July 2009 Archives

The day can get away from you in the way an oyster can slip off your plate, the toothpaste cap can disappear and, forgetting you're not supposed to do it, you send to know for whom the bell tolls.  There it goes, and it's gone in the sense that it's 12 noon and it's not morning anymore, and you can't say why or what has transpired.  Of course, there are things.  Life demands that obligations get met, certain occurrences occur, and damned if you don't have a list of them.  At least two items.  

First, call the guy about the new wheelchair.  You do this.  He, the wheelchair guy, has a website and, in fact, is even part of a national chain.  A store chain, the supply chain, a food chain.  He also has an automated phone system that invites you to, if you know it, enter the party's four digit extension, now.  And if you don't know it, key in the first three letters of his/her surname.  All you want to do is talk to a sales person about an object that retails for, oh, round about $12,000.  Maybe 14K on a bad day, or a good one, depending on your perspective.  I am almost livid by the time I am at the end of this silly telephone interaction.  Oh, this is fine if you are a wholesale supplier of anhydrous ammonia.  Then you probably know your party's three digit extension.  In fact you and your party have probably had a party, agribusiness dollars overflowing the punch bowls, parking valets running every which way.  

But, to return to the point, if you are selling wheelchairs, one at a time, to persons like me....  Of course, you're not.  That is the whole point.  Welcome to California 2009.  What once might have been described as a wheelchair market no longer exists.  The State of California, once a major purchaser of wheelchairs for the many disabled people who are not as lucky as I am to have good insurance, is out of the business of doing much of anything.  Private insurers have been out of the game for years.  And when a new wheelchair costs more than a new small car, there aren't that many Californians in tough times who will shell out their own money for some (small) indoor wheels.  And so a wheelchair company in Santa Clara County, California, may only be in business to the extent that someone occasionally checks the answering machine for messages.

Thus, the first item on the day's agenda.  The next?  Tomatoes, of course.  They keep appearing, which under normal circumstances gladdens the heart.  For the earth is fructifying, there is increase, the land has been touched and coaxed and excited into bloom.  Under normal circumstances.  Which these are not.  Uncharacteristically, I forget about the garden for days at a time.  My landlord waters it, thank God.  And the tomatoes?  Whenever I think about it, and wander out to the raised beds for a look, what I see as stupefying.  Colored globes hanging off of vines.  As though the tomato concept had just been developed, recently proposed and was still in its trial run.

But it's beyond the concept phase, the tomato is, and the vines are beyond description in this globally-warmed Menlo Park summer.  What do I do with the fruit of the vine?  There seems to be only one answer.  I've discounted the others, it seems.  Giving them away.  Throwing them at bad performers.  So I do what any mensch would do.  I make tomato sauce.

How do you make tomato sauce?  A recipe would provide an overview and general systematic approach.  But the sad and soul-wearying truth is that I don't want tomato sauce.  I don't want the substance.  I don't want the process.  I want it all to go away.  But it won't, for I have already included Lorna in this mad plot.  She has picked the tomatoes, pulled up the onions.  And now all the constituent home grown vegetables are cored and sliced and waiting to become sauce.  Really, there isn't much else to say about the process.  You know the drill.  Basil.  Garlic.  Oregano.  Etc.  Cook the stuff, salt and pepper it.  Not much else to say.  Except that I don't even want to do these things.  Adding ingredients, stirring, tasting.  This is where I am.  I do not care.  Which means that the slow-cooker is on for a full 24 hours.  Things cook, then the cool, then they cook again.  And at various points along the way, I give things a stir, add an ingredient here and there.  Generally, my approach is the laziest.  Tomato skins?  They are really easy to fish out of the slow-cooker.  But not easy enough.  I throw everything into the Cuisinart and grind away.  The skins become skin molecules, turning the spaghetti sauce into a strange colloidal suspension.  Seasoning?  This is why God invented the shaker bottle.  I pour in large doses of Italian seasoning.  I let the stuff bubble and bubble, and truly it is all toil and trouble.

