May 2009 Archives

At 3:40 AM, knowing thoughts of sleep were no more than that, I got the thing underway. Lorna was here at 5 AM, and I continued remembering last minute matters, knowing that soon nothing would matter. So why not phone Scotland? This departure day also happened to be the very first that ScotRail...by now my friends...'ask for Claire'...was taking bookings for mid-August. So, with SuperShuttle 15 minutes away, I gave Claire a call. Oh, dear, she told me, this is rather complicated. You'll need singles. Do you have a Disabled Rail Card? Yes, I lied. In the background Claire was going on about how complicated it all was. Could she call me back? Well, what was my dialing code? Oh, dear, oh, dear. I offered to ring her back. Claire, an employee of international telesales for the Scottish rail network, was not allowed to call outside of Britain.

 

No problem, I said. London to Glasgow to Oban to Edinburgh to London. And, dammit, if Claire's buddy wasn't taking down my Visa number just as the SuperShuttle lift descended. In moments 101 was flying by, and soon I was flying out, and it was too late to worry about what Delta Airlines was going to do to my wheelchair. It was too late to worry about whether I had remembered to pack my mobile phone. I sat alone in business class, no one beside me, happily reading and dozing while the North American continent slipped by. I had an omelette. I finished half a novel. I calmed down. All the while I felt much like The Little Match Girl, having expended thousands of frequent flyer miles accumulated over years, all the mileage going up in flames, just so I could avoid sitting in coach.

 

Naturally, one pays for such ease. My bag was the last to appear at Kennedy Airport. No one knew where my wheelchair was. SuperShuttle New York made me wait an hour for my $120 chartered, not shared, van into midtown. And yet, there it was, the Manhattan skyline, yes minus the big blocky World Trade Center. There's no explaining why the traffic on E. 37th St. is bumper-to-bumper at 8 PM. I guess plays are starting. The driver is nervous about dropping me on 44th St., in front of the Algonquin Hotel. I assume he doesn't want to block traffic, but, no, he could care less. He wonders how I will make it from street to curb. The Algonquin doorman produces a folding aluminum ramp and I sail inside. I sail right past the front desk, almost too small to be credible. But in seconds I am checked in and rolling into the Oak Room, the famous supper club. Without much thought, I have booked a table for one, alone. There's a famous jazz singer and a famous jazz pianist, but I've arrived so late that there is not time to order anything but a salad before the lights go down. The room is remarkably small, with the feeling of a few diners gathered around a piano in a large living room. It's a good feeling, but I've only been in New York for 30 seconds and it's hard to adjust. It's hard to adjust to spending so much money, but the reasons for this are unclear. Marlou would want me to be here, I tell myself, and urge me to throw budgetary caution to the winds.

 

As chanteuse and pianist work their way through the Cy Coleman songbook, I nervously add up the cost. About $10 per song, is my estimate. With the lights down it's impossible to eat. When the spotlights come up for the livelier numbers, I am very conscious of the click of my knife and fork on the china plate. I am eating a watercress salad, not a quadriplegic-friendly dish at the best of times. So in the dark I grab a sesame roll, stab at curlicues of butter in an ice dish, and feel rather pleased with myself. Both performers are Britons, and something about this makes sense, all of us looking back and forth across the Atlantic. In the dark, I make my way through a glass of red wine. The waiter had offered me a tiny flashlight to both read the menu and negotiate my food, but I declined. With one hand, I would either hold the light or hold a fork. The only option is a miner's headbandlight, but something tells me these are in short supply at the Hotel Algonquin. The brits will sell their CD in the lobby, we hear at the end of the show, and I'm determined to roll out there and at least talk to them. Except that the lights have come up, revealing my lap as a scene of intense butter and watercress bombing. Embarrassed, I dab at the wreckage, spreading a couple of tablespoons of butter in a wide arc across my trousers. This is all the result of nervousness, both the butter dropping and the spreading, and the situation is getting worse, it seems, for there's no way to exit except through the lobby, right past the famous Algonquin round table, haunt of 1920s and 1930s literati. I retreat to my room.

 

Or try to. The woman at the front desk is smiling out the news of my room. It isn't the handicapped one, but it's a big one. They are moving me. I follow the bellman upstairs, have him place bags strategically, then begin making moves for bed. The problem is that 10 PM is really 7:00 pacific time. And there's another problem. I cannot get into the bathroom. Literally. The wheelchair does not fit through the door. So I maneuver on shaky feet, mentally grabbing at nonexistent railings. It's all very tenuous, disabled existence. Survival requires a high level of alertness. In a move that might even be satirical, the Algonquin bathroom floor is of the slickest, glass-like ceramic tile. There is nothing to grab and every reason to fall. I prepare for bed with the utmost caution, and the process takes until almost midnight. There was a reason why I decided to take this trip on my own, but staring into the one 1 AM ceiling, it eludes me. At 1:30, I finally give up and take some herbal sleeping pills. I am awake five hours later, par for the course these days.

 

I have breakfast with Eric, my one New York friend, who takes me to a truly New York place, the Edison Hotel diner. It's got Art Deco designs and decent food, and Eric tells me I'm a good writer and urges me to keep at it and don't lose heart. You probably want a nap before the play, he suggests. Eric is right. I have tickets for a matinee, and my energy is failing. Back at the room it fails some more, but there's more news from the front desk. I have to pack my things, for the wheelchair room is now available. I get the bags closed, but this takes half an hour. I put up my feet for 10 minutes, then roll in search of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It's across the street from the Edison diner, where I just ate with Eric. Which is good, because I'm running on no sleep and simple navigation is a major challenge. The house manager shows me to my wheelchair space near the back of the orchestra. How am I going to keep awake for this, whatever it is?

 

It's 'Exit the King' by Ionesco, a 1962 absurdist drama. I read the play in my university days, but what has drawn me to it now is unclear. It doesn't take long to find out. The star, Geoffrey Rush, whom I last saw as a Pirate of the Caribbean, proves to be a mesmerizing artist. He has translated the play himself and, moving as lithely as Marcel Marceau, achieves the physical comedy and existential profundity of the finest Beckett. Except that I've never been as moved by, say, 'Waiting for Godot'. Besides, this Ionesco play is all about death. The king has been alive for centuries and now with his kingdom falling apart, he is falling apart, and to great comic effect. He denies death, tries to escape it, tries to find meaning in it, tries to deny meaning in it, and the plot keeps progressing, the certainty of death intensifying, its significance moving farther and farther away. Geoffrey Rush's clowning has the sole-stirring intensity of great Shakespeare comedy. His costar, Susan Sarandon, is the queen who guides the monarch to his death. She is all intelligence. 'It wasn't worth all the fuss, was it?' she asks just before the king breathes his last gasp.

 

Memories of Marlou's last gasp, calmly indicated by the hospice nurse, drowned out the applause and the curtain calls. People were staring at the guy crying in his wheelchair in the last row as they made their way up the aisle. It couldn't be helped. When the crowds were gone, I rolled back to the Algonquin and had a cup of tea. I stared at the famous round table, noting that it was actually oval. It was time for something else. How was the Star of India, I asked the concierge? Good curries, he said. I rolled up the street.

Someone needs to have a chat with the Unitarians.  It is quite splendid that they have opened things up, provided this nondenominational space for events like the current one, the Evening of Remembrance.  But the branch doesn't work.  Instead of a cross or Star of David or a hammer and sickle, they have a bit of a tree.  Madrone or laurel or something admirably local, and while I am all in favor of acknowledging, preserving and, yes, worshiping nature, hanging a tree branch on the wall does not work.  Here, the nude branch looks oddly literal.  One cannot tell if the thing is there to demonstrate the bifurcation patterns of drought years or inspire higher thought.  It is not a symbol, that is its problem.  

In reality, it is no one's problem.  Our problem is on the screen.  And here she comes again.  The slideshow assembled by the hospice people presents the Loved Ones in regular succession.  Click and click and click.  Marlou, I have learned by watching the thing multiple times and noting its sequence, comes right after the 1950s couple in the sweaters.  They are preceded by the Thanksgiving portrait of husband, wife and five kids.  There's a war bride photo before that one.  A 1960s football player ready to pass.  A little kid in his Sunday finery.  And a young blonde woman from, perhaps, last year.  Marlou looks prettiest.  Her expression is all joy, tugs at the heart, and as its spiritual corners turn down, reveals a sense of fated resignation.  I'm sure it was taken post-diagnosis.  And then it's gone, the slideshow beginning again.

