new breed of error. Instead of typos -- there's no typing -- there are 'voice-o's'. If you are waxing Edwardian, for example, and say that someone engaged in 'fisticuffs', the voice system likely will recognize 'fizzie fucks'. That's how it is. Warn your editor.
Voice-recognition requires a microphone, something worn on the head and plugged into the computer's USB port. This derives from an old military term, Un-Soldierly Behavior in Port, but never mind. The point is that the USB requires a wire, and you want to go wireless. You are 62 years old and you want to be a real cool no-wires kind of guy. You want to be like all the cool guys who stride out of high-rise buildings with inexplicable scarab beetle things stuck in their ears. You want one of these, because you think it will make you look like a bond trader. It will. Except that there aren't any bond traders anymore, but you can't master this fact until you master your headset.
Thing is, when the software package arrives, the promised Bluetooth arrives also, and without instructions. The latter are deemed unnecessary, because all the cool bond traders rip their Bluetooth headsets out of the bubble wrap, stick them in their ears and go to it. Just like my nephew knew how to work my plasma TV before I bought it. It's a young person's thing. If you're cool enough to be a bond trader, you work the trapeze without a net.
All of which explains why the Bluetooth microphone sat in its bubble wrap on my desk for six months before I summoned help. Naturally, the middle-aged friend who came by could not make the thing work either. He resorted to the web. And gradually all was revealed. The little flange on the side of the Bluetooth controls everything. Off/on, connection, volume. Press a certain way, and it works. Press wrong, and you might as well lie down in the middle of the street. But over time, trial by error teaches you the way of the Bluetooth button.
And now, this thing stuck prominently in my ear, I can roll over to Peet's and act cool. I can pretend that my discussions with the barista are actually turning up on a computer screen back home. The whole experience is cool beyond description. As for the Philips USB digital recorder, which purports to actually capture random thoughts at Peet's or anywhere, I plan to open the box and inspect this gadget sometime soon. Give it a few months.
This technology leap occurred at the same time as my sister's visit. She and her husband proved to be a marvelous catalyst in getting the two of us out. Under siege by cancer, Marlou tends to pull up the drawbridge and wait things out behind the battlements. We haven't been to a movie or gone for a purely non-medical pleasure drive in quite a while. So, the four of us made it out, Susie and her husband Andy, Marlou and me. To the Stanford Theatre. Over the hills to the coastal town of Pescadero. And out to the garden.
Of course, first came the garden center. I waited in the car while my sister purchased spinach, lettuce and flower seedlings. Back home, we prepared the beds. My raised beds inspire raised eyebrows in Marlou this time of year. The remnants of the cover crop and, worse, the non-composted remains of last year's broccoli and tomato vines stick out of the earth. Marlou always wants to tidy this stuff up, and we have an annual tug-of-war. But having given ground on all matters pertaining to carpet, I probably give off a certain vibe in the garden. Besides, my sister proved masterly at wielding of two bags of Nurseryman's Magic Nutrient Mix. She placed each on the bed, ripped the plastic open lengthwise, like a surgeon doing a simultaneous appendectomy and heart bypass, and proceeded to spread the contents. Within minutes, there was barely a trace of cover crop, living or dead. The seedlings went into the ground. And we went inside. But not before one final act.
I'm not sure what possessed me to buy an industrial quantity of California poppy seeds. But I found the stuff on the Internet, and the minimal order was enough to cover half a block. So what? My sister loaded an old spice bottle with a shaker top and sprinkled the seeds around the unplanted bed. She put the unused poppy seeds back in the cardboard box with last year's remnants. And poked around the box. Which turned up a packet of mixed poppies. Not to mention lupine. And some foxglove. The seeds dated from the first Clinton Administration. And, no, there were no jokes or even thoughts about anyone spreading their seed. It's just that the decade and a half had passed, and I was still here, and so were the seed packets. My sister opened them all, flung the contents over the bed, and then we went inside. To wait for dinner. Wait for the rain. To see what would come up.
