Fields

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.