June 2009 Archives
The one thing that can be said about London's oppressive heat wave is that it makes one sleep. Without these muggy tropical nights...with global warming, the British capital is projected to have Marseille's current climate by 2030...well, all I would do with the darkness is worry. It hits me as I slide off to sleep in the dorm room night, then returns in the morning, something between rage and fear, always at the back of things. But shoved well back by the thing that's always in the front of the spinal cord injured person's hot-weather physiology...exhaustion and the hope of something cooler. That something comes about five in the morning, a pleasant breeze, just enough to send me right back into another couple of hours of slumber.
I can tell that I am in the hysterical departure thing. Alastair who helped me pack up my Gloucestershire stay and set out for London five days ago would identify this as a clinical condition. He knows the contents of my suitcase. After complaining that the Cotswolds were too cool and purchasing a bunch of sweaters...not to mention a new jacket...my bags were full to bursting when we finally headed for the Moreton-in-Marsh rail station. Now in London, I am beyond that now, into another dimension, something that approximates nuclear fusion...or maybe the mega-force of a black hole's gravitation...because it will take a mega-force to close the suitcases after today's Oxford Street sortie...several more pullovers, trousers, socks. In short, it's hopeless. Or I am hopeless. Or to put a finer point on it, I am pinning all my hope on Jake, Caroline's son, who may have the human strength to cram the clothing genie into the suitcase bottle.
On going home I am divided, stretched in opposite extremes. I need to get back to where I live. Yes, it's where Marlou died. And as my friend Barbara pointed out today, it's where she lived. Where we lived. And I live. Because the tomato harvest should be on a roll, and the crookneck squash reaching out toward Oakland. And I need to get back. That's why in the last couple of days I've been asking people what it costs to buy a one-bedroom flat in Bloomsbury. Who cares? Why would I throw the last of my crash-depleted savings into a tiny residential space in London? In London, where the snows come in the winter. Where there's no room to grow tomatoes. Where the curb ramps are sometimes too steep for a wheelchair, sometimes nonexistent. What am I thinking?
I am not thinking. I am dreaming. That's why after buying all these clothes this afternoon, I rolled into a Whittard's and bought some tea. As the shop assistant pointed out, there was a three-for-the-price-of-two sale on, and only a fool would buy one box of tea. Which explains the presence of three boxes on my dormroom desk, awaiting the strong trash-compactor hands of Jake.
I am not disappointed. We cram, force, mash and reduce much of Marks & Spencer into a few liters of air space. Thus, Jake.
We have dinner. I had promised a ritual curry, but it's too hot, I'm too tired, and fortunately Jake doesn't seem to care. We sit in the same Italian restaurant in the Brunswick shopping arcade staring at the now familiar menu. We talk life. I find myself erring in the direction of giving Jake advice. This doesn't work, feels forced, and in the end all I can do is commiserate with his life in progress. He needs a job at a time when the British economy is not terribly robust. And what do I need? I tell Jake that I need to get published. This is not only my dream, but my evidence of failure. This has hung as a possibility in my life, and an accusatory finger, forever, it seems.
Jake tells me to send my writings out in all directions. Multiple publishers, several publications, just go for it. I tell him this isn't protocol. Why, he asks? I don't know. I really don't. Maybe he's right. In fact, I know he's right in spirit. Marketing myself is the hardest ego testing thing I can do. This realization, the fact that I am discovering this in the company of a much younger person, makes me feel sad. Life is so long, we progress so little...and last night, it drifts through my mind, Marlou was in a dream.
So was Perry, my physiotherapy assistant. Marlou and I were hugging and Perry was waiting to begin a therapy session. I realized that even though we were being watched, and something else was going on, I needed to embrace Marlou. This would be our last chance, it seemed. I pulled her close to me, ran my hand up and down her and...woke up. I am waking up now. There are things unfinished, and they happen to be in California. The cab for Heathrow turns up at 10:30 AM.
I never forgot 'The L-Shaped Room', what the British would call a kitchen sink film, a.k.a., social realism. It was hard for me to understand the love story in this 1962 drama...I was 15 or 16 years old...but I grasped much of the rest. How a middle-class woman had been brought down the social ladder by circumstance, forced to live in and adapt to impoverished London housing, and hold her head up. What does any of this have to do with me? Nothing, except that I am now in London living in my own L-shaped room. And like Leslie Caron's, it's a pressure cooker.
Why? It's hard to say, for I am really quite happy in this University of London dorm room. The place is small and claustrophobic. It could use a bar of soap, but other conditions are quite favorable. The wheelchair access seems battle hardened. I get the impression that someone in a wheelchair, a succession of someones, actually lived in this room. I can roll my wheelchair under the desk. There is an easy-to-reach crank that opens the windows. And, yes, there's a roll-in shower. As for the sense of being in a university, well, it's mixed. There are some definite students downstairs in the 9 AM cafeteria drinking tea and having the cooked English breakfast or the cold variety...guess which version I choose, complete with hot mustard on the bangers...but there are also people like me. Older people, here for the summer accommodation. The university isn't really happening. It is on idle.
The doors are hard to open, but no matter, for the doors to my wing and my room are in full view of the computer lounge. And all I have to do is linger for a troubled moment or two struggling with the stiff door spring and one or more students...post-graduate, American, Croatian, Indonesian...rush to help me get in. Unless one of the University of London employees gets there first. It takes about five seconds for something similar to happen when I roll into the cafeteria for my morning tea and, yes, £1 breakfast. One or more cafeteria workers rushes out from behind the steam table to load up my tray. As for the £1, that's actually a surcharge for the extra plates that somehow appear morning after morning as I wander past the cashier. Four breakfast items, the amount any reasonable person would eat, are included with the room. Somehow, I drive breakfast up into the six or seven item range.
What there isn't in the University of London dorms, aside from soap, is distraction. No television, not even a radio. There is also nothing that could be termed decor. Not a picture on the walls, even a calendar. This is a place to come back to at the end of the day -- and hope that you have had a day. A night here without a day to proceed it would be a bleak thing. I understand bleak. I remember my first room in London.
In 1969, an era when London rooms seemed maddeningly unavailable, somehow I had found one -- and promptly given the landlord a week's rent. That was before my cousins saw the place, a low-ceilinged basement with bare plaster columns and a concrete floor. Caroline and Bob shook their heads. No. There were limits. But it's a room, I protested. Someone would actually rent me this place, and I had been looking for weeks. Besides, I had already paid for the place. Caroline cleared her throat and speculated that this might just be the place in Islington where some lone guy had hung himself the week before. It certainly seemed possible, and I was so desperate that I didn't care. They did, and thus began several weeks living with their parents in Kensington. The rent was out the window, and so was I. I never saw it again, the L-shaped basement.
One of the prime differences between my current London dorm room and, say, my university dorm room of 40 years...and, yes, let's also compare the pathetic bedsit in 1969 Islington...is location. Wander out the door here...okay wander out several doors, winter proof design being what it is...and you stumble upon Bloomsbury at its most magnificent. Brunswick Square, a lush London garden of lawns and trees and flower beds beckons through a wrought iron fence. The Bloomsbury houses, the ones that aren't posh offices, present their shiny brass door knobs to passersby. The plane trees sigh. People wander the public squares, ogle the private ones and stop to take their pulses. With every beat the property values seem to increase.
It was Jake who brought me here on my arrival from Paddington Station. He helped me get unpacked, and we wandered outside to Brunswick Centre, the big concrete shopping arcade across from the square. The place was modern, anonymous, yet it was so booming with shoppers and diners and Londoners going to bars and cinemas...what the hell. Never mind the modern look of the place, the vibes were all London. Funny, I said to Jake, Marlou and I had lunch in an Italian place with the same name as this one. And then it dawned on me. We'd had lunch in the same restaurant...while staying at the supposedly wheelchair-friendly Holiday Inn at the other end of Brunswick Centre. Why hadn't I realized this? Because the place had come into its own. New shops, new shoppers, a place to be at night. The Tuscan bean soup was pretty good.
It's a half-hour run from Bloomsbury into the West End theaters. Uneven pavements, Soho streets packed with tourists and paved with cobblestones, all this delays my progress. Not that progress is really the important product here. After all, I'm going to see Trevor Nunn's 'A Little Night Music', hardly work, and leaving early enough to enjoy the vagaries of London en route would only add to the experience. But I am feeling anxious, even after an unusual research job on the Garrick Theatre's whereabouts. In fact, I've even used the Transport for London website to map out the pedestrian route.
However, it says something that I set out on my anxious journey without quite having the street address. At my wit's end, I stop a policeman in Leicester Square. Where is the Garrick? Emotionless, he asks me what play I want to see. He points me down the Charing Cross Road...and, there it is, the Sondheim marquee and my cousin Sandy waiting under it. Sandy has lost a wife to colon cancer. We don't mince words these days. At the interval, I ask him why I am so anxious...his grief experience has been different. He was raising a child, he explains. I speculate that everything seems much more shaky without someone deeply caring whether I make it or do not make it through Seven Dials, down Longacre and into the Garrick's wheelchair space in the dress circle. Sandy tells me he would miss me if I vanished en route. I thank him and explain that it's not the same...yet I'm not sure. Maybe caring is caring. And being family, Sandy's version has that special enduring force. As for the evening evening, it's a treasure...Nunn and his Royal National Theatre continuously resuscitating everything from Carousel to Night Music with deep affection and respect. Sandy walks me back to the L-shaped room. It seems small and a little bleak at night...modern, institutional and devoid of night music. But having had a theatre dose of the latter, I say goodnight to Sandy...and await further London developments.