I rolled in late.  I arrive late for many things these days.  It was hardly something to look forward to, an evening's rehash of loss.  Yes, I needed the catharsis.  No, I did not particularly want to attend.  Which may explain why I made short work of the hello, thank you for coming, please sign in let's make a name badge, and here's your carnation.  The latter had a long stem, and I draped it across my lap like a firearm.  The sign in proved awkward, the woman handing me the guestbook at one angle, turning it to another worse angle, realizing the thing was too floppy to support the neuromuscularly imprecise.  She put the guestbook down, frantically looked for something firmer, and I did nothing to lighten the load of a liberal hospice worker in a Unitarian church bringing everyone together for Remembrance.  I wasn't exactly fuming, but I wasn't exactly smiling.  I wasn't exactly there, more to the point.  A space at the end of the back row had room for my wheelchair.

Personal observations.  Mary Oliver poems.  A snatch from Ecclesiastes.  Some music, what the British would call hummy-strummy, from a woman with a guitar and one with a voice.  And later, Thais' famous hit performed with piano and violin.  And then, after more observations about the ashes-to-ashes nature of it all, an all-soprano rendition of a moving ballad, putatively Irish, about the road rising up to meet you.  I have sung the latter and have a bias here, that men's voices give the song some depth.  In fact, the entire evening had this much in common with the reading group aboard the Queen Mary 2.  All women.  Meaning, the men were missing in action.  

Is grief women's work?  What is going on here?  There's a reason why I return from the annual Minnesota Men's Conference sadder and wiser.  This was enough to make me roar into quadriplegic action, batteries blazing, to get in the grief queue.  Everyone headed for the altar, if that is what the Unitarians call it.  We all spoke the names of the Loved One into a handheld wireless microphone, stuck our carnations in a wireframe base and headed back.  Viewed from the altar, Marlou's picture acquired force, the bittersweet smile in particular.  It was the look of someone who has begun abandoning things.  My brother, sister and sister-in-law and brother-in-law spent hours in Marlou's kitchen during Memorial Day weekend.  Marlou, who was always on top of food storage and production, had cupboards full of moldering bags and boxes.  It wasn't like her.  The past two and a half years of death stalking weren't like her either.

And then it was all over and time for brownies and chitchat in the foyer.  I had a couple of bites and aimed for the exit, pausing reconsider this behavior.  No need to be abrupt and perfunctory.  No need to mentally edit the microphone announcements of the Loved Ones either.  To John, the world's most wonderful dad.  Jane, you are in our hearts and minds forever.  The best, from a woman considerably younger than me -- my sweet husband Frank.

So I talk to a middle-aged black nurse's aide.  Everyone knows her, quite a few people pat her on the back.  We make small talk.  It's a big organization, the hospice.  Increasing demand for services.  Growing markets.  She tells me I am looking okay.  I consider this.  I thank her.  I go home.  And only 24 hours later, everything packed, all transit documents ready for inspection, I decide to sleep.  There's nothing else to do.  I've gone over everything again and again.  I shut down the computer, and before turning out the light, something catches my eye.  Tags and IDs required to board the ship for Southhampton.  A ticket to a Broadway show.  Oy.  I am, for better or worse, on my way.

The day dawns.  I waken and sag, the life force rising and descending in me like an elevator going in two directions.  The downward motion comes from the Walgreens SleepMore, or whatever it's called.  An off-the-shelf slumber remedy, effective yet unsubtle, the stuff leaves me in a sort of stupor for the first few waking hours.  I have things to do.  The nature and extent of the stuff is unclear, and the day's advance isn't bringing much clarity.  Passport.  Can't forget the passport.  Has it expired?  That is to say, has it expired since I last looked at it, a week ago?  One never knows.  Things can creep up on you, transform themselves, dates appearing one way in one light, another way in another light.  Better have a look.  2015.  I can go anywhere until 2015.  I cannot go from Israel, to say, Damascus, but I can go almost anywhere else.  So many passport stamps, so little time.  And while my brain is occupied with such trivia, the conviction grows that the important thing, the absolute priority, has slipped out of my consciousness altogether.  There are the shoes.  They are in the hands of Mr. Lee.  I know Mr. Lee.  He needs leeway.  I'm going to pay him a visit today and discuss the shoes.

How about Friday morning, he asks, as we both regard the shoes that have sat untouched for a week on his shelf.  I hear sounds of grinding and stitching from the back, but Mr. Lee denies that he has an assistant.  All on own, he says.  I tell him that Friday morning is out.  It is completely out.  I am out and riding the jet stream eastward.  He doesn't need to hear this or care.  Still, he tries to be helpful.  Okay, he says, Thursday.  Thursday morning, I say, narrowing the target area.  Okay, he says.  I don't actually need the shoes Mr. Lee is repairing, not for the trip.  But new soles are on my list, and I might as well get this done.  

I have no sense of priorities, these days.  Things have equal weight or are equally weightless.  It doesn't seem to matter much what I do.  Which also applies to the trip.  I'm not sure why I am going, just acting on blind faith.  Events will take over.  SuperShuttle either will arrive or it won't.  The plane will be on time or late.  The Queen Mary will dock in Brooklyn or sink.  And if it sinks with me, I will have my memory stick.

Someone suggested that I buy one.  There's no better way to load up one's laptop computer with junk, a.k.a., data, it seems.  This is true.  Within an hour, this silly little thing on a key ring has ingested two years of my life.  With my own memory failing, the idea of inserting a replacement appeals to me.  In it goes, the memory stick, and out it comes remembering everything.  The problem is there seem to be things I don't want to remember.  I keep forgetting the Remembrance Evening sponsored by the hospice organization that nursed Marlou in her final months.  It's tonight.  The hospice, someone told me, has hundreds of people dying at any given moment in and around this end of San Francisco Bay.  Will anyone remember Marlou?  Will we all drown in each other's sorrow?  Who will be there?  One of her nurses?  Her doctor?  What will we do together, except cry and look at each other's photos?  Everyone contributes a picture of the Loved One.  If I'd had the nerve and inclination, I could have contributed Evelyn Waugh.  I check my watch.  Ninety minutes until remembrance.  I have to drive to South Palo Alto.

Odd how I am channeling Marlou these days.  Rolling about Menlo Park's shoe repair shops and espresso outlets, I have returned with a few crushed leaves on my wheelchair tires.  I find this most exasperating, the cleaning lady having only been at it with her vacuum cleaner hours ago.  Crushed leaves here, crushed leaves there, and pretty soon it's autumn.  That's why I asked my brother and sister to resurrect the handheld vacuum cleaner, shop vac.  I grab the thing, I fire it up like a chainsaw and maneuver the crushed leaves into its maw.  The latter disappear, out damn spot, and the Marlou Memorial Carpet has returned to its pristine glory.  

Too bad that, having forgotten the remembrance, I will be attending the evening alone.  Yet I am alone.  Single.  I've certainly been here before.  It's just that I don't like it anymore.  I got used to socializing as a couple.  There was something comfortable about being with Marlou at gatherings, dinners with friends, almost anything.  Now that comfort is gone, and it's me who will roll up to the ship's dinner table Sunday evening alone.  I've signed up for this.  One can eat in any number of places aboard the Queen Mary, but I like the idea of meeting people, strangers.  The practice will do me good.  The experience might even be enjoyable.

I prefer 'An Evening of Collective Grief' to Remembrance Evening.  But having forgotten the remembrance, I have also forgotten to invite someone.  The general advice to the grieving is to avoid doing things alone.  Get help.  Get company.  But this seems different.  Marlou's absence is the whole point.  So I will turn up alone, get on with the remembrance and get out.  Overall, I hope to remember more than Marlou.  Memory is playing strange tricks.  I remembered last week's Su Hong Pine Nut Chicken in plenty of time, placed the aluminum take-away container in a slow oven...even slowed the oven down to a comfortable 250° until black smoke wafted out of the kitchen.  The metal container's cardboard lid had ignited.  I stared at the scene dumbly, pulling ashes out of the toaster oven.  Paper burns.  I must remember that.