Marlou and I are now fighting over carpet. And don't snigger. Gilbert and Sullivan parted over an argument about a carpet in the Savoy Theatre. Behind the carpet dispute, ours that is, lie many layers. There's the issue of how much time we have to deal with this sort of thing. I contend that we must act posthaste, getting the furniture moved, electronics unplugged and new carpets rolled and glued into place before cancer's witching hour. Marlou is in no particular hurry. She's not afraid that medical events will overtake us. If I ever doubted this essential fact about her, the proof has been borne out over several months of carpet selection. Patterns, colors, wools and acrylics, carpet-store boards and FedExed sample squares have been flowing in and out our front door with the tides. Overnight guests have offered opinions. At least one consultant has weighed in. And in a strange reversal of roles, I suggested that we spring for the $16,000 brand, desperate to have the process concluded. Marlou balked. Which was fortunate. Someone had to. Remember, this is only an apartment -- and it's not ours. We are tenants.
Which, one can remind oneself, is close to the life condition. That's why the underlying issues in arguments these days seem particularly arbitrary. Carpet is no life and death matter. But decisions around it can be. In fact, our lives are so completely out of control that interior decoration feels much like menu planning aboard the Titanic. Not that anyone could foresee the iceberg. Iceberg lettuce doubtless seemed a larger issue at the time. So, why not select the perfect carpet hue, texture and blend? There could be an earthquake tomorrow. Someone could perform radical automotive surgery on my neck, using their bumper for anesthesia. Anything can happen.
What's important, someone pointed out, is that carpet installation, and its timing, matter to Marlou. Anyone who could endure several painful trips to our local carpet store and seriously consider the relative merits of 142,000 different samples, viewed in morning, midday and late-afternoon light -- well, they're really into this.
I care about Marlou getting tired and overextended, but her very passion for floor covering décor speaks a different truth. Human energy is a funny thing. We do what we care about. And in extremis, this essential truth becomes even truer. Carpet installation entails massive upheaval, of course. Furniture and all household contents have to go. It's clear the decks and find a motel room for several days. Marlou knows this and is undaunted. It is, at the end of our day of battle, a promising sign of health. Marlou is even feeling optimistic about the pain-relieving effects of her imminent radiation. What the hell. Let the carpet roll.
Which, one can remind oneself, is close to the life condition. That's why the underlying issues in arguments these days seem particularly arbitrary. Carpet is no life and death matter. But decisions around it can be. In fact, our lives are so completely out of control that interior decoration feels much like menu planning aboard the Titanic. Not that anyone could foresee the iceberg. Iceberg lettuce doubtless seemed a larger issue at the time. So, why not select the perfect carpet hue, texture and blend? There could be an earthquake tomorrow. Someone could perform radical automotive surgery on my neck, using their bumper for anesthesia. Anything can happen.
What's important, someone pointed out, is that carpet installation, and its timing, matter to Marlou. Anyone who could endure several painful trips to our local carpet store and seriously consider the relative merits of 142,000 different samples, viewed in morning, midday and late-afternoon light -- well, they're really into this.
I care about Marlou getting tired and overextended, but her very passion for floor covering décor speaks a different truth. Human energy is a funny thing. We do what we care about. And in extremis, this essential truth becomes even truer. Carpet installation entails massive upheaval, of course. Furniture and all household contents have to go. It's clear the decks and find a motel room for several days. Marlou knows this and is undaunted. It is, at the end of our day of battle, a promising sign of health. Marlou is even feeling optimistic about the pain-relieving effects of her imminent radiation. What the hell. Let the carpet roll.
In April, 1968, I had an operation on my knee. It is hard to say why. Actually, saying why is not really hard, but the remembering is. My knee, it is true, was acting up. But I was acting up, subtly, and in ways that now disturb me. My love life had gone terribly wrong, it seemed, and my life was going wrong too. This conviction, underlying my days, drove a hidden desperation. University life was about to end. Nothing lay beyond. Perhaps life was about to end. I decided to have an operation on my knee.
The decision point came in March on the banks of the Big Sur River. It was late at night, about 10 PM, and I had just forded the rushing stream, big with spring rains. I held my sleeping bag high over my head, my shoes tied together dangling around my neck. Something in me was trying to prove something, for my trip to Big Sur had come all in a rush. From Berkeley, I had taken a series of buses to San Francisco Airport, boarded a United Airlines Convair and flown the half hour to the Monterey Airport, where I had hitchhiked down Highway 1. Somehow, I decided to fit in a trip between a morning class and the next day's evening seminar. I had to prove I could do it. Complete with the flight. God only knows why.
