TescoLand

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.