Security

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.