What is is so rare as a day in June? Good question, but it's an American question, asked by an American poet. And the real issue in Britain has to do with the rarity of summer days in June...at least this June...much of the month having been imported from the Californian winter. I woke up today still dreading my return to the bedroom where Marlou died. In a typical English home, predominantly from the Victorian era, as my cousin points out, every room in the house would have been the scene of multiple births, deaths and illnesses. I feel my cousin is on the way to making a point here, a point I am trying to make myself...but continuously fail at...a way to normalize and make routine this most familiar of human experience. But it's hopeless. I fear the return to memories in California.
The only answer is tea. Being that rarity, a warm June day, Caroline suggests we have breakfast 'al fiasco'. This includes baked beans, eggs and toast. Caroline would like me to have the beans on the toast, British style, but I decline. We get stuck in our ways, set on a certain course in life, and I have unshakable bean expectations. The British version of baked beans is a milder, lighter one that works well as an egg accompaniment. In fact, I see the essential wisdom in this marriage of baked beans and eggs. Still, I prefer the American pork and beans. I can't help it. Furthermore, beans on toast flies in the face of logic. Beans, even baked ones, belong with tortillas. But in these parts, a tortilla is a Spanish omelette with potatoes...so the issue gets muddy.
This is the essence of travel, clinging to bits of the familiar while awash in the foreign. The whole thing seems an exercise in facing fear. My muscular world keeps shrinking. The less my limbs move, the more my proprioception evaporates, the more I can get into trouble. This morning, unaccountably while shaving, I was listening a little too hard to Radio 4 and began losing my balance. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, it took only a second to drift off my center of gravity and slam against the wall. Not that this mattered. I grabbed the edge of the sink, righted myself and dropped into the wheelchair.
But there was collateral damage. For in the course of falling, my elbow slammed against open containers of toothpaste and lotion, sending them flying upon my cousin's authentic Cotswolds sandstone floor. Along with one comb and a bar of soap. Knocking things about throws me into a frenzy of self-flagellation. How could anyone be so stupid? The objects on the floor have rolled about, and I roll about in my wheelchair, conscious that if I don't get my anger in check the inevitable will happen...rolling over, say, the toothpaste. Compounding an already annoying situation and providing further evidence of my incompetence and doomed state.
All of which masks a larger reality. That I am on my own again and frightened. Climbing wheelchair curb inclines in London things tilt at a steep angle, the possibility of going over backwards seems real. And I am alone. What would happen if I toppled backwards in Tottenham Court Road?
It seemed like a great idea at the time, booking a wheelchair-accessible room at the University of London residence halls for the next few days. I have already had a dream about my Friday arrival. I show my e-mail receipt to the bursar, and he begins showing me about. There is a lounge. A dining commons. Up one hallway, down another, everything glassy and airy and suspiciously California looking. But, nevermind, this is a dream, and what keeps happening is that things keep happening. The bursar showing me this, showing me that. And where is the room? The bursar keeps disappearing, I keep making my way back to his desk. We start out again, as though heading for a room...but he, or I, forget. Eventually I am out of the wheelchair, fighting my way up and down hallways with my crutch. My shoes have fallen off. My socks are wearing out.
Thus, my fears. The best travel, perhaps the only travel, occurs in the mind.
The Holywell Music Room is just big enough to hold three chamber musicians, a couple of hundred observers, mild neoclassical touches and centuries of ambience. George Friedrich Handel wandered upon a tiny stage here and did his thing. My wheelchair blocks out several seats, but so the present inevitably obliterates the past. Rachel Brown walks on with flute and continuo, and for the next hour everyone is transported. We can't beat Bach, so we join him. Caroline has pointed out the Jews in the audience. Hitler drove a generation of classical artists into the arms of the Britons. And German Jews of that generation, and their offspring, still turn up at the Holywell here in Oxford, Wigmore Hall in London, but less and less, it seems. Caroline appreciates her roots. I appreciate being here, and I notice the disabled people in the audience.
One man across from me has something neurological going on with his wrists. He is 10 or 20 years older than I, has a life, has a wife, and when the time comes, has a way of clapping with his wrists. I have my own way, slapping the back of one hand lightly with the other, which produces no sound, but makes me feel better, while signaling that I am appreciative and having a go at expression.
Speaking of expressions, but they are different here in Britain. This is not a tourist event, the 11:15 Sunday morning 'coffee concert' at the Holywell. These are the real faces and expressions of people in this country. Many are gently, warmly impassive. Some are savagely so. I am fascinated by the woman, perhaps late sixties, who sits scowling in row three, on the opposite side of the recital hall. She has a sour disdain about her face, or does she really? When flute, cello and harpsichord burst into life, I cannot avoid sneaking a look. Her expression is unchanged, her scowl constant. It remains so even during the applause. Hers may not be a scowl at all. If I muttered something to her on the way out, her features might turn sunny. The essential mystery of a foreign land.
Caroline's friend Helen guides us past other Georgian buildings along a street that must be of medieval width. We are heading for lunch. And being a summer day, Helen suggests something outside. Why not? There is an outdoor café right in the middle of a former street, now blocked off to form a pedestrian precinct, in the heart of Oxford. The place is fairly crowded, but with the scraping of a few folding chairs, a path clears for my wheelchair. Lunch is simple and modest and hearty, and I go for something hot. That's because the day is not. Charcoal gray clouds hang overhead and the day is, by California standards, a winter one. All of which I easily ignore, because Helen is so delightful. She plays music with Caroline, and the two of them chat about chamber works.
Rachel Brown took a moment to give the Holywell audience some insight into the oddities of Bach's manuscripts, how he mixed his own ink and maximized the use of paper. And music and its playing and its practice and its trivia light up the two of them, and the contagion spreads to me. Moreover, Helen is retired from a high academic post in Oxford, so specialized as to inspire awe. For decades she was one of the Ashmolean Museum's curators of classical coins -- and note that there were several. She explained that her career ladder led straight from Oxford to the one remotely similar post in the nation...in London, of course. For Helen to advance, that lone London academic had to die or retire, which apparently failed to happen. Which explains why we are now sitting at the edge of a former street, our table tipping with the camber of the asphalt. And I am thinking that Helen's knowledge is lost on me, but my friend Joe in California would have lots of questions about coins. All of which is interrupted by liquid coins, or drops the size of them, which are finally descending from the skies. The three of us are still talking. This is why I come to Britain, for conversations like this one in the rain. It's only water, after all. Everyone in the outdoor café has fled, but we are still at it. A little wetter, perhaps, but also wiser.
The party is only over when Helen has to go. I have to go to the toilet, of course. The indoor portion of the café now being jammed with rain refugees, a succession of patrons have to slide tables and chairs out of the way for the man in the enormous wheelchair to make its widebodied way toward the back. I approach this matter with delicacy. But I'm glad to be approaching it on my own. Caroline would happily do this for me, booming out the news that a wheelchair was advancing, make way, make way. But I need to do this on my own. I say very little, for the wheelchair says a lot. Now and then I mutter 'excuse me' and let the café crowd make up the rest. It's a relief to finally get to the loo, the final path to which is blocked by a highchair. By the time I reverse course and head for the front door, the café patrons have changed. We begin the chair-scraping process afresh, blazing a new wheelchair trail.
Which brings me back to the Kings Road. Something happened there on Saturday, my last day in London, when I went out in search of breakfast. I was not in the smart end of the Kings Road, but the true end...and at my wit's end, by the time I finally found a café. I stared stupidly at the door, wondering if the place was really open and served breakfast. A waitress opened the door and ushered me inside. This slightly confused me, for I found myself rolling in without really deciding if I wanted to eat there. What I didn't want to do was to appear out of it, a foreigner. So the door opened, I followed so as not to make waves. And then I was inside. Which table? The waitress had one idea, but her boss had another, and there I was sitting in a small round table by the door. What did I want? The waitress held a small, old-fashioned order pad with carbon paper. Menu? I had to ask for this. Of course, I was in a café, what Britons would almost call a transport café where the grub is familiar and standard and no one lingers over a menu. Still, being half transport café and half Italian restaurant, there was a menu, and now I was staring at it.
'It's hot in here, isn't it?' An older man sat hunched over a table next to mine. 'We want the door open.' He looked up and spoke loudly at the wall opposite. This was a general observation addressed to the surrounding space, an all-points request. He looked at me. Wasn't it hot? I nodded meekly and muttered 'yes'.
'There's no need to open the door. You've got your jacket on, don't you?' This from some basso-voiced man behind me.