Anger burns too.  It burns rather steadily these days.  Only yesterday, rolling into the sunlight after a Vietnamese manicure, it hit me in the parking lot.  How could this have happened to us?  Marlou and me.  But now it hasn't happened to any 'us', but to me.  And that realization makes me want to do something drastic.  Something that matches the force of the event.  But there is no match.  Nothing comes close, not in terms of suddenness and totality.  

Somewhere south of here, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church, hospice people are setting up for the Remembrance Evening.  Marlou's picture will be on display.  And there she will fade into the multitudes.  I want to see that happen.  I want to see that my dramatic loss is actually routine, the most predictable of life events.  I want to see how many of us there are.  People from Sunnyvale and Palo Alto and San Jose and Cupertino, all of them freshly ripped from someone.  The Loved Ones.  They are all around us, have always been, and all cultures make a place for them, present informed by the past, the past informed by the present.  I want to see how we are together tonight, the living amid the dead.  I want to see if I am still so angry.  What lies behind my anger is a mystery, but it's a mystery I want to solve.

It came to me in the night when I could not sleep, about the ashes.  Marlou, post-crematorium, now resides on a shelf in my pantry.  And I, in decades or weeks, will do the same.  And the puzzle of all this only unfolds through process of elimination.  The moment the hospice nurse said that was it, that breath was the last, the person propped up in the bed, head hanging, eyelid sagging, became something else.  Because I cannot say what that something is, I am left with what it is not.  Marlou was never threatened by decomposition, until one instant in April.  And then she was in a freezer.  And then she was in a fire.  And now she is on my shelf.

It is the stuff of black humor, the person in a box.  The ashes in the pantry.  And when the ashes, or thoughts of ashes, came to me in the sleepless night, it was their essence that intrigued me.  I recalled how they have a ritual purpose.  Ash Wednesday, when churchgoers emerge with a charcoal dot on the forehead.  African tribesmen with ritual ash-whitened bodies in some National Geographic.  That's all I know.  Lying awake at night, the other thing I know is that we are supposed to move from ashes to ashes and from dust to dust.  But I don't believe in the dust.  I believe that dust is a euphemism, an evasion.  We move from the circulatory and robust to the rotting.  The ashes offer, I suppose, a less disturbing course of physical dissolution.  As a home gardener, I am all for the rot.  Why not save on compost?  I can believe in my reincarnation as a butter leaf lettuce.

As for the ashes, their ritual uses still baffle me.  It is 4 AM.  What is clear is the substance, gritty and mineral.  Animal, vegetable and the other.  Ashes, ground rock, the antithesis of cells and mitochondria and peristaltic action.  This is hard, cold stuff.  It doesn't care about weather or vacuum or acid or alkali.  It does not give a flying fuck.  It can be bombed, strafed or exposed to airline security.  The essence of the inorganic, as coldly, immutably permanent as anything.

When I stare at the plaster ceiling, a close cousin of the ashes in the pantry, I see the sense in changing the subject through a choice of materials.  Let's think about lime and gypsum and sand, even some asbestos.  Stuff that's hard, elemental and eternal.  Which raises an interesting question.  Would Marlou's ashes pass EPA inspection?  What is in there?  Haven't we all absorbed enough lead and mercury and strontium 90 to make us essentially toxic?  And the thought is not only deeply irreverent, but profoundly irrelevant, and yet at 4:30 AM, it occupies the mind.  

Life, whatever it is or was, can hold itself together with a certain excess of heavy metal, it seems.  We can be up to our eyeballs in bodily pollution, yet our cells can maintain proper discipline, march in formation, hold hands and remember their purpose as hair follicles or pancreatic ducts.  So why do some forget?  Why do some refuse to cooperate?  What is death and life and cancer and health...and why is it 4:45, dangerously close to 5:00, the hour at which the functional morning can be said to begin?  It's enough to make one turn on the radio.  Which I don't.  I stare at the mineral ceiling.

Is this a sign of a decadent culture, that I fixate on the material elements of death?  It seems for the moment, all I have, a starting point.  My instinct leads me here.  For now, it's what I know.  Just as I know that Marlou would want me to spend some time with her nephews this summer.  They are great guys, they have her DNA, and the biochemical path leads there...and then peters out.  The future seems frighteningly empty.  So, for the moment there's the ceiling, and later in the summer there's the nephews.  Tomorrow and tomorrow.  Meanwhile, virtually the day after tomorrow, there's the trip.  I can't get into it.  

Travel was something I did with Marlou most enjoyably and don't want to face this prospect alone.  It brings me back to older, lonelier parts of my life.  Or it seems to, with my field of vision dominated by an apartment ceiling in California.  Soon enough I'll be looking at departure screens and nervously pulling my passport out for the eleventh time, just to make sure it hasn't expired.  And I haven't expired.  There is an expiration date, and this fact could not be clearer, and once we are pulled from life's shelf it doesn't matter if we end up in my garden or the landfill or a crematorium smoke stack.  People can look at all my uncompleted drafts and see what a bad writer I really am.  It's all going to be revealed, and by that point it's all going to be chemical and not matter.  Still, matter does matter.  I can't work it out.  But something is working its way out.  And this time next week I'll be making my way out of New York Harbor.

I am on the brink of a month-long trip, focused on noisome details and taking aim...yet I am aimless.  Wandering out of the wheelchair repair shop in Sunnyvale, a stream-of-consciousness moment directs me toward Macy's.  It's there, in the center of town, and I am too.  I need, or think I need, a short sleeve dress shirt.  I need new shorts.  A salad bowl.  I once had a salad bowl, then something happened to it.  And now rolling through the Macy's Housewares Department, something has happened to me.  I shift into domestic high gear.  

Bits of advice and items of kitchen lore pop off the shelves.  There's a little mixer, a tiny thing with a name like Tornado, that someone told me would be perfect for salad dressings.  Sold.  A smaller microwave, my brother assures me, would make my kitchen bigger.  Bought.  A salad bowl, wooden tongs, and subordinate salad bowls come in one box.  Purchased.  The saleswoman, of South Asian origins, has assembled the boxes by the cash register.  With the boxes stacked next to each other, I can see this is stupid.  I have journeyed to Sunnyvale via train to get the seat adjusted on my new wheelchair.  All this kitchen gear requires a car.  What if I have the boxes shipped?  Can the stuff arrive at my home say, Saturday, in two days?  My siblings will be visiting.

The shop assistant is Indian, well spoken, polite and asking an annoying question.  Where is your car?  My car, I tell her, is in Menlo Park.  How did you get here?  This is a very stupid question and I smile in a very fixed and unfriendly way.  How did any of us get here, I want to ask?  One moment we were floating through the cosmos, the next we were in Macy's Housewares.  The woman is waiting.  Other means, I reply.  Ah, transport, she says.  Caltrain, I add.  Something tells me that this subtle distinction means nothing to her.  Transport.  When will I be driving down to Sunnyvale, she asks?  Later in the decade, I want to say.  Can she ship these items to my home, pronto?  She confers with a colleague.  No.  It is a massive undertaking to transport goods the twelve miles to Menlo Park.  Two days is not enough.  Of course in post-Bush America, Macy's may be employing rickshaws.  In a moment of sanity I say the obvious.  Isn't this stuff on sale closer to home at the Macy's in Palo Alto?  The woman nods.  I leave.

The Macy's encounter feels like a close call.  My temper is easily roused.  The Indian woman had rigid notions about cars and transport, perhaps growing out of the caste system.  She may think me an untouchable.  I make emotional leaps of this sort all the time.  At least I remembered the salad bowl and the microwave, things that are on my mental shopping list.  And now I'm on the train and glad the ride is short as my temper.  I don't want to talk to the guy sharing the wheelchair space.  I remember him.  He's a nice kid, probably with cerebral palsy.  Only at the end of the ride do I turn and have a few words about our wheelchair life and times.  