So, there on the banks of the river, emerging onto the dry sand, I slipped and felt my knee momentarily go wonky. This, an orthopedist had told me, was a common malady. Knees went 'out', and not with other knees, but out of commission. Everything in my knee snapped back into place and I carried on hiking, but the unreliable joint disturbed me. In the darkness, I hiked a couple of hours up the trail, thinking I would make it all the way to the Barton Flats camp ground. I gave up, threw the bedroll on the ground, and slept right in the path. At daybreak, I hiked down, hitched my way back up Highway 1 to the Monterey Airport, and in Berkeley stuck my thumb out, only to be picked up by my seminar instructor.
The upshot of all this was the knee operation. During the spring break, I visited my father in Southern California, discussed the orthopedic prospects and scheduled surgery. One of my father's colleagues performed the operation, which required several nights in Redlands Hospital. I shared a room with a man who had begun his life in vaudeville. He was full of tales of big productions, splendiferous mountings of kitsch involving dancers and acrobats, animals and musicians. The stories went on a bit, but I didn't mind. The morphine, or whatever it was that smoothed my days, made everything enjoyable. Things acquired a deep emotional intensity. I felt well cared for in the white hospital womb. The surgeon had done a splendid, nurturing job of knee restoration, I was certain.
In the end, my right leg in a straight cast, my father drove me to Ontario Airport where I hobbled across the tarmac and up the stairs to a Western Airlines Lockheed Electra. To accommodate me on the half-empty plane, a flight attendant folded down the seat in front of me. I was unspeakably comfortable for the 90 minutes it took to get to Oakland. The plane roared through the spring night, flying along the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, miles of city lights sparkling.
I was not unaware of the recent history of these planes. Only a few years before, Electras mysteriously blew apart in the air. After a couple of accidents, Lockheed had fixed the problem, but something in me remained unconvinced. Still, for that night flight, the plane's sad history did not matter. I was not afraid. The glow and the onboard care and the emergence from a healing experience merged into something just as welcome at the other end, at Oakland Airport where my mother met me. She must have driven me to her apartment in Walnut Creek. I really can't recall. In any case I was back at my Berkeley room within a few days.
A dubious operation, book-ended by the care of each parent. It was the latter that I needed. While all this is clear in retrospect, at the time the whole experience, knee pain and all, even the weeks of walking with a cast around the campus, less than two months before my shooting...felt like a pleasant interlude. We all need relief and escape and caring attention. And it is remarkable the strange paths we find.
The decision point came in March on the banks of the Big Sur River. It was late at night, about 10 PM, and I had just forded the rushing stream, big with spring rains. I held my sleeping bag high over my head, my shoes tied together dangling around my neck. Something in me was trying to prove something, for my trip to Big Sur had come all in a rush. From Berkeley, I had taken a series of buses to San Francisco Airport, boarded a United Airlines Convair and flown the half hour to the Monterey Airport, where I had hitchhiked down Highway 1. Somehow, I decided to fit in a trip between a morning class and the next day's evening seminar. I had to prove I could do it. Complete with the flight. God only knows why.
So, there on the banks of the river, emerging onto the dry sand, I slipped and felt my knee momentarily go wonky. This, an orthopedist had told me, was a common malady. Knees went 'out', and not with other knees, but out of commission. Everything in my knee snapped back into place and I carried on hiking, but the unreliable joint disturbed me. In the darkness, I hiked a couple of hours up the trail, thinking I would make it all the way to the Barton Flats camp ground. I gave up, threw the bedroll on the ground, and slept right in the path. At daybreak, I hiked down, hitched my way back up Highway 1 to the Monterey Airport, and in Berkeley stuck my thumb out, only to be picked up by my seminar instructor.
The upshot of all this was the knee operation. During the spring break, I visited my father in Southern California, discussed the orthopedic prospects and scheduled surgery. One of my father's colleagues performed the operation, which required several nights in Redlands Hospital. I shared a room with a man who had begun his life in vaudeville. He was full of tales of big productions, splendiferous mountings of kitsch involving dancers and acrobats, animals and musicians. The stories went on a bit, but I didn't mind. The morphine, or whatever it was that smoothed my days, made everything enjoyable. Things acquired a deep emotional intensity. I felt well cared for in the white hospital womb. The surgeon had done a splendid, nurturing job of knee restoration, I was certain.