It was true. The man next to me had on a nylon jacket. He was tucking into the all British breakfast, fried eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, fried slice of toast, blood sausage. The menu, which I was studying uneasily, offered variations on all these things, including the vegetable options of mushrooms and grilled tomato. Having had a lifespan-shortening dose of Wiltshire sausage at various points across the North Atlantic, I thought I would try something faintly healthier, at least more upscale. Smoked salmon with scrambled eggs. My order arrived in seconds. It was just what it said it was. Scrambled eggs in one pile, an adjacent slice of smoked salmon. All unseasoned. White toast. I looked at a man seated against the wall. He quickly stared back at me. The Saturday Guardian balanced on my lap. Almost everyone ate alone.
No one opened the door. The old man with the loud voice and nylon jacket shoveled down his baked beans and eggs, fork clicking on his plate. He said nothing more. He made no eye contact. I felt the sense of wandering into a stage play with a plot well underway, outcome uncertain, plot intriguing...without knowing my part. I wanted one. I wanted to audition. I wanted to take part in whatever was going on, and to understand, for starters, the chorus. We were the chorus. All of us.
In America, a restaurant dispute about whether or not to open the door would come down to individuals. I'm hot and want the door open. I am not, want it closed, and take off your jacket. But this discussion was different. Can't we have the door open? A statement/request addressed to those assembled. Not, you by the door, would you mind opening...or you don't mind if I open the door. But a general appeal to us. And who is us? We Britons. We sit here quietly eating our meal, each the natural guardian of his guardian of his table space...which when the place is crowded can probably shrink to almost nothing, yet remain inviolate. And yet we are Britons, cooperatively defining this as a restaurant of a certain decibel level, eye-contact level, air-circulation level and, yes, thermostat level. And the countervailing argument regarding the latter issues to the entire assembly, the plenary session, not the waitress. It is a subtle thing, a cultural thing, and I wish to be part of it.
Why I wish this is anyone's guess. Communicating my wants and needs by asserting myself in a public space is unfamiliar. It goes against the grain. It requires a certain level of confidence. A lack of guilt is helpful. To take part in such a discourse as an American and a cripple would be a stretch. I did not start the Iraq war or drive our economy off a cliff, but certain of my countrymen did, and there are bad feelings about American accents. To speak up means getting knocked around. But getting around is everything to the disabled person, at least this one. I am running out of time this morning in London. But there will be other mornings. It has become very foreign, this adopted city. But it always was. And whatever it was 40 years ago, I was untested and untried. And now I am as seasoned as an old board. Splintering and a little cracked, but solid enough. And there is the café challenge, and there is life ahead.
Want a hot time in the old town tonight? You want Hotwire. After all, you haven't planned things all that well. And ten days in Todenham, Gloucestershire, with its 400 residents and single business (pub) while restful, can get a little lonely when your extrovert cousin heads off to work in London...so maybe London is where I need to be. Where hotels are so expensive as to be almost laughable, especially if one doesn't book ahead. So there's Hotwire. How far wrong can you go? Choose a known part of town and a place big and modern enough to have a swimming pool listed...and there's bound to be a wheelchair-accessible room. So, go for it. Give Hotwire your money. Go ahead, click on Purchase.
In my current life, which everyone describes as grief, not only is planning difficult, but envisioning seems a challenge. That must explain why I managed to set off for London with a single shirt. That is to say, to enter one of the world's grimy, windblown metropolises without a change of upper garment. I discovered this as soon as I opened my bag in the Wyndham Chelsea Wharf. Wyndham is a known hotel chain, but Chelsea Wharf is an unknown location at the most remote corner of the Royal Borough. In fact, I am sure that Hotwire's Chelsea map had to be slightly gerrymandered to include this remote location. It's a stretch. In fact, it's pretty hard in terms of miles to be much further from central London. Furthermore, Chelsea Wharf exists even to this day largely in the mind of whatever developer built it.
I wonder what was here at one point. Doubtless old wharves, timbers crumbling, Dickensian. Now there's a so-called wharf where yachts tie up off the Thames. And the entire area surrounded by modern offices, a vast and these days startlingly empty design center, stark modern flats and, yes, one Wyndham hotel. Some French filmmaker in the 1960s would have found this a great location for a movie about anomie and alienation, people smoking and looking through each other and wandering about a big floodlit empty city of the future. Chelsea Wharf. Not only is the location distant in terms of mileage, it is culturally distant from almost anything one can conceive of as London. And I only had one shirt.
The shirt thing touched a nerve. The nerve is an exposed one these days, and I must give my grief advisors full credit for warning me. Yes, the recently bereaved person can easily flare into anger when forced to take up a task once handled by the deceased. And, no, it's not a matter of the work involved or the lack of assistance. It's emotional, a hot button. Good thing one has Hotwire.
Jake met me at Paddington Station, London. I'm always impressed by the sheer size of the place, the crowds, the railway comings and goings. I'm also impressed by Jake, his persistent good spirits and humor. I find it hard to put on a chatty social front with Jake, my cousin's son. At 26 or 27, he is down-to-earth and hard to fool. I am not in a very good mood, it seems, on my arrival in London. I can't fake it. So we go about tasks. First, down to the Tube level to deal with transport. I queue, produce a credit card and a man gives me an Oyster Card. The latter ensures swift and less expensive entry to tube trains and buses. A man from Transport for London even approaches with a couple of brochures. Moreover, we go to the full-sized tube schematic on the wall and he points out the paucity of wheelchair-accessible tube stations. There are a couple. But virtually the entire West End is still out of bounds for wheelchairs.
Jake and I continue on our way. Our way is complicated. We queue on one side of Praed Street, change our collective minds and switch to the other. It's one bus to Kensington High Street, then another to...no, it's not. There is a Marks & Spencer right there, and I must go inside and inspect the goods. Jake doesn't mind. He is very good at going with the flow. Eventually, we flow aboard the 328 bus for Chelsea. Incredibly, in the same spirit as the shirt packing, I do not have a single document with me that lists the address of the hotel or even hints at its whereabouts. I've seen the thing on a map, feel I'm under control...and in the end, I am more or less correct. We miss the correct turn by only a couple of streets, according to the ruddy-faced man I stop as he emerges from a bar.
We face each other, this man and I, as true aliens. It is utterly foreign to me, Britons' capacity for drink. This man has had quite a bit, and likely decades of having quite a bit, judging by his general flush and the network of veins across his cheeks. I can't help staring at the latter, as intricate and detailed as the Ganges delta. He looks at me in the same spirit. You want Lot's Road, he says, correctly discerning in me something equally distracted and obsessed. It's true, for I am barely listening to him and not taking in much of anything these days, and what he has said, his words and geographic advice have sailed in one neuron and out the other. Still, my mind grabs the last sentence, like the lingering subtitle in a film. Lot's Road I mouth back to him, mechanically. He nods as though approving my admirable effort at comprehension. His eyes let me go, and Jake and I continue.
'Of course, you know about the construction.' The desk guy from the Wyndham Chelsea Wharf is walking me to my room. There are always reasons why hotels pop up in Hotwire. In a city bursting with summer tourists, where the $600-a-night hotel room is guaranteed to be small, if central, and not necessarily available, it doesn't make sense that the Wyndham isn't jammed. I say nothing about the construction. I don't care. Jake and I have endured a series of buses and my aging body has been sitting in a wheelchair for too many hours. At least I have a room. Actually, it's a suite. After asking Hotwire to intervene, things have worked out well in the access department. There's lots of space, an accessible tub and separate shower...not to mention no less than two plasma TVs and really good digital radio. I turn the latter on immediately. Too bad there's not much time. Jake and I hit the bus road for dinner in Soho.
Lot's Road doesn't have lots going for it. I was too tired to pay much attention on the way to the hotel, but now I am alert enough to notice and to be annoyed. To get up to the bus stop at the Kings Road, I have to go off the footpath several times, go into the street and dodge traffic. All of this would be understandable in a poorer, less recently modernized and developed part of London. But not here. Never mind, for we are back on the bus, and I am getting the hang of it. I do have to rely on Jake to wave the Oyster Card in front of the pay point...a proximity card reader. A wave is all it takes. And a word with the driver. The low-floor bus unfurls a short ramp, and I roll aboard. Although it's not realistic, and my neuromuscular times have changed, I can't help remembering that I used to take the Tube. There's a reason why God invented subway trains, and that reason could not be more apparent now, during the London rush hour. The 11 bus fights its way like a salmon upstream in the Kings Road. Turning into Victoria Street, the traffic flows into a slough. Buses move here like water in a Louisiana bayou. There is a general forward flow, or there seems to be. One isn't sure. The cars could be parked and moving along with continental drift. By Victoria Station itself, the effect is complete. There is no traffic flow at all, but a sort of Brownian movement that drifts familiar landmarks by. There's a good view of Westminster Square. The bus goes right by the famous Abbey.
Jake and I get off here, as the driver advises. And damned if the next bus, the #24, is not right behind us. Jake waves at the driver, and we board in seconds. Incredibly, we make it to the Charlotte Street curry joint more or less on time. There's a big step at the front door, but Jake is a big guy, and he and a couple of waiters lift me inside. It's an ambivalent experience, being lifted, for it punctures the independence fantasy. But it's also reassuring. People care. They care about getting me in front of a curry. And I don't even mind fighting my way between tables, around a corner and into a small banquet room where...Caroline waves and so does a slightly older version of Ian Young. I haven't seen him in...who knows, 15 years? He is essentially and delightfully unchanged, even though he has moved on to late-in-life marriage and kids. Funny, intellectually engaged and, it develops, a reader of my blog. I decide the latter reveals an exquisite taste.