The young man has badly deformed wrists bent by too much spasticity and too little physical therapy.  How are things going, I ask?  How is he fairing in the economy?   He speaks with great difficulty, holding his arms somewhat involuntarily in the air while he enunciates.  He buys things when he has to, tries to avoid spending money whenever possible.  The last time we talked, a year or more ago, he was a student.  I could pursue this topic, but the Menlo Park station is drifting by, and I have maneuvered us into a brief exchange.  Still, any exchange is important.  We are in this together, he and I.  The wheelchair lift lowers me to the platform.   

My stomach is full from breakfast, but my apartment is empty from grief, so I roll Into the terrace café by the train station and order a bowl of soup.  Is California Lotus Land?  The sun is blaring, its warmth flooding my veins, and even the soup is good.  I spring for a cappuccino.  The place is crowded with people of all ages.  The elderly converse in the shade.  Toddlers chase pigeons in the sun.  We are alive.  Infused with sun, I drift to the essential puzzle of these days.  Is this a piercing sadness or a physical disease?  In the ordeal of marriage, I rose into something new.  Which entered my cells, and being over now, is kicking up a major somatic fuss.  Would I like another cappuccino?  I wonder if the three-year-old will catch the pigeon.  The waiter is doing what waiters do, waiting.  He is waiting for me, and I am waiting for God knows what, and it's hard to tell if the pigeon has a good life or a bad one.  The terrace abounds with dropped food, and, okay, a pigeon gets chased.  No, I tell the waiter.  But thanks for asking.

At home, there's an e-mail from my cousin Bob.  He tells me not to worry about Southampton.  Cunard is tightlipped about the disembarkation process.  The time and place of our quayside meeting, Bob and mine, is somewhat vague.  And there's the battery charger.  I'm tired of schlepping more than a kilo of copper windings and rolled steel about the planet just to recharge my wheelchair.  A guy in Oxford will sell me a solid-state charger that weighs one tenth as much.  Bob says the thing is ludicrously overpriced.  He is right, of course, but this is true of everything medical.  Beyond that is the larger story.  

We're not talking about any old guy in Oxford.  This is the repair guy who drove out to a remote Gloucestershire village last summer after Italian airport workers turned their sledgehammers on my wheelchair.  He is the Oxford guy who patched the thing together, got it running well enough to make it through London for a few days, then home.  He is the guy who remembered me in a recent e-mail exchange.  We have a relationship.  I may need him again.  I will buy his overpriced charger.  People like him have gotten me through life...just as Marlou got me through life...and now life has gotten through to me, and at times I even know what I'm doing.  Problem is, it's a perilous time.  I just hope I make it through all this with my life.

Mina, a perky Colombian woman not far from my age, is arranging sandwiches for the supermarket's Sunday afternoon flood, while I await salmon.  The latter will be the cooked variety, for the California sun is blasting away, summer style.  We are going to have a salad.  A big salad.  And 'we' is a big five guests, invited for a late afternoon Sunday gathering in my apartment.  Life goes on.  How is my wife, Mina asks?

 

The question doesn't throw me, or even spur me toward tears.  There is something about Mina, bustling and lighthearted and present, that makes me answer truthfully.  Dead.  Last month, I add.  Why not just say it?  I roll into Shopping Land on such a regular basis, the crew might as well be prepared. 

 

Barely a beat separates Mina's mildly stunned incredulity from religious nostrum.  Don't worry, she tells me, your wife is in a better place.  Mina gives me a hug.  Her colleague gives me the salmon.  I give them both the slip.

 

On my birthday, the 60th and laden with the usual baggage, Marlou held a party.  It was a small gathering, but big enough.  She had been diagnosed with cancer for barely two months.  Her chemotherapy was under way and she was cranked up on steroids.  Party planning, one of Marlou's favorite pastimes, was in high gear.  She had uncharacteristically planned substantial entertainment.  People, one of them me, were supposed to sing.  She had duplicated music and passed out the scores to various showtunes.  We all gave it a go.  I sensed the evening was about her, which made the proceedings somewhat awkward, but the way revealed itself.  I toasted her as the love of my life.  The words sounded a bit much, over the top.  But they seemed the right words.  And time has revealed them to be just that, an accurate reportage.  One life.  Only so many loves, time and space being what they are.  What seemed a bit forced at the time, has gathered force over time.

 

Which is why the converse seems equally plausible.  The love of my death.  I am having dreams, strange dreams.  Layered bonbons, carefully crafted and made of bone, flesh and blood, appear in a fancy box.  I eat the wrong one.  The punishment will be dire. 

 

Retribution, guilt, verdict.  I'm not sure what it means, except that I am the survivor.  And should not be.  Where this comes from, and how the equation developed, is unclear.  The dream seems all about fear, darkness and, of course, death.  Mine, it seems, in the wake of Marlou's...one of those messages that only comes as an intimation.  Like a road sign barely glimpsed, speeding along on holiday.  Did it really say Bridge Subject to Washout?  Or was I just imagining.

 

*                                   *                                   *

 

Because there is no larger plan, not even an imagined shape to the future, life's mundanities have taken over the entire stage.  They are like supernumeraries in some inflated production who know they will never see the spotlight again.  They demand attention and do not reward it. 

 

Consumer Reports is staring at me from somewhere in Iowa.  All I have to do is check a box and they will return to Iowa.  Maybe I will go to Iowa myself and talk to them.  In fact, I intend to go anyway, for Marlou has family there and I want to keep in touch.  I have questions for Consumer Reports.  What is it like in Iowa?  Aren't the winters cold?  Don't you feel bad sucking the lifeblood out of the agrarian economy so you can mail magazines?  Is it really worth it?  As I consider this, it seems really worth it to subscribe for five years.  Consumer Reports will leave me alone.  Besides, in a couple of months there's a big exposé on dishwashers.  The essential myth behind boiling hot water sprayed at plates and glasses, caustic soap eating its way through your spoons, all of this will fall to the wayside.  The truth.  Five years.  It would lighten my load to just pay these people and forget about it.

 

I've already forgotten about so much.  The New York Review of Books bursts into my mailbox every couple of weeks, all these brilliant writers being their ineffable selves, and I stare blankly at the copies and drop them in a pile.  Melinda has done me the Jewish Family Service of putting my magazine subscriptions on hold.  Everything is on hold.

 

Fortunately my friend Bob was on hold this morning, making an attempt to talk to a software company.  A program wasn't working.  To put a finer point on it, a voice recorder that stores dictation for automated transcription wasn't working.  Made by Philips in 2007, the product has dropped out of existence.  The software vendor knows nothing about it.  Phillips does not list the product number on its website. 

 

Drop everything.  This is my newest modus operandi.  Lunching on the kitchen counter, I knock the top to a jar on the floor.  As I reach for a napkin, the saltshaker plunges to the linoleum. Demons have braided the pull cords on my venetian blinds.  It has taken me weeks to read a 150 page novel. 

 

In the afternoon, my feet mechanically cranked up in an electric recliner, I stare at the wall for signs of continental drift.  Now and then I see them.  My apartment is definitely getting closer to Redwood City, where the train service is better and one can easily nip over to government offices to tidy up this or that piece of official business.  Left to their own devices, devices such as my stereo-TV-cable box, hum to themselves.  Hmmm.  A small click emanates from the kitchen clock, an hour having passed.  Old Man River.

 

The electric reclining chair is the source of some concern.  Marlou was determined to get this thing, having watched me struggle -- her word, not mine -- with getting the footrests up on its predecessor.  So now I'm fully automated and anxious.  It is unclear to me what will happen if the power grid fails.  And it does, often enough.  The manufacturer wants me to believe that a tiny nine-volt battery will provide backup.  There is no backup.  That is the point.  I am on my own.

 

Which is patently untrue.  There are plenty of people around who care about me.  Friends and phone calls and e-mails and visits and offers.  Like this one mailed from TempurPedic.  I can get a new Swedish bed for cheap.  The current one, Marlou's deathbed, may be haunted.  What can TempurPedic do about this?  There's nothing on their website.  What kind of Swedes are they?  They have the entire winter to brood in the dark about beds and mortality, drinking and thinking.  Okay, driving too.  And all they have to offer is another spine-supporting box of foam.  Swedish meatballs.