In the end, my right leg in a straight cast, my father drove me to Ontario Airport where I hobbled across the tarmac and up the stairs to a Western Airlines Lockheed Electra. To accommodate me on the half-empty plane, a flight attendant folded down the seat in front of me. I was unspeakably comfortable for the 90 minutes it took to get to Oakland. The plane roared through the spring night, flying along the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, miles of city lights sparkling.
I was not unaware of the recent history of these planes. Only a few years before, Electras mysteriously blew apart in the air. After a couple of accidents, Lockheed had fixed the problem, but something in me remained unconvinced. Still, for that night flight, the plane's sad history did not matter. I was not afraid. The glow and the onboard care and the emergence from a healing experience merged into something just as welcome at the other end, at Oakland Airport where my mother met me. She must have driven me to her apartment in Walnut Creek. I really can't recall. In any case I was back at my Berkeley room within a few days.
A dubious operation, book-ended by the care of each parent. It was the latter that I needed. While all this is clear in retrospect, at the time the whole experience, knee pain and all, even the weeks of walking with a cast around the campus, less than two months before my shooting...felt like a pleasant interlude. We all need relief and escape and caring attention. And it is remarkable the strange paths we find.
Marlou sits up in bed and drinks her tea. Our days begin this way. Once I have sat up in bed myself, a major neuromuscular feat drawing upon years of abdominal exercise, spasticity control, balance gauging and a general abandonment of common sense, I stagger into my wheelchair. Whirring into the kitchen, the tea kettle, primed and loaded, grinds into action. There are minutes, perhaps two, in which I must decide the critical course. With three types of tea, and two types of people, I face a choice. The trade-offs aren't easy. The Yorkshire Gold comes in tea bags. Peet's Holiday Blend and Extra Fancy Assam do not. The latter fit in individual tea strainers with their own tops. The tea bag will require jerryrigged tops for the two steaming mugs, usually old lids that happen to be hanging about. The roaring kettle forces a decision point. I go for the Peet's, let the stuff brew and roll back to the bedroom with one steaming mug.
While Marlou sips her tea, we go through the usual morning interrogation. How was your night? And yours? We generally mute our responses. When the nights are bad, neither of us wants to come clean, it seems. Well, I had a little trouble falling asleep, one of us might say. 'Little' is a relative term, of course, and might have spanned the distance from 11 PM to 2 AM, the hours passed with ceiling staring and thought churning. Then, there's the 4 AM wakeup call which, if traced, would reveal hell's dialing code. On this particular morning, we've both had good nights, little to complain of, and now there is tea. What else?
I have a book to revise. At the moment, the prospect of plunging into this is about as attractive as mining coal or training someone's weimaraner. Marlou has laundry to do. She will need quarters. Such is life in our quarters, two 1950s apartments, coin-operated washers across the way. Ours is, and always has been, in odd life for people with ages in the neighborhood of 60. Perhaps not really, when we consider friends whose mortgage payments must expand as the economy shrinks. To me, life on Roble Ave. feels like a sort of long-term Bedouin encampment. Or one of those double-wide mobile homes. We never think of moving. We have put down roots. And yet when the time comes, the whole thing can roll, roots and all.
Roots are on my mind this morning. I am keenly aware of them, the ones I keep exposing to the crisp February drought. The cover crop refuses to die. This is because, things being what they are, I have refused to obsess about it. In past years, once the gardener has pitchforked my vetch and annual ryegrass into the earth, I began a long-term process of hacking away at what's left. The plants keep growing, the rains keep coming usually, and I keep knocking the green matter back, chopping it down into the ground. The cover crop eventually gives up, the spring planting takes over, and we have a garden.
This is my Sunday morning mission. I will call the local garden center and determine the availability of spinach and lettuce seedlings. A daring move. I may have to actually drive there. It's almost a mile away. Actually, I have historically rolled there directly in my wheelchair. I don't know. Like the tea, this will involve another decision point. To say that I don't drive much is an understatement. My car was last fueled in 2008.