We knew each other 40 years ago, Ian and I, have visited occasionally since. And now we are here, back in Soho curry land, and so is my cousin Sandy and Barbara and Ed and their son Oliver and his new girlfriend Lauren and Marion and Jake. And it's impossible to talk to everyone, and yet I connect, more or less, with each of them. I connect with the past. I connect the past with the present. And it's amazing how people live and die, and sometimes the threads of a life can be drawn across the decades and briefly, even temporarily, be woven into something that surprises and fills the heart.
I am tired by the time the curry draws to its close. Someone flags down a cab for me, and I set off for my first taxi ride. I had sworn to minimize these, to try to go as far as possible on buses. But this is a good moment for a cab. It's just that the moment is a long one, and the £23 ride back to Wyndham Land reminds me of why I was determined to master the bus routes. What I really want to master is the solo flight. How can this have become so difficult? What is so intimidating about boarding and exiting a London bus on my own? This used to be a daily activity. But now in a wheelchair, the whole thing intimidates me. I am afraid I will tip over backwards going up the bus ramp. I'm not sure how to communicate with the driver from the back of the bus. For the old buses are gone now. As is the old neurology
Morning. On my own. The room is as well-equipped as it could be, all systems are go disability-wise, but my mood is sour. Things start going wrong almost immediately. I can't get the shaver charger plugged in. This is evidence of my utter incompetence. Only a fool.... I press the charger hard into the 110 outlet, aware that this is my last chance. American electricity flows only in American hotels like Wyndham's. And even though my charger is a multi-voltage one, and I even have a plug adapter back in Todenham, for some reason it is essential that I charge my shaver here in Chelsea Harbour. I press the plug in, it jumps out, I press it again. I am stupid. I give the plug a good hard shove and knock the soap on the floor. Now there are both the charger and the soap leering at me, superior in their knowledge of my faults. Everything in the bathroom is laughing at me. Everyone knows I am aging and alone and in mourning, and my need to get dressed and showered and out the door, all of this angers me. It is a task too many and a bridge too far. And fuck everyone. The shampoo tumbles to the floor. I lunge for it and feel my feet slip on the slick marble. This is dangerous. I have to settle down.
Fuck it, as I blast the shaver plug with my fist. My blow catches the thing a little off center, and it clatters to the floor also. I put on Radio 4. A good move. The show, Agriculture Today, deals with the issue of trout farming. Only the British could make this interesting, and trout take my mind off angry obsessive things. And I get to hear a lot about trout feces and effluent, which my brain needs. I need as much effluent as I can get. I make it through the shower experience without falling, battle with my socks, and I'm about to get myself up on my feet and out the door for a morning crutch up and down the carpeted hotel hallway. The phone rings. Both telephones are just out of reach, actually three telephones if one counts the one in the bathroom. Furthermore, they issue four short British rings before switching to voicemail...but I discover these details later. For now, I am in a lather, desperate to make everything go efficiently, smoothly and not be the hopeless aging paralyzed widower in the wheelchair who is currently racing to get the telephone by the bed.
On the way, I run over the rubber tip of the crutch leaning by the desk. This would be of no consequence, except for the secret purpose behind orthopedic walking sticks -- actually among the most effective and versatile clown props. Running over the flared rubber tip makes the crutch stand up most impressively and, if one is lucky or unlucky, depending on one's purpose, flip the entire aluminum stick into the air. In a second, still headed for the ringing phone, I run over my own crutch. The phone call turns out to be from Barbara who is on her way to meet me at the National Gallery, and she is slightly delayed. Not to worry, for I now have time for my walk. And as I stand up and clip the steel sleeve of the forearm crutch onto my wrist, I realize that in running over the crutch I have flattened the wrist sleeve. It's hopeless. I don't have the strength to straighten it, of course. I roll downstairs, hand the thing to the concierge, roll back in the door just as the phone begins ringing again. I miss the call, of course. I am now reaching another level of fury, and getting worked up into another froth when things reach their peak. This takes the form, probably as in many miracles, of something plausibly familiar.
The shower has been on, then turned off. And now it is on again. It has turned itself on spontaneously. I am going mad. The shower is on as on can be. Nervously, I roll into the bathroom. Water is pouring from the shower, but not from the shower head. Water is pouring around the light fixture. It is also pouring around the bar outside. Water is pouring through the ceiling. No, there is not a hail of toads, but that may follow shortly. For now, we have the water cataclysm at the ceiling, and that will do. What I do is to phone the front desk. Oh, says the receptionist. That's odd. Someone will come up. The someone proves to be an American. A Wyndham woman. She does not do the understated expensive-British-hotel thing. Wow, she says. Engineers take over, and I go to breakfast.
After Barbara and I have a look at the National Gallery, I finally throw transport caution to the winds. I board the 11 bus and, yes, Barbara waves my oyster card, but she also waves goodbye. I am on my own. The master of my fate. Lot's Road is announced by a recorded voice triggered by the satellite navigation system. And if I miss the West Indian conductors of the old days, swinging down the steps with their change machines and ticket cranks, I don't miss the stop. I press the blue button, the bus halts and the ramp descends. Lot's Road. Lot is not far. His wife has turned into the Wyndham Pillar of Salt, and I am speeding toward her now.
The next morning, on the way out of town, I decide that the £20 Wyndham breakfast isn't worth it. I make it a point to negotiate Lot's Road one last perilous time. I haven't been back in Britain long enough to automatically look right when crossing the drive-on-the-left pavement, but I mostly remember in time. I even find a cheap Italian transport café in the grand British tradition, order the wrong thing and make it back to the hotel in time for checkout. On my own again. On the road again.
There is something oddly gratifying about meeting up with old friends in London or anywhere in Britain. The sheer endurance of these relationships gives me heart. I first met my British relations 40 years ago. The friends soon followed. And for many of us, it has never stopped whatever 'it' is. And particularly right now, the question is worth asking. I immediately think of how different I look. My neck is out of joint, my head twisted askew. My tolerance for sitting has shrunk along with my skin thickness. I look worse and feel worse, and yet it feels better than ever to arrange a curry with friends. As for the curry, my tolerance has waned over the years. Indian food is rich, loaded as it is with ghee, clarified butter. And four decades ago I could knock the stuff back in enormous quantities, but no more. And now just sitting at a table is a major osteoarthritic experience. I cross my legs, often with someone's help, about 30 minutes into any meal. I rise from my wheelchair, sheepishly making the same joke about giving a speech. I'm actually giving the lower back a stretch. The home stretch, in terms of lifespan. But who knows about lifespan? Please pass the chicken vindaloo, and, yes, I'll have a little more of the bindji and some sag.
People are busy. People of my age are still working. And for me, 'working' consists of getting up in the morning, getting into the tea and making the awesome journey to London. True, it is another world when the train doors open at Paddington Station. First, there are the objects. One bag, one crutch, one wheelchair, one life. It's enough to shake a person out of his lethargy, collect his wits and be on high anti-theft alert. But this is one of the least cozy realities of British urban life, the prospect of getting things nicked. By the time I have made it through sooty, thunderous Paddington and been placed, if the authorities are on their toes, at the head of the cab queue, I am in urban mode, looking around in all directions, scanning the territory near and far. And this habit never stops, not really, until I close the door to my hotel.
So, with people working, bodies failing, time running out, I will find myself dining with a cast of thousands at some curry restaurant on Thursday evening. Caroline's son Jake has a place in mind. And that I am in the minds of friends and family after all these years and all these losses with only a few threads of spinal cord...it's gratifying. It's gratifying that people care. That we can still tune into each other. And that I can get back into the flow of local life.
It seems to take longer than it did. I have BBC Radio 4 on in the mornings, most evenings. And it's a pleasant discovery, hearing the day's events toned down, quieted and discussed...the segments are longer, the whole feel less choppy. I can't quite get a handle on the current national loathing for the government of Gordon Brown. But hearing about it, listening to the world news unfold through the minds of BBC broadcasters, it's almost calming. Britain's problems are not mine, at least currently. I float upon the news.
Later, I float upon the A3400, the road to Stratford upon Avon. The town may be Shakespeare's birthplace, but to me, it is Marks & Spencer's outpost. It's where I stock up on attire. Marlou has advised me quite effectively in the Stratford M & S, but now it's Caroline's job. My job is to, aside from being a passenger, lightly adjust the tiller on the ship of life. I see my first chance as we drive past the store. Incredibly, I actually recall where the disabled parking spaces are. They are where they last were, just up the street, and all of them are full. What shall we do? Caroline's suggestions have this let's-get-on-with-it flavor...park anywhere and run in, being the most prominent. We pull into an empty space next to the disabled cars. Caroline gives each of the handicapped vehicles the fisheye, but all have proper parking permits. One motorist returns to briefly drop something in his car, and my cousin says something to him. Probably something along the lines of 'when do you plan to move?' He says something to her. And the situation ignites.
'That man was hardly disabled', Caroline says. 'And he was rude'.