 

A hospice nurse explained to Marlou that human anxiety always rises at night.  Mine certainly does.  And what precisely is rising baffles and irritates me.  I complain, and yet there is backup, plenty of it.  Lorna will roll in tomorrow morning at the startling hour of 7 AM, roust me into my clothes and out the door for breakfast with a friend.  My life is neither dangerous nor empty.  And yet it feels so.  Marlou's night fear, heartbreaking to consider, is part of history.  Mine is part of the present.  And being even halfway part of the present, present and accounted for, has become a full-time job.

The day dawns, pinning me to the bed.  I lack the will or faith to sit up, get into the wheelchair and begin another day.  It is 6 AM.  It is 6 AM outside and 6 AM inside.  But it's different outside where morning lives.  Inside, the other kind of mourning goes on and on like some robotic manufacturing plant in Ohio, run from Tokyo and financed in the Ukraine.  There's a world out there, at least a world economy, and at 6:10 I still don't care.  All I really care about is getting dressed enough for Lorna's imminent arrival and socks-putting-on which literally makes my day, makes me begin it anyway, at 6:35.

By 9:20 I have concluded my day's work, having had a neuromuscular go at the rowing machine in the carport, staring at the Michoacan nomads who masquerade as gardeners, mechanically blowing the dry leaves east, so that the next day's crew can blow them west.  There's a tricky part to giving up from the rowing machine's seat.  First I must remember that the seat moves back and forth on metal wheels.  The second part involves faith.  I have to yank myself up, roll forward over my center of gravity, then pull on one of the wheelchair's armrest until my leg muscles can take over.  There's a moment when fear takes over.  For if all this doesn't work, I'm going down into a scrunched position, wedged between wheelchair and rower.  And as everyone knows, there is no getting up.

There is no getting on either, with the day, with the future.  So I busy myself with the previous night's e-mail.  All the news is bad.  Because I need an impossible task, something that is utterly futile and guaranteed to waste the maximum hours, my current preoccupation is Skye.  That's the one in the Hebrides, just across from the West Highlands.  Scotland.  I have this demented idea that on the way to Edinburgh with Marlou's nephew Eliot and my British cousin's son Jake, we will nip over to Broadford, a village on the southern end of the island, just for a night.  It's a ridiculous idea if one considers it.  But I don't.  Instead, I am trying to make it happen.  In fact, I have mounted a suicidal correspondence with ScotRail.  Our exchanges read like something out of Samuel Beckett.  I would like to go here.  Would you, comes the reply.  I would like to go here, I explain, at this time with two additional passengers.  Ah, very well, good luck...you might try giving someone a ring.  Thus the e-mail to and from what is, believe it or not, a special web address for disabled passengers.

In the end, even I do not fancy journeying from the Kyle of Lochalsh on the West Highland coast to Edinburgh, a distance of about 150 miles, via three trains, spanning eight hours.  No, I think I'll do something else.  It's 10:30 AM, after all, and the day is terrifyingly young.  It's blank, one might say, and there is a nasty emptiness about it.  In fact, even on the brightest of days with my bloodstream brimming with Peet's highest octane, my place can feel like the falsely secure opening scene of some horror film.  I continue with the e-mail.  Too bad the beautiful bed-and-breakfast in Broadford is already booked for August, this being May.  On the web, things certainly look beautiful in Skye.  It is almost 12 noon in California, time for lunch, which is good, because I only have an hour until Melinda.

Melinda, dispatched by Jewish Family Services, once worked for an insurance company.  She is not daunted by bureaucracy, has endless patience with forms and phone calls and generally promises to get official things moving on my behalf.  This morning I have already spent time on the phone with a retirement fund in Ohio, which through some fluke, manages part of Marlou's pension money.  It seems that I did not complete the trustee form properly.  I should have indicated that I was not myself, that I was actually the trustee of the Marlou Trust.  

What the woman in Ohio doesn't understand is that I do not trust her.  I do not trust any of this.  It is too abstract and mysterious.  The lawyer who explained all this to me made things as clear as anyone could.  You create a trust to avoid probate.  In the same way that you create Menlo Park to avoid Milpitas.  Probate isn't good.  You don't want to go there.  You don't want to go to Milpitas either.

The problem is that I am short tempered, on top of being confused, so I asked the woman in Ohio to call back.  Melinda would be here soon, I explained.  The Ohio woman sounded baffled.  I didn't care.  My fuse is short, my attention span is minimal and a single task constitutes a really big day.  This particular Friday is already overburdened.  There's a screwup in Ohio.  And I face a phone call regarding Marlou's Social Security benefits in midafternoon.  With Melinda here, I feel better about the whole thing.  There is backup.  If I snap at anyone wanting to know if my address is the same as my postal address and is, in fact, my place of residence, and would I kindly sign an affidavit affirming all this, well, at the snapping stage, I can hand things over to Melinda.

In fact, by the time the phone call comes, Melinda has dealt with so many things, I have a general sense that the conversation with the feds will go swimmingly.  At first, it does.  Each question seems to eliminate, rather than create, bureaucratic obstacles.  You are not retired?  Oh, so you're 62.  Okay.  When did you last work?  Long ago.  Splendid.  We need a death certificate.  We need a marriage license.  Produce these items and Social Security will send you, the bereaved, a monthly check.  Can you drop by now?  Our office closes at 4 PM.

Marriage license?  I'll show you a fucking marriage license.  With Melinda in the house I don't say this, of course, and fortunately she is scurrying about looking in all the wrong places, knowing that for me these are the right places.  Unfortunately, the marriage license does not turn up.  There is a tantalizing photocopy of it, but the woman at the office preparing for her 4 PM closure has made it clear, no copies.  Originals only.  This is so preposterous, monstrous and outrageous that I fly into quadriplegic action, attaching my money belt, asking Melinda to assemble forms and, yes, living proof of Marlou's dying, one freshly minted certificate of death.  Rolling out the door, I ask Melinda to find out where the county clerk's office is.  I know, of course, but effective action sometimes requires effective forgetting.  Marlou and I were married in the county offices.

On the way to Caltrain, I make conscious efforts to slow down.  This frenzied journey to the station seems a metaphor for my life just now.  There is plenty of time.  I could do this Monday.  Unfortunately, by Monday, I could be in such an appalling mood that the thing won't get done.  Meanwhile, the current effort has its perils.  My chances of making the 3:14 northbound seem slim.  All the more reason to pour on the wheelchair steam.  All the more reason to be careful.  Particularly now as I am approaching the tracks.  Every reason to be slow and cautious, because this is a moment when I am, face it, having not infrequent thoughts about how death will someday unite Marlou and me.  And the difference between some day and this day being unclear, and my presence on the Caltrain Advisory Council requiring exemplary behavior, I do slow slightly as the crossing signal nears.  It is not flashing.  In a moment I am over the tracks and halfway through the woods.

The other half is central Redwood City.  It is a curious place, the county seat, full of office buildings in the jollified Stalin-esque style.  The woman in County Records rises from her seat to speak to me at a special wheelchair-height window.  This is good.  It is now 3:35 and Social Security is untold blocks away.  I give her $13 and 45 seconds later she hands me a County marriage certificate.  I try to joke with her, tell her she is in touch with higher powers.  She stares at me blankly.  I am weird.  It has clearly rattled her that she had to fill in the Marriage Certificate Request Form for me, probably in violation of section 2540-679-C.  She would like me to leave, and so would I.  The wheelchair-friendly door to the outside opens with a pushbutton.  I am on a roll.

So is Redwood City.  Much of America, particularly Western America, particularly post-Mormon Western America, is designed on a grid, a system of boringly predictable right angles.  Redwood City is different.  I believe it was designed by a drunken Mormon.  Streets bend.  Directions are useless.  Still, running on instinct and running out of time, I spot it.  There's something in me perennially restless and borderline self-destructive that keeps my wheelchair speed setting on high.  This is particularly bad in ascending curb ramps.  On at least one occasion in the last year this foolishness has tilted me over backwards.  Slowing, I remind myself that the quadriplegic has only so many crashes in his karma.  And now, the federal office doors opening, and I take a number.  But with the office only open for a few more minutes, this is superfluous.  I may be essentially introverted, but I'm also quite social.  Yes, I have my insecurities, but at this moment I feel secure.  That's why I am qualified for this, Social Security.  The woman at the counter copies my originals, pronounces me officially retired, authentically bereaved and a check receiver.

