Productivity

'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.