In the course of the day, I have lunch with the president of my Jewish congregation.  I am invited to give the Yom Kippur drash, or sermon, to the gathered.  This seems preposterous.  For I'm not in the mood.  Or am I?  What mood is required for a day of reflection and atonement?  Maybe my mood will do.  In any case, this is an honor.  And even if it wasn't an honor, it's a pat on the back, an arm on the shoulder.  So I say yes.  The day pivots on this moment.  Not everyday has such a moment.  Most days just have spaghetti sauce.  I'm glad I have taken this challenge.  I'm even glad I've taken the tomatoes.

One of my neurological oddities is the delay factor in conditions of heat/cold.  Hot day outside?  Take me into an air-conditioned room to cool me down, and you'll have a long wait.  If I was at the panting stage of overheating, and being deprived of normal perspiration I reach that stage easily, well check on me two hours later...and I will still be panting.  Maybe not quite as quickly, but the effects of heat will still be with me.  I don't know why this is.  The opposite is just as curious.  A bad chill settles in for a long run.  There's no warming me up.  It will be a two-hour chill out.  All of which I remember as I sit in my morning armchair staring at the blank television screen like an alien from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I'm staring at nothing and waiting for a change.  It will be a long wait.  Much longer than normal.  What constitutes 'a change?'  A shift in the barometric pressure?  The arrival of the Royal Messenger?  It's hard to say in Menlo Park.  The town seems more resistant to change than I am.

Where was I?  In the armchair, of course, 45 minutes having passed without incident.  Oh, there was a hummingbird at the feeder.  And damned if that wasn't a blue jay hopping down from the roof.  Thus, avian life.  There is a such a thing as daytime television.  But to see it, one has to turn the television on.  And there is simply no precedent for this.  I have not had the television on in the daytime since Saudi freelancers had a go at flying airplanes into midtown Manhattan.  Since then, the telly has been off in the daylight hours, that being its natural state.  True, the departed wife and I had a disagreement on this matter.  She was a believer in the afternoon use of televised entertainment.  Perhaps if she had stuck around, I would've become a convert.  You never know what mutual exposure will do to people over time.

And speaking of overtime, surely I have reached a sedentary limit.  No human being should be ensconced in an armchair all morning.  Yet that is what appears to be happening.  Long Day's Journey into Morning.  Which is what this is reputed to be, mourning, a time of loss and readjustment and personal reassessment.  It's also a time of 10:45 AM, evidence of which I can see on my watch face.  Big hands and little hands being what they are.  And what are they?  Pointers on the great circle of life.  Or of death.  The phone rings.  A message from my lawyer.  The answering machine booms out his morning greeting.  He is on his way.

Very important to let people know 'my lawyer' is doing this or doing that.  The presence of a lawyer in one's routine life denotes a certain level of prosperity and complexity.  There is a suggestion that personal affairs are demanding.  I have to talk to my attorney.  My attorney has to talk to you.  In reality, I can't remember why my attorney is talking to anyone.  But I vaguely recall he made an appointment to come by, and this kicks me into high gear.  I am up and rolling about, gathering papers together the way one rakes autumn leaves in Vermont.

Like leaves, piles of paper are not pure.  This particular pile, the one on my lap currently on its way to the dining room table, preferred site of paper sorting, mail opening and other life-enhancing tasks, is riddled with foreign objects.  I pull the crap out, the way you pull twigs out of a nice autumn leaf display.  Adverts, demands that Marlou report for jury duty, unwanted magazines, a massive and glossy report from a company supposedly specializing in investments.  I tilt my lap forward like a dump truck, and the pile slides serenely into a wastebasket.