What am I going to do with Marlou's clothes?  She has a closet full of them.  Actually, if one thinks about it, she probably has more, for there are bits and pieces scattered about drawers and cupboards upstairs.  For now, what concerns me is the bedroom closet.  I haven't opened it except to retrieve a folding wheelchair or stash a suitcase.  Marlou's hanging clothes never affected me in these moments.  I am visually unobservant, as she used to note.  But even in my normal state of oblivion, opening the bedroom closet and sliding a few hangers around eventually will reveal something reminiscent and evocative.  

Closets draw kids to them.  At night, they are portals to the dark and fearsome.  By day, they are the best places to hide.  In my adult variation, the closet is simply full.  It contains and holds and hangs.  It hangs over me.  

All sorts of people or charities or businesses will gladly take this closet off my hands.  Estate removal.  The process can be handled over the web, I suspect.  I am easy with sweeping out the old, jettisoning the unwanted.  Marlou was never very good at this.  She was something of a pack rat, holding onto possessions long after they had outlived their purpose or lost their meaning.  Our upstairs is full of unusable furniture, odd mementos and even notes Marlou took in college.  As for the clothes, all it takes is a little human help to see what's there, make some simple decisions.  There is a Cancer Society thrift shop in downtown Menlo Park that might want some stuff.  Goodwill for the rest.  

Marlou is bound to manifest in the dresses and tops hanging in her closet, one more painful remembrance, grief letting off its steam.  And there are bound to be blanks.  Did she ever wear this one?  Why can't I recall?  Was she saving it for some occasion?  There are, after all, ways in which we never got to know each other.  Ten years isn't that much time for two introverts.  A closet shows so many things, including the passage of body time.  Which brings me to my own.

One problem with my closet is that, during Marlou's illness, it relocated to my office.  I moved all my clothes into that room, hoping to dress without disturbing her.  There were certain advantages, some of them permanent, in swapping closets.  I was forever closing the doors of Marlou's closet when it was in my office.  At my desk, I didn't like the scent of old shoes and fresh dry cleaning.  Then with my clothes relocated to my office, I quietly dressed in the morning feeling like an exile.  I missed what was there before.  Marlou was bedridden and no longer dressing much.  The clothes hung in her closet unused.  I longed for her old sweaty shoes.  People are never satisfied.

And some day fairly soon, perhaps in the summer, I will deal with whatever is hanging in Marlou's closet.  I will remember and remove.  And the whole thing adds up to the next step.  And there is one.  That is the odd thing.  It's on the table.

The table is the one beside my bed.  For the longest time, it has posed a problem.  I wake up in the night.  I wake up repeatedly.  With paralysis, my bladder capacity has shrunk to that of an airline martini bottle.  In the stumbling darkness, I waken, reach with my one good arm for the plastic urinal on the bedside table, then reverse the process.  Somehow, reaching got difficult in the last few years.  Marlou had a way of waking herself at such moments and giving me a gentle shove.  It made all the difference.  The fact of her being awake seemed a gift.  Somehow over the years we had gotten into a mutual pattern of sleep.

Years ago at a hotel in Arizona, I found the perfect bedside table.  It was the right height and hung over the bed just enough to be in easy reach.  Rolling was barely necessary.  I scoured the Internet for something like it, but nothing came close.  It seemed almost mythic, the table in Phoenix, wondrous and unobtainable.  After a while, I forgot about the solution and got used to the problem.  Waking and reaching and straining.  The one obvious answer drifted in and out of my mind.  I needed a hospital-style table that hung over a bed.  Marlou, I knew, would like the idea, but she would want something decorative as well as functional.  The matter stalled.  Marlou grew ill.  There were other things to think about.

Now there aren't.  Ease and comfort have taken over.  They are the right things to think about.  Marlou may have been the bringer of optimism in our relationship, but I am the discoverer.  Reducing strain changes my overall perception of life.  The balance sheet feels better.  It's an accounting matter in the end.  A burden subtracted on one side of the ledger, increases the balance on the other.  All this is obvious to anyone whose mother was more or less on the job.  But mine was AWOL, and I am now doing my best to report for duty.  There's no keeping Marlou alive through obeisance to her home decorating.  First things first.  Hospital tables abound.  They get cast off all the time as people convalesce and die.  People sell them on Craigslist.  It's part of the rhythm of life.  Decor can come later.

I am sitting in the San Francisco sun with Daniel, the cool rabbi from Jewish Family Services, and in his remarkable and refreshing way, neither of us has said a word about dead wives or grief or Kaddish.  In fact, we are talking about Dublin.  I have never been there, but he has, and the annual Bloomsday celebration sounds like something to see.  From Bloomsbury to Bloomsday can't be that far.  And better Bloomsday then doomsday, these bubbly puns wafting through my brain, doubtless spurred by the cappuccino at Caffe Centro, which is located somewhere between Portofino, Los Mochis and Islington.  Laughter erupts from kids playing in South Park.  And I tell Daniel, apropos of nothing, that I realize how much of my optimism came from Marlou.  Daniel does not miss a rabbinical beat.  Perhaps she has handed that task to you, he says.  

Meaning, optimism's close ally, now comes bubbling up like water from a troubled drain.  It is uninvited, unwelcome and fortunately, unending, just like tears, a fresh batch of which also erupt.  Optimism, or the worthwhileness of existing, seems to be a byproduct of pain and vulnerability.  It is hard right now for me to put this all together.  Fortunately, Daniel doesn't seem to mind, appears born to the task, easily quoting from Judaica on the general worth and honor of heartbreak.  He is at least 25 years my junior, and could probably build a convincing case for transcendent meaning in Caffe Centro's soup of the day.  In fact, after a few conversational leaps, we are now discussing in all sanity the possibility that, before boarding the Queen Mary, I might just spend my Saturday in Manhattan wheelchairing about Midtown in search of a Yizkor service.  There are only four of these mourning rituals a year, he quietly explains.  He seems the antithesis of a salesman, yet I am sold...at least in this moment.

When it's time to bid Daniel goodbye, I drift toward the Muni.  Aboard the buses and trams, there is no aloneness.  The whole thing is one big urban effort telling us, like it or not, that we are in this together.  One statistic claims that each day almost 700,000 people ride the buses and streetcars of the Muni, a.k.a., San Francisco Municipal Railway, and, yes, this includes the cable cars.  Since the population of San Francisco amounts to 700,000, the number seems ludicrous.  But maybe not when one considers all the suburban commuters who blow in and out of town each rush hour.  In any case, San Francisco is an American oddity, a public transport town.  

Just watch the buses empty in front of the Opera House, passengers turning into audience as though by magic.  And watch me do something similar, wheelchair lift lowering at Van Ness Avenue and Grove Streets, just across from the box office.  Inside the Opera's echoing, empty foyer, I fumble with my season tickets.  It's all popular summer stuff, and I regret being away for Tosca, but what the hell.  I'm consolidating tickets into a July La Traviata.  There is a gap, Marlou's absence, but I have friends, and someone will occupy the seat.  It won't be the same, and that fact echoes around the marble floors, but fuck it.  What would Violetta do?  Stay home and swoon?  Or get out for the evening and swoon before 3000 people while hitting a series of arpeggios and deciding if the guy in the second row is wearing a toupee?  The man in the box office is most helpful, except that he can't do anything about Porgy and Bess, long sold out, with people queuing halfway to Oregon.  The Gershwins' piece has been rarely, perhaps never, performed by the local opera.  So what?  I plan to be in the Outer Hebrides about that time.

Things transit begin to fall apart.  They always do.  First, the 47 bus vaporizes.  I keep looking up the street at nothing but tourist coaches.  When it finally descends to earth orbit, the 47 is packed.  The bus driver verbally prods passengers out of my way, making a spot for me near the front.  Passengers have to lift their feet to avoid my wheels.  In the narrow confines this requires major acrobatics.  The bus' front seats tend to be occupied by those with crutches, walkers and attitudes, and such people are not terribly happy to see a 175 pound wheelchair bearing down upon them.  They lift their orthopedic aids out of the way and attempt the same with their feet, but few have sufficient joint flexibility.  I try to bump them as little as possible.  