What follows only occurs at the strange conjunction of things Jewish, German and English. Civil law clashes with Higher Law and with Human Decency, all of which are invoked in the ensuing discussion over parking. Caroline is now rising to the mission. The putative mission is to buy me a new sweater and sports jacket. But the immediate, Higher Purpose is to assert our human rights to park our car here, within short wheeling distance of a department store, despite the injustice evident in the spaces next to ours. For they are certainly, or at least very likely, impostors, these disabled-parking riffraff. Mine is the real thing, my disability, limbs askew, functions limited and purpose just. The paralyzed man wants to buy clothes, the authorities will not let him, and I can see my cousin getting wound up about whole thing.
'We'll leave the traffic warden a note', Caroline says.
Parking in a place like Stratford, with Shakespeare tourists washing up and down the streets in waves, is a cut-and-dried affair. You pay the Council in the form of a £1 coin, or you pay them in the form of a £50 ticket...as one would in San Francisco or most traffic-clogged places. Forget the note. Also forget hanging a California disabled placard from the mirror. Not that it can hurt, but I don't know the parking rules here. And whatever they are, they are. I urge Caroline to give the Council its lucre, place a 30-minute permit on her dashboard...and we will play the rest by ear. Reluctantly, she agrees. And we're off.
I am not good at shopping for clothes. When I arrived in London 40 years ago attire became important, and my cousins provided the necessary help. Today, my brother and sister serve much the same function. When necessary, they point and I buy. Marlou, of course, was very good at wardrobe, and I happily delegated all such matters to her. Now, it's Caroline's job. I tell her quite frankly to wander about Marks & Spencer's men's clothing racks and grab what's good. She pronounces one particular sports jacket to be up to standard. And now I have to be up to standing in front of a mirror and considering the matter. What's the matter with me, my body, my posture, my entire physiognomy, all of this reflects itself out of the glass, and in the end it comes down to the same thing. She points, and I buy.
The car has come through the afternoon without a parking ticket. I have come through several lives in one, it seems. Which is why meeting friends for dinner in London is so satisfying. How many lives ago did we become friends? How many times has Caroline been my fashion buyer, then handed the job over to someone else, then again taken up the reins? I've come through it all...and with so much death in the air, my air, this is what helps me breathe.
I am a survivalist when it comes to computers, determined to make them work but otherwise unadventurous and unimaginative. I use Outlook. You know, the usual Microsoft e-mail thingy. Those of us who barely get by in the computer department, have no shame in calling a software product a thingy. In any case, I have long accepted the essential fact that this particular thingy only works on my home WiFi network in
I have long come to terms with this, think nothing of it and use a cumbersome webmail alternative provided by my Internet Service Provider, a.k.a., ISP. Just in case you thought I was totally out of it. Hope springs eternal, and it sprung out of my laptop this morning, joined forces with the Home Farm WiFi network and the sprites and spirits of Todenham, Gloucestershire, to make Outlook suddenly and inexplicably work both ways. It sends. It receives. An e-mail sitting in my out basket for two years...yes, that's right, for I've been avoiding Outlook on my laptop for a long time...sent itself to me. The feeling was eerie. But there was, two years late, and better late than never, I always say.
I had fired up Outlook to retrieve a couple of e-mail addresses for use on the webmail front. And damned if the thing didn't start sending and receiving. Outlook was looking out for me. It brightened my outlook, did Outlook.
All of which confirmed a growing sense within me. I noticed this yesterday, this sudden and surprising realization that I didn't want to go home. Not home to
I suppose my bedroom is full of memories...most savagely, of Marlou hanging comatose at the edge of death. But I find it more useful to say the room is full of spirits. Demons, actually. It feels that way. Demons, I have decided, have a hard time pursuing their quarry across the water. So if Outlook can come to life, my demons can end theirs. I need an exorcism. Don't try to talk me out of it. I need a ritualistic excising of house demons, bedroom demons, call them what you will. Because they keep calling me. They don't use Outlook. They don't need a calling plan. And I don't need them.
If exorcism sounds a bit desperate, so are my feelings. Is it too impatient to want Marlou's death behind me? It isn't possible, of course, for there is a house full of stuff, Marlou stuff, that needs to be sorted and assigned and dispatched. Maybe this will be the exorcism, the dealing with the contents of her closet, the upstairs apartment full of her life. Maybe the home won't get exercised, just cleaned out. Whatever the process, I dread my return to things as they were, not sleeping, the bitter visions of life's end.
My sister suggests repainting the bedroom, changing the decor. It's a good idea, but probably ineffective for me, such is my natural state of oblivion. It doesn't feel like the visual cues have been getting to me. It's more the room itself. The place as it is, even as it was, having gone through so many color transformations. Meanwhile, what is there to do but brace for the return and fortify oneself with the British essence. Everyone knows that the latter is not absorbed, learned or acquired. It is brewed, diluted with sugar and milk, and inhaled several times per day. Take this day, Monday, but don't take away the tea, even if it is my fifth cup. Some would say I have little to do at Home Farm, Todenham, except drink tea. This may be true, but this may be fortunate. I crossed the
A year ago Marlou and I were in Tuscany, and particularly for an American there's a luxuriant ring to this statement. It is the latter tone that can serve to invalidate my experience of that time. We were in the lap of luxury. For me luxury equals convenience, a lightening of the physical load. Which makes the rest possible. Without a beautiful hotel in the Italian countryside, life would have gone on just fine. But there would have been less of it. Marlou and I would have done fewer things, I suppose. Not that we did very many. That was the essence of it. Marlou was frightened, each moment filled with dread and intimations of the end.
So, I kept telling her that we had no agenda. There was no shrine we had to visit, no museum we had to see. We would get up each morning, have a sumptuous breakfast and deal with the day. Dealing with the fear was both of our jobs. And by throwing money at the problems of disabled accommodation and wheelchair transport, we were able to get on with the big work. Marlou's days, being numbered, must have dawned with an ever renewed sense of terror. Mine...well they dawned with the illusion that we had many more ahead. This was all I could think to do. Pretend today was always, take the pressure off my wife and encourage her to open up. Now and then she did. Mostly she didn't. And then there was another breakfast.
Did we fight? If I recall correctly, there were no major confrontations of the land armies. The minor skirmishes, of course. Did that sign say Arezzo? Why didn't we book for dinner? It was your fault. That sort of thing. Perhaps we had gotten the real fighting mastered at home. On one occasion in Menlo Park, after some dire and painful estrangement over something, Marlou and I sat down, ate dinner and at the close she quietly observed how satisfying it was to argue successfully and thoroughly and come out the other side. Neither of us were comfortable with conflict. As battles neared, I tended to flinch, she tended to withdraw. Over time, and not without pain, we found ways to get into battle and to get out.
I knew what she meant at that dinner table moment. It was heartening to forge new emotional ground with another human being. Looking back on such moments, we had the sense of building something. We shared bonds of veterans. We could give each other medals or share one as a battalion. For that was the best, or certainly the newest, of the feelings that arose between us. We were in this together. A team.
The notion that it was all going to end seemed less than credible. It was like my mother's warnings about the beach at Santa Barbara. There was an undertow. Which meant what? Plenty of people were in the water, the Pacific ocean under their toes. I didn't see anyone getting towed under. All my life I'd been alert to undertones, and undertows had no tones except my mother's fears. The ocean was the ocean. Life was life. Death was...well, it was somewhere else.
Death is doubtless in Gloucestershire but concealing itself rather pleasantly these days. No clouds hang over Home Farm, Todenham. Well they do, of course, but eventually they go skittering by. What looms is the two rising steel sheds on the adjoining farm. Caroline says they will block out the view. Alastair points out that no one can see them from the terrace. Surely the farmer could have built them 10 meters west, Caroline says. The farmer was thinking about farming, Alastair says. And while the two of them are disputing, the village have pulled together £100 to refurbish the community hall. A start.
'Why didn't I know about this?' It is the next day, and Caroline and I are talking to one of the proprietors of the local Nepalese rug center. What links southeastern Gloucestershire with the Himalayas? The story is too long to tell, but it is a fine one, this story. A man from France found himself in Britain and found his way to Nepal...where, I believe, he found himself. For years this has been his life, obtaining handmade artifacts from the exiled Tibetan community and selling them to rich Britons. The rug shop is just down the hill from Home Farm. And today Caroline and I have headed there in search of spectacular Himalayan coffee. And, yes, chocolate brownies made by a Jewish woman from Brooklyn who was not in evidence.
On the way, my wheelchair flung itself from one side of the road to the other. The conventional wisdom is to face the oncoming traffic, which requires that I keep my wits about me, wits having drained in numbers over the years. Cars drive on the left. In the country, cars drive sort of on the left, mostly in the middle, and very fast. It's a visibility thing, Caroline says. Drive the chair where drivers can see you. In the end, I rely on the sound of tires on pavement, divert the chair into the widest off-road area and hope for the best. I can feel the air stream of passing cars. Country roads are narrow.