I place the remaining matter on the dining room table.  Weeks of post have been winnowed down.  What's left should be like golden specks in the pan of a Sierra prospector.  Bills.  Several of these have unfortunately dived to the bottom of the mail pond.  They include outrageous demands from the local electrical power company.  Something from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.  Five hundred fucking dollars for a dermatology appointment?  Yes.  There it is, and there it is also, an envelope into which I'm supposed to insert my check.  For $500.  Fuck these people.  Nevermind about the lawyer.  Yes, he's like a walking taxi meter, the numbers spinning around whether he's parked or driving.  But I don't care.  

I am now in the phone tree, well out on a limb, of these medical provider assholes in Palo Alto.  Your call is very important to us....  I'm now in such a state that when, and if, a live, non-formaldehyded human being answers the phone, I'm going to give them a taste of their own recorded medicine.  Hello, clinic business office?  Your call is very important to me.  That's why I've been holding.  Is my holding very important to you?  What were you doing while I was holding?  Would you like to know what I was holding while on hold?  Yes.  It's a body part.  You think it's bigger than a bread box?  Who knows?  Really, bread and its attendant boxes, can come in any size.  Could be a breadstick box, couldn't it?

Oh, hello.  Are you aware that I have medical insurance?  Yes?  Oh.

So much for that.  Marlou had various retirement accounts, and one of them is a trust, and inexplicably I have been entrusted with the trust.  Is this trust misplaced?  Which trust are you referring to?  The personal or the Charles Schwab?  It can't be both, can it?  Because I don't understand any of this, and haven't made any particular effort in that direction, all I can do is empty the contents of a drawer.  Various papers from financial institutions reside there.  I add them to the pile of mail and other crap on my dining room table.  The lawyer.  I prepare for his arrival, imminent, for he can be heard parking his car at this very moment, by shuffling them into one neat pile, right angles aligned on the upper left.  Don't say I can't handle paperwork.

Without preamble, I shove the pile of receipts and investment notices and God knows what else toward the lawyer.  He eyeballs the stuff and tells me he wants to take it all away and make copies.  This is the supreme compliment for the bureaucratically challenged.  I thank him.  The papers are his.  He tells me that profits from a trust are taxed at a very high rate.  I'm not the least bit surprised, having never trusted the trust.  I must, he tells me, take profits out of the trust and put them in my own bank account.  There, they will be taxed at the special Quadriplegic Writer Rate.  I understand this too.  I tell him that the QWR is my friend.  I have long relied upon it.  That said, he says things are in order.  He leaves.  I cry only briefly, near the end, the accumulation of all these tangible pieces of death being what they are.  Nevermind, for it's over now.  And so is my lethargy.  I have wandered about the apartment in pursuit of futile goals, gotten angry at Blue Shield of California and now things are in gear, the day has begun.

Departing Seattle yesterday, my sister-in-law and nephew parked the car in the short-term structure and followed me inside.  This was an unusual move, but these are unusual times for me.  And everyone seems to sense this.  More remarkably, I did not protest.  I rumbled among the cars, down the familiar glass bridge into the terminal, making my way to the desk of Virgin America, so-called airline.  

Could I have a seat in the bulkhead row, please?  The agent, hip as could be in dreadlocks, had a go at his computer keyboard.  Yes, he said, row four.  I knew better, actually.  I wasn't born yesterday.  I was born several days before, and in the interim, critical life skills have slowly built up in my brain.  One is the retention of comfort zones aboard airliners.  In this Airbus, we are talking row three.  With a somewhat higher level of psychic comfort I would have pursued this matter.  But I did not.  It dropped.  And I made my way toward what in the perverse parlance of airports is dubbed security.  I presented my ticket, my drivers license and waved goodbye to the family.  Continuing toward Inspection Land, I looked around and waved goodbye to Debbie one more time.  I felt like a kid nervously going off to college, anxious and unaccustomed to what lay ahead.  Even though what lay ahead was nothing more exotic than the new wing at SeaTac.  The international wing.  I have been there a time or two, but this didn't matter.  Everything feels shaky.  I approached one of the nation's Homeland Security professionals, asked if he would deconstruct my wheelchair beast of burden, and watched while the ritual of laptop-removal-from-bag, keys out of pocket, hat off of head, played itself out.  I sat glum and passive while the usual indignities were done to me.