What people in the front of the bus perceive as peril to their extremities, those in the back of the bus only know as delay.  I feel pressure not to crunch anyone's metatarsals and not detain the bus.  The driver isn't going anywhere until my wheelchair gets turned around.  I have to spin 180° to park in the disabled slot.  Doing this, and doing it quickly, requires belief in the survival instincts of the passengers around me.  It is a relief to arrive at the train station on a virtually empty bus.

Because things transit are falling apart, there is more trouble.  Two wheelchairs have already boarded the 12:37 Caltrain southbound, so I have to wait for the slow 1:07 which stops everywhere it can.  I decide not to worry about this.  I decide to read my book.  In fact, I decide to get out of my wheelchair, prop my ever-swollen leg against a carpeted wall, and nap.  Everything exhausts me these days.  Even when I sleep well, which is iffy most nights, there is strain in living.

It is very hard to get used to the cushiness of my current circumstances.  Most of my disabled life has been characterized by high physical demands and low physical comfort.  Now I'm doing everything to make things easy.  Seven days a week, it seems, someone arrives in the morning to get my shoes and socks on.  People make dinner and help me eat it.  Others drop it off.  I could, without much effort, never leave the house for a wide range of services.  Massage.  Car repair.  Piercing or the occasional tattoo.  I have enough available television to keep me occupied for the next century.  I watch about an hour a week.  Still, it's there.  Just as the people are there.  And since everything else is so mysteriously hard, I am learning to make the most of the inexplicably soft.  So, the 1:07 jerks into southbound action, and I alternately read and sleep.  The suburbs appear, one after the next.  And if I have trouble getting out of my seat and back into the wheelchair, help will appear too.  It doesn't always, of course.  But it's there often enough to make me reasonably optimistic.

My eyelids fly open at 4:30 AM, and cannot be coaxed downward.  The bedroom, otherwise empty, has filled with a sort of buzzing or humming or silence...I cannot tell which.  The herbal sleeping pills, stashed bedside for this moment, waltz to my stomach, change partners and head for Tierra del Fuego.  At 5:30 AM it is dawning on me that dawn itself is dawning.  This is happening throughout California, even parts of Oregon.  The Dawn Patrol.  I am part of it, do not wish to be, but there is no choice, and the inevitable action will soon begin.

I throw back the duvet and swing successive legs over the bed's edge.  Although I do not pause to consider, there is every reason to feel grateful for my leg-swinging abilities.  My paralysis, now into its 41st year, has not rendered me inflexible.  Usually, the paralytic ages and loses joint movement.  As the shortening of tendons outpaces even that of tempers, he winds up stiff and frozen as a rusty lock.  There but for the grace of a trainer from Stanford's athletic department, go I.  But I haven't gone there, thanks to Perry and his fortnightly joint stretching on the massage table he unfolds in my living room.  I'm here, and my joints move, my abdominals pull, and dammit if I'm not sitting up and staring at the Marlou Memorial Carpet.  It is 6 AM.

The counseling term for this level of sleep disturbance is anxiety, but to me, both problem and solution are physical.  With better sense, long about 4:45 I would have sat myself up and pounded on the bed mattress.  Sealey Posturepedic deserves this form of punishment.  A direct blow to the mattress corner, one to the foot of the bed and a couple in the middle can usually get me going.  Along the way, I can pound at Marlou for not getting a colonoscopy, at her cancer cells for being so virulent that it didn't matter, for whoever occupies the executive suite in the sky for dumping this shit on me.  Pounding and pounding.  It's downright aerobic, and after five minutes, I can generally fall asleep.  Anxiety?  I'll show you fucking anxiety.

The fact is that I do not sit up and slug the mattress, but continue to toss and turn.  I rise, instantly transitioning from sleep avoidance to Lorna preparation.  Her 8 AM arrival gives me a goal, a morning marker.  I have to get showered so she can help me get dressed.  Lorna can also get me on the rowing machine, but not without grabbing my arm in ways that knock me off balance.  No, no, I tell her.  She backs away one centimeter.  I lower myself to the seat of the rowing machine and she gasps and can barely restrain herself from lunging at my quadriplegic shoulder.  No, no, I say, later.  I shall take this one, she says using a Filipina turn of phrase.  Lorna lifts my foot, swift and energetic.  This all but knocks me off balance.  Not that I was ever on balance.  She stares at me puzzled.  No one knows what to do with me these days, and neither do I.

A friend invites me for lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club.  I enjoy the experience so much, appreciate the attention so deeply that I decide I may just join the faculty myself.  The place looks pretty much like my idea of a cool club.  Yes, it's all California terrace outside where Vic and I eat.  But inside there are comfortable leather armchairs, a fireplace which is dormant and a bar which is surprisingly active for midday.  I'm not sure what I would do on the faculty, but for the moment it seems that I would hang out here, take a book, take a seat and wait for Phileas Fogg to get lost on his way to the Reform Club.

Thing is, these days once I am on the road, it seems best to stay on the road.  I am extremely off-road, that is the problem.  Mortal events may have overtaken me, but credit card records show that I fueled my van only once in the four months from November through March.  And there are things to buy, things to do, and all these cannot all be accomplished within wheelchair range of my apartment, so I leave Vic and go in search of shoes.  I have been off-road too long.

Winding through the parking acreage of Palo Alto's Town & Country Shopping Center sparks a reevaluation.  I had been counting on the US Depression to clear the roads, but the place is jammed with cars.  The wise thing would be to park and look for the shop, but this might be unwise.  I have not purchased a pair of shoes since the Clinton Administration, and it is entirely possible that the shop has moved or never existed.  Certainly, it is not on the north side of the shopping center.  I head for the south half, but run out of roadway.  The parking area is torn up with construction and cars funnel between cyclone fences.  

My foot jumps.  Jumping feet are nothing new to the experienced quadriplegic, just as jumping beans are said to be common in Mexico.  What's worrying is the jumping of the non-paralyzed foot that controls the accelerator and brake.  A little weird neurological activity here and there is to be expected and doesn't matter, if it doesn't happen again.  Which, of course, it does.  Naturally, I am now hemmed in by construction fences and creeping with a long queue of cars.  There is little room for automotive error.  Why my left foot, the good one, must begin spasming at this moment, is anyone's guess.  But there is a simple, general answer that applies to anything these days.  Grief.

Only moments earlier Vic, a recent widower at 85, was warning me about health and the grieving.  He'd had a heart attack himself not long after his wife died.  Very common, he told me.  Stress, subtle and pervasive, is enough to make an otherwise cooperative foot spasm.  The key is to stay calm.  I have lost that key.  Better to stay focused.  Hysterical and purposeful, I direct the car into a parking space.  And there's the shop.  I roll inside.

Late in the Bush Administration, I did make a serious attempt at shoe purchase.  I hit three shops in Stanford Shopping Center on the same afternoon and got the same results.  Getting a somewhat swollen right foot into the same shoe with a massive plastic leg brace is asking for a lot these days.  And shoe fashions do change, which I think is unfortunate and accounts for much of what is wrong in the national economy.  But something tells me the shoe salesman does not want to hear this.  I don't want to hear that the one pair of shoes he comes up with, right on the cusp of dressy enough for a wheelchair, costs $300.  Reports of $300 shoes reach me through various sources, such as those glossy ads in The New Yorker.  But I see myself on the back pages of The Nation, and the price tag throws me so totally off that I haul out my credit card and get the thing over with quickly.  If the shoe doesn't fit, the salesman tells me, he'll personally stretch it.  Never mind.  One task is done.

The next destination is a racy, in the literal sense, bike shop in central Palo Alto.  To ride my exercycle, I need bicycle shoes with the sort of clamps that Lance Armstrong probably uses.  It's strangely embarrassing rolling my wheelchair in the door of a shop full of Tour de France aspirants and asking for shoes.  Never mind.  The sales guy listens to my story, one eyebrow slightly raised.  Palo Alto has its share of loonies, after all.  Something inside me is already fraying.  The seems another aspect of the grief experience, extreme impatience, short attention span.  The sales guy returns from some back room with several pairs of bike shoes.  Doesn't he have anything with velcro closures?  Well, sort of.  But all shoes now come with a ratcheting buckle device, inspired by ski gear, he brightly tells me.  I want to go home.