The Nepalese rug shop has a Nepalese coffee bar where a very British proprietor who spends his evenings on the scenery crew of the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre, and now chats about Gloucestershire life and times. That's where we learn about the fundraiser. Caroline sounds mildly miffed that she wasn't invited, but mostly relieved. She comes and goes, after all, working M.D. assignments in London and Worcester. She misses a certain amount of mid-week village life but more than makes up for it on the weekends. Little gossip escapes her. On the way back it does not escape me that it's beautiful, this bit of the Cotswolds. The fields roll in their trapezoidal outlines over the landscape, some separated by stone walls, others defined by centuries-old markings. I have asked everyone who has accompanied me down this road, and the other roads around Todenham, the simplest and most profoundly baffling of questions. What is in the fields? What are the crops? It says much about this wealthy county, where so many people have bought up cottages and farms and estates on the rising speculative tides of the City of London, still the world's greatest financial center. Urbanites don't know where they are. They stare at the fields in bafflement and disbelief. I like this state of not knowing. The high point of this Gloucestershire day has been a half-mile wheelchair ride to get some coffee. My horizons have shrunaken to where they need to be.
By 11 in the morning, having been up and in my wheelchair and publicly presentable for all of two hours, I return to bed. This is what I used to self deprecatingly refer to as my midmorning swoon. Marlou seemed to understand. A lot can happen in two hours. Life. Demands. It can all be too much. Fortunately whatever 'it' is, the matter can be improved by a 20 minute nap. Even 10. My cousin Caroline wanders in at 11:10 with the morning's second cup of tea. She doesn't bat an eye that I am returned to bed, but places the tea by the card table recently erected as my desk. I appreciate the room she and her husband constructed with the wheelchair-accessible shower. But more important is the ambience. Jewish mothering expressed in cups of tea, conversation and drives to Tesco. And one must not overlook Gloucestershire. In fact, overlooks of Gloucestershire, the green ever deepening, the Cotswolds undulating, rape crop yellowing, the whole thing softens and clutches the traveler to its breast.
Breast clutching is important. It is all coming back to me now. When I came to Britain 40 years ago, recently paralyzed and emotionally lost, I set about repairing. Out of the bits and pieces available, extended family under the secret direction of a Mayfair psychoanalyst, I constructed a newfound mother. That which is accepting, wants what I want, is endlessly patient and enjoys endless hours of rocking and tea stirring and expressing the German Jewish heart. Such were the available materials. And now with my heart ripped out by death, I sit in my cousin Caroline's guest bedroom staring at the neighboring farmer's sheds and equipment yards, the latter boasting one Diverted Traffic sign, yellow with arrow pointing down. Britain.
The Tesco in Stratford upon Avon has four disabled parking spots, one of them empty, by the front door. The supermarket has no less than two battery-powered scooters for disabled patrons. Caroline finds it appalling that the store will not allow the scooters into the parking area for fear that drivers will plow into them. A Tesco staff person you must bring out a push wheelchair, load me into it, then transfer me to the electric cart. This situation is cumbersome, but such a vast improvement over the old days when nothing in Britain was accessible to the disabled, that I don't object. Caroline does. She wants to speak to the manager. I would rather not. I want the manager to carry on with his day. Things are going rather well, I think. I don't care all that much about transferring from one disabled conveyance to another. But I appreciate Caroline's going to bat for me, however superfluous. The fact is that something within me is putting all this together in highly effective ways, and for the first time since Marlou's death, I am sleeping eight hours and facing the day with my energies intact.
Life again holds promise. Isn't there some sort of festival in nearby Oxford? Or is that in July? At least I am curious enough to have a look at the web. And next week will I begin to feel a little stifled in a 400-person Gloucestershire village whose sole mercantile establishment is the Farrier's Arms? Speaking of pubs with arms, everyone in Todenham is up in arms about the blonde proprietress of the local. Locals get into fights with her, Caroline assures me, and they are snubbing the Farrier's Arms in favor of the pub in the next village. This is what passes for high drama in Todenham. And there is much to be said for this pastoral level of excitement. If you want drama, try London. There is a tube strike planned for tomorrow. And even without industrial action, crossing the street there demands one's wits.
So does Tesco. Midday shoppers swarm about the supermarket in numbers that would equal the after-work rush in the Menlo Park Safeway. Britain is crowded. The Stratford store's parking lot is jammed at 1 PM. Having lunch in the Tesco cafeteria, Caroline asks me to keep an eye on her purse while she clears our table. Minor theft such as purse snatching seems to worry people much more in the UK. After lunch, I drive my electric cart in search of Tesco underwear. I find the right aisle, but maneuvering among the racks of cheap clothes is trickier. Britain is crowded, and so is Tesco.
In anticipating the limits of an English village, with thoughts about getting a bit lonely in the middle of the week when Caroline and Alastair are both working, I am constructing another layer for the Mother. She can't always be there. She is also getting old, her middle-aged back less and less able to lift quadriplegics from low chairs. The Good Mother makes no judgments about self-sufficiency, just encourages getting what one wants. The good mother become stultifying, that is part of the experience. There's an upside and a downside. That explains why despite her sunny disposition, the Good English Mother has a cold side. Specifically 56°F today in Todenham, southern Gloucestershire.
* * *
One of the fascinating things about contemporary Britain, is that superficially it's very hard to define what is British. My impression is that the UK puts the term 'multicultural' to a supreme test. Yes, we do a pretty good job of this in the States, but the conditions are substantially different. In the UK, where people live cheek by jowl, it's all in your face, cultures and races and languages. As for disabled people, I feel my own status acutely, regardless of locale. With my fondness for Britain and my general desire to fit in anywhere, I spent my first days or weeks in the UK puzzling over the rules, practices and signals governing human relations.
One shop in Moreton in Marsh, floors slanting from century to century, proved to have such a meager selection of wool pullovers...it is summer, after all, even if the days never get out of the 50s°...that I spent a good twenty minutes pawing through the shelves. Shoppers came and went, someone at a desk rang up purchases and the loudest sound was the ring of the bell attached to the front door. I said hello to a man studying anoraks, smiled at a woman considering belts and generally fit in with the decibel-free zone. Until I heard my cousin yell from somewhere near the distant front door, Paul? Oh, there you are. Caroline is naturally extroverted and walks onstage confidently. If her entrance was louder than what had preceded it, she quickly became part of the action. She said something to the middle-aged man eyeing the polo shirts. He laughed, and soon she was helping me sort through the woolens with an openly critical commentary...people don't wear acrylic...this pile is all nasty...let's go. In the end, I made do with some heavy cotton shirts, and Caroline made conversation over the credit card swiping and signing. We headed outside. It's not that we Americans are simply louder, although we do lay on the decibels, but that we take up sonic space. In Britain, it's fine to be a bit loud if you share it. My cousin seems able to walk into a public space anywhere in Britain and strike a common note...parking, weather, prices...some amusing observation that resonates. And occasionally falls flat. She strikes out from time to time, but doesn't much care. She has a basic confidence that she is a Briton, and we are all in this together, whatever this is. Observing her, I decide that my approach, safely silent, is overcautious and unadventurous. I need to learn how to take conversational chances and strike out too.
* * *
One day near the end of last week's crossing, I was rolling down the endless hallway of Deck #4, when I passed an elderly couple fiddling with their room key. 'He wants me to hurry up', the woman said as I sailed by, 'I am 101'. There was every reason to believe this was her age and, out of general curiosity, to stop and have a chat. But I was not in chatting mode. The last few days, my mode was lonely and angry and isolated. I could not remember why I was making the trip or have much faith in what lay ahead.
Now I regret not stopping to partake of the woman's own amazement at being 101. For even as I hurried by her, that sense came across. Later, perhaps the next day, I encountered one of the solos. The woman had been to a solo luncheon, met for solo discussions in the ship's pub...and listening to her, I regretted turning my nose up at these gatherings. I did not do better on my own. I got out of touch with other people and with myself and missed bits of life around me.
Yesterday's e-mail brought a communication from the dead. Yes, it came via the living, but I prefer to think of death and its role. When Marlou and I took the Queen Mary many months ago, we met a British couple with a disabled husband. The man had ALS, Lou Gehrig's's disease, and Marlou and I knew why the couple was on holiday. For the same reason we were. Because life had become a holiday, a grim one, but a holiday nonetheless. We kept running into each other on the ship, the two couples,and finally had a chat in the Deck #2 pub. The man was losing neuromuscular ground, I could see. His pattern differed from mine, a wasting of motor neurons from the extremities inward, but I had a sense of what it was like to lose control of one's body, one's life, one's future. Marlou told me she was going to leave a note for the wife. She would pen something simple, let the woman know she wasn't alone. Marlou slipped the note under the stateroom door. And that was the end of it. Until yesterday, when the British woman rediscovered the note, found my blog and learned that Marlou was dead. sent me an e-mail.
Grief disrupts time and continuity, and things have to happen when they happen. What moves me and makes me want to honor her memory and her character and her love is Marlou's note. She knew she had little time. Fear was her constant companion. And yet she had the generosity of spirit to reach out to another human being. Marlou, who was something of a loner, was learning in her last months of life to value human alliances in a new dimension. And now I'm a widower, the British woman is a widow, and the future seems arbitrary and futile. Still, there are small steps. And small things to remember, like don't withdraw.