'I'm using the back of my hand.'  I looked up at the guy, a 40-something man with plastic gloves, running his fingers up and down the crotch of a 62-year-old Jewish quadriplegic in a wheelchair.  I wondered if there couldn't be some public sign at such moments, a big electronic sucker with lights that flash and text that streams words like 'THIS TRAVELER'S THREAT LEVEL ORANGE.'  Or maybe 'THIS TRAVELER'S THREAT LEVEL LUDICROUSLY LOW.'  I mean, why not?  Your tax dollars at work.

Things still felt shaky emerging from the inspection area and heading toward the gate.  Logically, I knew that I could not be in safer surroundings.  All the most dire scenarios were coming at me.  The wheelchair mysteriously stopping.  Me having a heart attack.  Or on the more plausible front, the sudden failure of the SeaTac air conditioning system, overburdened on this record-breaking 100°F day.  What would happen?  I could summon help within about 30 seconds.  This has got to be one of the safest places anywhere.  Gun-free.  Explosives-free.  Carefree.  None of this mattered.  The source of my anxiety is opaque and mysterious to me.

Having been placed in a non-bulkhead row, and conveniently on the aisle, I knew better than to take my seat.  Two other passengers were going to do the same right next to me, and in the tight quarters that constitute coach, I was going to have to stand up again anyway.  And standing up aboard an airplane being something of a quadriplegic feat, I decided to remain vertical.  Boarding passengers kept asking me if I wanted to get into the aisle.  No, I told them.  I felt like saying, no thank you, I'm going to San Francisco.  But this would be snide.  I was feeling snide.

Of course, of all the logical sources of anxiety, one would think that the actual flight would rank high.  It didn't.  I stared idly at the SeaTac runway rushing by, the southern Seattle suburbs dropping away and turned my attention to The New Yorker.  A mistake these days.  For some reason, I just don't have patience with the same sort of polemical articles I've read for years.  I borrowed the magazine from my brother, having put my own subscription on hold.  Who could not be moved, even somewhat outraged 70 years on, by the death of Garcia Lorca and the perennially oblivious response of the Spanish nation?  Me.  These days topics that once fired me up have little effect.  I hope this is only temporary.

San Francisco.  The days are getting shorter.  At 7:40 PM there are definite signs of dusk.  Passengers clomp down the aisle, their heavy bags swinging into the seats.  Children wander here and there, some looking backwards, some forward.  They don't know where they are.  They want to know where their parents are.  So do I.  More to the point, I want to know why their parents are on this plane trundling their bags slowly past my seat, when there were so many other flights available.  I wait and wait.  Finally, there is a break in the exodus.  I swing my legs into the aisle, but this is premature.  More passengers, more bags.  If Messrs. Virgin America only had the sense to not charge for baggage, their planes would empty much more quickly, I guarantee it.  Finally, a flight attendant helps me to my feet, and I make my way to the front.  

At the door there is the usual confusion.  Oh, did you have your own wheelchair?  I nod.  The flight crew on this airline are just a little too hip and a little too clueless.  By the time I make it to the door, I'm just a little too impatient.  No, I tell the flight attendant brusquely, I do not want a push chair.  An attendant has brought one to the door.  I want my wheelchair.  That one, parked in the background for reasons that are unclear.  The wheelchairs are switched.  Rather gruffly, I tell one flight attendant to hold my wrist while I step down to the jetway.  That footrest needs to be bent into the correct position, I tell no one in particular.  The wheelchair attendant bends it for me.  Everyone is looking at me, and I'm not imagining this.  And their looks are not fond.  I can see now what happens to a chronically anxious person when he happens to be disabled.  He turns into one of those chronically querulous handicapped types that turn up in the final scene of Ethan Frome.