Our lives have shrunk. A friend suggested that I read to Marlou, and not just anything, but Roald Dahl, and not just any Dahl, but his stories for young people, precocious young people, perhaps, but young. The stories are delightful, the friend assured. Still, in her account I could feel life narrowing. Nothing that challenges the mind, I heard her saying, something comfortably childish.
And here, one must seriously consider the shrinking of lives, the childish, the simple. 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free', America's Shakers used to sing. That's why I'm going to follow my friend's advice and grab a couple of Dahl's adolescent tales from our local library. I've been reading the letters of E. B. White to Marlou from a book she gave to me. Writing from another era of American life, for all of his sophistication, his pivotal role in the rise of The New Yorker, White sounds both simple and free. He chose to write for young people, as well as adults. And who knows, but we may just move on to White's Charlotte's Web.
For life is showing us its limits, demanding that we accept our own. There's a paring down, a shedding of excess. Our closets, certainly mine, contain dark reaches of fashion history. We plan to jettison these old clothes, and yes, we will need help. We are going to hire a closet jettisoner. So be it. No time to put on airs, impress anyone or do anything we, and particularly Marlou, don't really want to do. 'Tis a gift.
While Marlou sips her tea, we go through the usual morning interrogation. How was your night? And yours? We generally mute our responses. When the nights are bad, neither of us wants to come clean, it seems. Well, I had a little trouble falling asleep, one of us might say. 'Little' is a relative term, of course, and might have spanned the distance from 11 PM to 2 AM, the hours passed with ceiling staring and thought churning. Then, there's the 4 AM wakeup call which, if traced, would reveal hell's dialing code. On this particular morning, we've both had good nights, little to complain of, and now there is tea. What else?
I have a book to revise. At the moment, the prospect of plunging into this is about as attractive as mining coal or training someone's weimaraner. Marlou has laundry to do. She will need quarters. Such is life in our quarters, two 1950s apartments, coin-operated washers across the way. Ours is, and always has been, in odd life for people with ages in the neighborhood of 60. Perhaps not really, when we consider friends whose mortgage payments must expand as the economy shrinks. To me, life on Roble Ave. feels like a sort of long-term Bedouin encampment. Or one of those double-wide mobile homes. We never think of moving. We have put down roots. And yet when the time comes, the whole thing can roll, roots and all.
Roots are on my mind this morning. I am keenly aware of them, the ones I keep exposing to the crisp February drought. The cover crop refuses to die. This is because, things being what they are, I have refused to obsess about it. In past years, once the gardener has pitchforked my vetch and annual ryegrass into the earth, I began a long-term process of hacking away at what's left. The plants keep growing, the rains keep coming usually, and I keep knocking the green matter back, chopping it down into the ground. The cover crop eventually gives up, the spring planting takes over, and we have a garden.
This is my Sunday morning mission. I will call the local garden center and determine the availability of spinach and lettuce seedlings. A daring move. I may have to actually drive there. It's almost a mile away. Actually, I have historically rolled there directly in my wheelchair. I don't know. Like the tea, this will involve another decision point. To say that I don't drive much is an understatement. My car was last fueled in 2008.
Our lives have shrunk. A friend suggested that I read to Marlou, and not just anything, but Roald Dahl, and not just any Dahl, but his stories for young people, precocious young people, perhaps, but young. The stories are delightful, the friend assured. Still, in her account I could feel life narrowing. Nothing that challenges the mind, I heard her saying, something comfortably childish.
And here, one must seriously consider the shrinking of lives, the childish, the simple. 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free', America's Shakers used to sing. That's why I'm going to follow my friend's advice and grab a couple of Dahl's adolescent tales from our local library. I've been reading the letters of E. B. White to Marlou from a book she gave to me. Writing from another era of American life, for all of his sophistication, his pivotal role in the rise of The New Yorker, White sounds both simple and free. He chose to write for young people, as well as adults. And who knows, but we may just move on to White's Charlotte's Web.
For life is showing us its limits, demanding that we accept our own. There's a paring down, a shedding of excess. Our closets, certainly mine, contain dark reaches of fashion history. We plan to jettison these old clothes, and yes, we will need help. We are going to hire a closet jettisoner. So be it. No time to put on airs, impress anyone or do anything we, and particularly Marlou, don't really want to do. 'Tis a gift.