The problem is that my current bike shoes are literally falling apart.  I need replacements.  At my current rate of driving, tanking up on a quarterly basis, the matter needs attention now while I am here in this shop.  Okay, I say, let me try them on.  One thing for bike shoes, they open more ways than a Swiss Army knife, so my foot and brace actually make it inside.  Unfortunately, I cannot release the ratchet thing with my one non-paralyzed hand.  They're really good Bertolinis, or somesuch, the sales guy says, adding that the $397 price is a good one.  I swoon.  It's time to go home.  In my last moment of consciousness, something on the display shelf grabs me.  It's an $89 pair with laces.  What about those?  Someone will simply have to help me tie my shoes.

There's a Peet's just down the street in Palo Alto, and I head there, pausing in front of the Stanford Theatre to see what old films are playing this week.  Someone else is eyeing the program, and I recognize her.  It's Jana.  She used to work at Trader Joe's, but hasn't been in evidence for ages.  Turns out she's turned 55, back at Stanford in some graduate program, the specifics of which go in one ear and out the other, since all that registers is her physical condition bordering on the stunning.  How are things?  She never knew Marlou, probably doesn't even grasp that I am married or was married, this matter still being a matter of some confusion in my mind.  Jana tells me what her week is like, because I ask.  Classes and studying and working out.  She runs.  She lifts weights.  She smiles, her breasts suspended by a network of invisible strings.  Do I ever turn up at the movies here, she asks?

It is one of life's essential cosmic rules that when you desperately need women they are not there, and when you don't, they pop up all around.  Jana, for all her buff physical attractions touches nothing of the heart.  And life is all about the heart, these days.  Mentally, I wish her well, hope she stays in shape and lie.  No, I never make it to films.  Marlou and I did, of course, and the last one we saw was right here, 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', which was one of her favorites, but not while cancer was infiltrating.  She told me the experience of sitting in a darkened theater was frightening.  This revelation, so unlike her, keeps me in shape these days.  I may not be in the best shape, but I am in the right shape.  I tell Jana that I'll see her around.  This isn't true.  But a high level of horniness seems to be part of grief, even in late middle age.  And the next film I am likely to see will be among the octogenarians aboard the Queen Mary.

Where is she?  The question slides into my mind just outside of Peet's, and it's enough to stop me dead in my battery powered tracks.  The fog is closing in, and the sky is making a pathetic attempt at rain.  Marlou used to call Menlo Park's center, consisting of little more than one street and a few side branches, Tiny Town.  I sip my sugar-free mocha and stare at Tiny Town through the gray.  It seems an exquisite torture, and entirely appropriate that California should express cultural and environmental collapse in the form of a drizzly drought.  

There was a time when Marlou and I used visits to Peet's to recover from fights.  At other times, it was a good place to escape the confines of home and plan whatever needed planning, Marlou wielding a yellow notepad, the two of us steering the domestic ship.  And it was a place to get caffeinated, of course, when the midlife batteries ran low.  The whole thing was hardly a crowning experience, seemed rather mundane much of the time and it's over now.  So the question hits me, just outside the improbably named Hoot 'n Toot Cleaners, where is she?

I bounce along the pavement, my sugarless mocha cup running low, but not quite low enough.  There's a trick to coffee and wheelchairs, and it has to do with finishing the drink before turning off the main street.  The mocha will become a major encumbrance when I begin one-handed fishing for my house key.  The efficient thing is to stash the cardboard cup in a public rubbish bin on the main street.  Quite a decision, whether to force the coffee down now or continue bouncing toward home with the hot liquid still in the hand I will need to hold the key.  Disabled life is extremely non-spontaneous.

                    *                    *                    *

The Menlo Park Chorus erupts into high-ceilinged sound in a church, just hours later.  Lorna, my Filipina neighbor and newly acquired sock-applier and shirt-buttoner, has gotten me into my suit, and I'm trying, in vain, to get the notes into my voice.  I'm completely out of practice.  Furthermore, I have been dreading this memorial concert in honor of Marlou.  It is a wonderful thing, and it is entirely her due, but it still promises to be an ordeal.  Perhaps because the event has gone through my mind so many times, the opposite is true.  During the concert I tune out the chorus director's dedication to Marlou, get into the target area regarding the notes and make it through the program.  On the way to the reception, I wait in a doorway, light rain drifting.  I take this instant to tune in to myself.  And, yes, it's okay.  I head for the church social room and begin munching nuts.

In the morning I awaken in a miasma of physical disgust.  Aware that it is time to rise from bed, eliminate and shower, a generalized revulsion for the body and its functions takes over.  The feeling is almost feverish.  In fact, it occurs to me that I may have a fever.  The line between the state of health with its sense of robustness, and the state of disease or fever, all this has blurred.  The human body, my human body, seems a wholly biological process, mechanical and fatiguing.  I stare at the ceiling.  I stare at the clock.  I have to get up to open the door so that Lorna can come in, make tea and put on my socks.  On this particular morning, this seems the only reason to rise.

Steinbeck's Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, remain on their Oklahoma farm even after they no longer own it.  They stay there until a banker's flunky bumps their house with a tractor, and the trauma of this, being knocked off foundation, triggers their exodus.  To me, this is a reminder to honor the spirit and its losses.  Material privation is only part of the story.  It seems indulgent for me to be wallowing in loss at a time when I have adequate income and resources and many people do not.  Still, this is an adequate metaphor, knocked off my foundation and wandering in something like shock.

I sit up in bed very slowly, aware that everything aches, maneuver myself into the wheelchair and begin the day.  It may have hit my body before my mind, the memory of what this day is.  It is a non-Lorna day.  No one to make tea, put on socks, get the life forces moving.  Personal assistance seems to make all the difference these days.  I am quite capable of putting on my socks, if anyone wants to know, but the strain seems enormous.  I have no patience.  Every bodily position makes me sore.  My irritation flares at the slightest provocation.  Dropping things, knocking things over, losing things, tearing things, staining things.  And because I am tired, inattentive and preoccupied, these events happen all day long.  Each fuels my own sense of incompetence and desperation.

It is midmorning by the time I get myself dressed and prepared to face the so-called world.  By the time I'm out the door, the mission already seems futile.  My idea was to go out for coffee on the day I have no help.  A sort of treat.  Which already feels like a burden, and because of the advancing hour my plan changes.  I stop in at Sky Nails so that Mai, Vietnamese queen of manicures, can have a go at my fingernails.  Her shop is relatively empty, and in my state of mind, it seems that if I don't tend to my fingers now, it won't happen.  Normally I chat during these appointments, make some effort at conversation, but there seems nothing to say.  Mai, who knows about Marlou's death, makes no effort to chitchat either.  At one point, near the end, when she is rubbing lotion up and down my forearms, in needless and utterly essential manual contact, it occurs to me that it wouldn't hurt to say something about the weather.  Will it rain?  The thought evaporates from my mind faster than the passing storm.  Will it rain?  Both of us know I don't care.

Marlou's death, the physical horror and agony of it, seems to have gotten into my being.  I feel it in my arms, sense it in my ever swollen ankles, and see it prowling about my apartment.  Is this what we all face?  Apparently.  No one can predict the future.  I might go like the flick of a light switch, picking lettuce this afternoon.  Or I might have every ounce of joy squeezed out of me slowly, my endurance drained, dignity trounced, dying of slow torture.

One day near the end, Marlou called her mother into the room.  Here, she said with matter-of-fact certainty, take this.  Marlou slipped off her ring, a much prized and resonant family heirloom.  Give it to Nancy, Marlou said.  I could see how it was now, the shedding of things.  The deepest life attachments cast off easily, the future abandoned.  Regarding terminal sedation, the doctor had explained at Marlou's bedside, do you understand....  Yes, Marlou said.  Yes and yes.  Though it was all moot, for the doctor demurred, and Marlou was gone within a couple of days.

And eventually, I may think of her as gone, rather than agonizing about her going.  I don't know why her horrid final month has me in its grip.  Something about life, the depths of its injustice, the brutality of its workings, all of this has come at me as a sort of postgraduate lesson in existence.  This puzzle of the worst things happening to the best people has troubled religious thinkers forever.  It simply horrifies and angers me.  In the end, there are two questions.  Where is she and why?