I stumbled off the Queen Mary sleepless, upset and into Bobby space. This is a familiar part of my universe, deriving as it does from the very formative years after my injury in my early 20s. My cousin Bob and I easily get under way, whatever way we're going. This way led to the local train station and on to Bristol where Bob's son and his sister's daughter both attend university. I had slept so badly the anxious last night aboard ship that southern England now passed before my eyes in a sort of dream. I had dinner, I think, with Bob's son and his girlfriend. But I'm not sure. I may have been hallucinating. I was very tired. I was at a point that led, reluctantly, to the prescribed sleeping pills. It only took a half to knock me out and get me into a state of relative rest.
I have to stop eating English breakfasts. I have had enough bangers to last me a lifetime. Still, I managed to knock down four in the course of my one day in Bristol. Actually, five, if one counts breakfast and lunch. Let's blame Alexandra. It was her idea to go to a restaurant that featured sausages. My cousin Caroline's daughter Alexandra has grown into a warm and very endearing young woman who welcomed me the way, well, family does. She drove Bob and I all around her neck of the Bristol woods. Perched on the hilly part of the city, the old neighborhoods of Clifton share something with San Francisco. Everything is different of course, but neighborhoods in both cities enjoy the high ground and keep opening up from narrow streets into wide vistas. We had tea at the edge of the Avon Gorge.
To pull all this off, I left my electric wheelchair in my hotel room. This stimulated the body's memory of the decades ago when I moved about the world with the help of a walking stick and my cousin Bob. In those days, I needed his help less often, but it was always there and available. Today, it's hard to accept my degree of neuromuscular decline. For in the years with Bob, I crunched everywhere in London, up and down stairs in tube stations, up and down stairs to the invariable basement toilets so beloved of Indian restaurants. And now crutching down the hall and a few meters across the hotel lobby to Alexandra's car requires enormous willpower and, to feel safe, Bob's arm.
What softens the blow of physical loss also has to do with feeling safe. In all my years in Britain I never quite got comfortable with being helped. British family and friends helped me constantly, but in those years I dragged around a basic sense of unworthiness. Was I bothering people? How much help could I legitimately demand? Was I demanding? I remember in those years frequently cringing. I was too needy, too lacking in the required stuff of life. Now, I am somehow more comfortable in my own skin. Bob and Alexandra have spent the entire day hauling me about, in and out of cars, up and down steps. And it all feels relatively natural.
In my years with Marlou I seem to have relaxed into myself in a new way. True, the sense of security, or whatever it is, often crumbles. I can be mercilessly impatient with myself. But there's something else. And whatever it is, I can see it in my Bristol afternoon. Bob, Alexandra and I talk. We jump from one subject to the next, the time is broken up into its usual urinary intervals, and in between trips to the loo, I feel the pleasure of old connections. And there is the newness of seeing Alexandra in her own element. And there's the pleasure of being in my own. Britain may not be my only element, but it's certainly one of them.
At day's end, I remember the battery charger, the new one, 220-voltage compatible, that arrived by mercantile magic at my hotel in Bristol. Bob plugs it into the wall. Later, I plug it into my wheelchair, or attempt to. I cannot get the plug to fit. Now, I remember. Of course, I had told the wheelchair guy in Oxford that I was bringing the other wheelchair, the one that folds, the one that is a different make and model. I try to force the plug into the wheelchair's recharging port, but no go. I am stupid. I am incompetent. Everything is fucked. Sitting alone on the bed, I stare at the bleak situation, stranded in Britain with a wheelchair that I cannot recharge. This will require a special trip to Oxford. Someone will have to do this for me. While my batteries run low and life itself peters out.
Finally, I give the plug a twist and a push and it slips in, but barely. A red light illuminates on the charger. Surely red is a bad sign. Red means stop. I stare at the red light seeing more signs of doom. I decide to go to sleep, or attempt to go to sleep. In the morning...well, there will be a morning, probably. There is. There is even a light illuminated on the charger. Overnight, it has changed from red to green.
E. L. Doctorow proves to be taller than expected, somewhat frailer, but every ounce a writer. He lives by and from his imagination, one can tell. The few remarks he makes about the hidden processes behind 'The March', his latest novel, fill me with hope. Go light on the historical research, he advises, if you want to protect your imagination. We are not portraying, as I understand him, but evoking. It's all about spirit. Thank you very much, says the ship's recreation director, hustling Doctorow offstage. And thank you, professor. Only minutes before, Doctorow had quietly explained that although he teaches creative writing at NYU, at this moment, on board ship, he is no professor. Thank you, professor. The recreation director was trying to clear the ship's cinema for the next lecture on the life and times of Ingrid Bergman, delivered by some ponce from BBC 2. There is something essentially banal about the Queen Mary experience. What the hell.
Our anxiety level goes up at night one of the nurses or maybe the social worker or someone tending Marlou in her final weeks, explained. I had never heard this before and welcomed the news. Anything to put fear in perspective. Marlou's fear soon drowned in her failing physiology. Mine remains. Night falls and the psyche rises. Sleep has never gotten back to normal. Although in the regularity and calm of shipboard life, it is coming back. The ocean races right by the windows on decks 2 and 3. It does so continuously, and the waters are so smooth I almost wonder what a rough crossing would be like to experience. The ship's environment is a naturally contemplative one. I don't know if it is the onboard program or essential human nature or the modern condition that makes it seem so frenetic and extroverted. There is a lot going on and people spend the days toing and froing. It is very hard to find an ideal reading spot. Although, it must be said, one gets spoiled.
Yesterday I nabbed one of the prime locations, a seat in the coffee bar right next to the window where I could sit on a plush bench and put my feet on the wheelchair. I virtually finished one of Doctorow's novels in that space, occasionally gazing out to sea. Today I dropped by the library, got the time and place of the ship's reading group and had a second novel half read by midafternoon. The book, about an autistic boy, seemed to be the first I have read with full concentration since I don't remember when. The process took me into another human mind, another human place and experience. The effect was utterly calming. Although I did keep dozing.
That's because of night. Anxiety stalks me. I can feel it when I enter the cabin. I turn on the television and play mindless melodramas while I undress. There's also a channel of the ship's bow camera with the likes of Delibes playing in the background. Anything but silence. In the silence, the scary things come at me. They jump right into bed and together we stare at the ceiling. In this posture, reclining, I hang suspended between slumber and fear. The two states average out to a sort of speediness. The minutes and hours tick away. Eventually it all gives way. There is blackness. Waking to pee. More blackness. More peeing. Then waking to blackness. In my windowless cabin, the light or the dark is unchanging. I turn it back into the day's reality by gazing at the TV image, Channel 39, from the bow camera. The ocean is invariably blue, the sky mostly so. Another day.
My cabin attendant has become my butler. He dresses me at least once a day, usually for dinner. Sometimes in the morning too. If I fall, it would not be long before he entered the cabin. This is the worst situation I can imagine on ship. The worst situation I can imagine overall is a further failing of my body. More paralysis, loss of mind, leading to loss of life. The latter is much on my mind these days. I have seen it happen, know it happens and do not doubt it will happen to me. So why resist? Things will end. Nothing will be finished. Or not enough will be finished. Exit the Cripple. It will happen.
This is why one must sit by the window and see enough of the sea. It is a rare privilege to be traveling over it. I am lucky in this regard. I can do this. I am also lucky in that I appreciate it. I have nowhere to go in a hurry. My biggest pressure is to finish the book for tomorrow's reading group. Exit the Voyager.
* * *
In today's talk, I fear his last, Doctorow says that we need more writers. In my sardonic view, we have too many. But Doctorow isn't joking. With media becoming increasingly uniform and cooked in a central kitchen, we need individual voices, he says. I feel better about my blog. I feel better full stop. I don't feel better about is my rage. It has been building, I sense, throughout the voyage. It's why physical exercise makes me feel better, I'm other reasons. It interferes with my sleep. When Benjam, my cabin attendant and virtually my butler, helps me get dressed, I recall the Marlou did this. He gets the job done with equal or greater efficiency, but everything else about the experience is wrong. He doesn't have breasts. He doesn't argue about the condition of my clothes and the best way to get my trousers on. I can't grab him in the small of the back, pull him toward me and squeeze his bottom and nuzzle his cheek. Worse, I can't take him with me to breakfast. Not that I could really take Marlou. She was not a morning person, always had breakfast delivered to the room. There are small advantages to the solo experience. I roll into the dining room in the morning, order up Wiltshire sausage, eggs, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes, not to mention assorted croissants, and knock down a pot of tea at my leisure.
Things are done with great style aboard the ship, including the printed invitation, embossed, that arrived at my statement yesterday, inviting me to the solos lunch. I would actually have attended, had I not decided on the reading group, instead. If I'd had my wits about me, I would have RSVP'd in the appropriate way. That is to say, I would have dispatched Benjam with my handwritten regrets atop a cushion, direct to the recreation department. Instead, I finished my reading. I missed Doctorow's book signing. I missed my wife.
The
* * *
We are nearing Bishop's Rock, the Commodore has announced in his noon address, as if everyone knows what this is. Landfall. That's what it is. The westernmost part of
Morning breakfast is a white linen expanse of sterling cutlery interrupted by a certain amount of food. In my case, it's a vast amount. I eat as though the Queen Mary is about to be torpedoed. Mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, poached eggs, Wiltshire sausage...another day, another assault on the arteries. I have taken to dining alone in the morning. It is easy enough to be seated at a table with others, which undoes the immediate sense of isolation, but such exchanges do little for the soul. People talk about the things they talk about, and it all takes time, and the 10:30 AM lectures tend to be the best, so I speed through breakfast, infused with tea and sausage and English mustard, to experience what can be experienced.
