Hosewares

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.