Philip Nye, late of Independent Television News, is showing footage from both
I like the Commodore's account of things. How we pass the Scilly Isles, Poole and Dorset, sail south of the
The problem with people is that being among them summons the presence of the one who is not. I run into Sam, who hails from Zimbabwe by way of North Carolina, a guy I keep bumping into. We chat in the coffee lounge, and our exchange brings Marlou into piercingly sharp focus. She delighted in the ship, dressing up, the fancy evenings. She looked lovely in her formal attire complete with décolletage and the apparent bloom of health. How we stood up in our evening attire and swayed in the ballroom, how the moment was poignant but barely anticipated what was to follow. How those moments are gone. And the coast of England is returned. And somehow something comes next.
I spend my final morning in
Pausing in the narrow aisle I stared dumbfounded at acres of hair treatment. Fluffing, shimmering, body-building, it is hard to know which shampoos are for men, which for women and if any are for me. In the end it doesn't matter. I buy deodorant instead. The fluorescent retail moment is just long enough to distract me from my own fear. I roll back to the Algonquin, try to take a late morning nap, give up, worry some more and finally summon the bellman to help me finish packing. Through the lobby doors I glimpse Vega Transportation's promised van. The lift descends in the accustomed way, the driver straps down my chair and jumps behind the wheel. 'Wait', I yell. I point out that he has belted the chair but not me. I am not wearing a seatbelt. He shrugs, buckles my seatbelt and careens off down
My state room is enormous. The cabin attendant unpacks my bags. I obediently grab my life jacket and endure a lifeboat drill. I even squeeze in a brief walk up and down the corridor, crutch clicking. The elevator ride to the top deck, though, doesn't pay off the way it should. There's been a delay. A few stragglers are en route from
Outside, everything is happening on two scales. In the foreground, slow water moves by. Red buoys rock in the current, their bells clanging. They're only a few yards away. Straight out from the ship is a point of land with a pile of something at its end. Behind us, the sun is setting in an ordinary, red sort of way, for this is not the West or the tropics where sunset is an event. The outline of
I have seen the next day's bulletin. There is a singles group meeting tomorrow at 11:30 AM. It occurs to me that I am now a single. I am even a widower. I have been so many things in life, and this thought makes me tired. I could go to a singles group or I could read or just wander the ship. I don't know. I don't know why I can't sleep if I will ever be less tired than I am now. I head for bed. The cabin attendant reminds me to turn my clock ahead one hour. There's less time all the time, but there's lots of water outside, and something is moving.
* * *
Getting up on the wrong side of the bed is nothing compared to getting down. When you're paralyzed on one side, there is a right side and a wrong side to everything in the world. The Queen Mary's bed is so much easier to enter from the right that, despite years of getting into bed on the left, I say screw it. Within moments I see the error in this logic. Maneuvering my paralyzed right leg under sheets that are tucked in securely on the right side proves almost impossible. Once the limbs are stowed, the bathroom light reveals itself to be burning like a beacon. I need the thing on at night to pee. Any one of these situations...loosening the sheets, adjusting the lighting...requires getting up, and this is unthinkable. I feel that I have never slept in my life.
The good news is that I get a full six hours of slumber, more than I have had in a long while. I'm still woozy, but life seems possible. The cabin attendant helps me get my shoes and socks on. I'm out doing my hallway crutching by 10 AM. The morning has had its horrors, of course, each frustration amplified by mood and fatigue. There was the knock-on-the-door horror. An attendant was arriving with breakfast on a tray, and I was in the shower, having mistimed, misjudged and misspoken. I fell into the wheelchair, rivulets of water rolling down my legs, dropped a towel over my crotch and opened the door for some unseen member of the crew. Which led, within minutes, to the milk horror. Boiling water in a pot. Teabags. Bran flakes. All breakfast components present and accounted for, except for milk, the latter being in square juice-box containers. Am I really going to take this plastic straw and stab the opening? Yes, and having punched a hole in the silly thing, milk squirted off in odd streams and unpredictable angles best known to men with aging prostates. I kept squirting the table. I grabbed a washcloth, mopped up the mess and had another go at it. I cursed myself all the way. I tried not to. I know this is one of those psychological tendencies to avoid. I'm doing my best.
The best of the Queen Mary is visible from Deck 7. On that level, just beneath the life boats, passengers promenade around the ship's circumference on a teak walkway. Few were promenading this morning. The sun was sparkling, the ocean rolling by and a June Atlantic gale blowing straight off the
Am I a single? No, I am a solo.
That was the name of the 11:30 gathering in the aft nightclub. Passengers traveling alone are cordially invited.... Of course I am not a solo, not traveling alone, and so not in touch with reality that it was essential I turn up. A good 40 people had managed to do the same. The sub-assistant-auxiliary entertainment director wandered about with a wireless mike, telling us that she was Anita, and we may have met her before aboard the QE2, and there are all kinds of ways for solos to become duos and trios and, doubtless quartets and full ensembles. But here we are, each taking the mike and saying our recreational purpose and how we wish to share it. I can see how Alcoholics Anonymous would drive one toward sobriety. Anita is passing around a clipboard, and we are all adding our names, just in case one soloist wants to invite another. I am chatting to Noreen. She is from Bradford,
To make our social way about the Queen Mary we will need one of these, Anita explains. She is holding up a copy of the ship's daily bulletin. 'This is your Bible', she says. The ship bulletin announces the evening cabaret singer, making much of his Frank Sinatra repertoire. It explains how to use the laundry facilities, offers amusing tidbits about navigation and generally boosts things shipboard. It is not a Bible it is devoid of Mosaic law, burning bushes or anything similar. I want to point this out and tell Anita to lighten up, but instead I attend to my fellow soloists.
The middle-aged woman to my left are also from
Am I going to the Commodore's cocktail party, my cabin attendant asks when I return? My automatic answer, no, catches in my throat. What the hell? If I'm going to dress for dinner I might as well have a fucking drink beforehand. It is not easy to be on my own or disabled on my own or bereft on my own. And somehow contained in this circumstance is my mysterious anger at myself, hard to understand and difficult to stop.
In one of my favorite shipboard spots, the mahogany coffee bar, I order a double latte, a small shrimp sandwich and a view of the shimmering
* * *
I decide at 4:30 PM to phone my cabin attendant, Benjam, and get some help with my evening attire. He's off duty, but his Ukrainian understudy appears, Christina. No way, she makes it clear, is she going to mess around with my underwear. What to do? Talk to the purser's office. I roll there, have a chat, and rounding the corner to the mile-long hallway leading to my room, two cabin attendants appear. Nothing like presenting oneself live, quadriplegic and in a wheelchair to drive home the disability point to the purser. These guys have been dispatched to get me dressed, and get me dressed they do. Dark suit, as prescribed, white shirt, almost ironed. Into the shoes, and here things stall. The shoes are new, admittedly stiff, but I had expected to get them on. No way. The Bulgarian cabin attendant has gotten my plastic brace into the shoe, but not my foot. I smile sheepishly. Do they know the story of Cinderella? The Bulgarian and his Filipino companion both shake their heads. Finally, by hammering on my knee, my foot makes it into the shoe, but a fierce pain rockets up my leg. Take it off, I say. The Bulgarian cannot get the shoe off fast enough.
Things don't work out. New shoes fail you. We make do. I am deciding to wear the shoe without the brace. But the Filipino wants me to see something. My mobile phone charger, its cord wound tight, has tumbled out of the toe of the shoe where it was efficiently packed.
I have on a black suit, even a black tie, but my black shoes, purchased because they are the only ones in
The dining room is opening late, and I join a queue of people in evening dress. We look exceedingly sharp, even me in my black running shoes. This must be one of the few social affairs at which I have actually arrived early. Inside, the waiter seats me at the far end of the table, my table #56. This is the wheelchair accessible end, but the first diners have gathered at the other end. I do my best to converse over the three-seat gap, but this is how it is, the wheelchair guy at one end of the table, everyone else at the other. I ask the waiter to pull some chairs away so I can sit closer. He tells me there's no room. I eyeball the table arrangement and decide there is plenty of room. I'm about to ask my fellow diners to shift some chairs for me. For by now we have ordered, the dinner hour is well underway, and the others at our table are not turning up. They refuse, instead moving their places closer to mine.
Some small person inside me wants to cry...with gratitude for being accepted, relief for not being shunned...I don't know. The guy next to me turns out to be a sociology professor recently retired from NYU. His wife is shrill as ever, but I decide this is a superficial matter of style, a New Yorker. The man seated across from me also turns out to be a retired prof. He's a Classics guy. We have a wonderful talk, the four of us. It was worth all the effort to get into my clothes. It was worth identifying myself as a solo. I am not alone, and now culminating this day of effort, I have put together a quartet. With dinner over early, I still have to put together an evening. There is an annoying nightclub act in the ship's theater, but I put together a much better substitute. A harpist, a very good one, is playing in one of the bars. Her music delights me, and having put together an evening, I may just be able to put together a new life.