I'm aware of this waiting for my bag to appear among those rotating into view in the luggage claim room.  A man offers to help me grab my bag when it appears.  I thank him.  He only has one arm.  I want to say something jaunty about how the two of us do so well with our single useful limbs.  But this isn't necessary.  It's readily apparent.  All I have to do is thank him, and thank him heartily.  No problem, he says.  Good.  It's not his problem I need to think about.

Sunlight creeps under the Saturday window shade, insinuating itself into my nephew's bedroom, currently mine for the Seattle duration. I do not want to be here. Not exactly 'here' in the sense of geography, more in the sense of chronology. I am single again, visiting my brother and family as in another era. Except that I am older and more, there is no other word for it, crippled. Yes, I have somehow shifted from disabled status to crippled. The reality of my stiffening, cramping and ossifying body would have been nicely muted by the presence of Marlou. All it takes is a slight change of scene to throw off what's left of my balance, strength and flexibility.

Take my nephew's bed. The Sealey Posturepedic landscape varies just enough from that of home to interrupt my sleep with major feats of reaching and turning. Peeing in the night, a routine semiconscious grabbing of plastic urinals, takes major concentration and surprising physical efforts at balance and body tilting. But all that is behind me, the morning being upon me. The day blares beyond the shade. The globally warmed summer in Seattle. Things to be done. Bathroom things. I wrench my abdominal muscles into a sit-up posture. It takes a few tries, but my torso follows. For a moment I sit on the edge of the bed watching the room ever so slightly spin. I drink some water. Up on my feet, arm in the metal crutch sleeve, and I set off clicking down the hallway.

In the bathroom there is a surprise. My sister-in-law has purchased the sort of shower chair that extends over the edge of the bathtub, allowing the disabled user to slide into the general target area of water, soap and shampoo. This is the good news, that everyone is trying to help me. The bad news is that I am an ingrate, do not want to use this or any other shower chair, and would happily spend the next month or two in a hammock being carried about by trained professionals, fed intravenously and presented with the occasional Netflix, save for moments when my keepers slip a little heroin into my veins.

Not to worry, for nothing could be farther from the current reality. I ease my arthritic self onto the shower chair, slide toward the center of the bathtub and stop. The legs of the bench are not far enough into the tub. The whole thing needs to be moved to the left. Which requires that I stand. Which is unreasonably predicated upon footing, balance and strength. Nevermind. I will have to make do. Next step, drag the paralyzed right leg over the edge of the tub and inside it. Just as I do at home. I give this a go. I hook the leg with both good and bad hands, yank and try to drag the limb up and over the porcelain. But something about this isn't working. The height, the angle, I can't say which. I grab and pull hard. The leg does not quite make it in.

'Do you want some help?' My brother has been appearing at the bathroom door every few minutes with this question. I tell him no. In a few minutes my brother-in-law, visiting from Phoenix, will ask the same question. No, I will say.

Yes, I finally tell my brother. He walks away. Maybe it's my tone. Maybe he didn't hear. This is humiliating beyond words. I am stuck getting into a bathtub. Something I routinely do on my own at home has become impossible. I yell for my brother, he appears and the leg gets lifted into the tub. I have a go at showering. My brother asks if I can reach the faucet. The latter appears to be within range, so I say yes. Anything he can do? No. Once he has left the bathroom, I strain toward the faucet, mess about with the soap and only drop the shampoo once. I respond to all dropping of things, failures of neuromuscular capacity and general fumblings with mounting denunciations of myself. I am stupid and incapable beyond belief. I try to put the brakes on this insidious tendency toward the self-destructive.

Which is why although the shower experience is less than completely satisfying...I cannot reach certain vital parts of me...this will have to do. I insist, wisely or unwisely, on getting my leg out of the tub, sliding my butt around and standing up, all on my own. I yell for my brother's help to get dressed. I have not fallen. I am in a dangerous mood.

At day's end, we journey into downtown Seattle to witness the Seafair Parade. I love a parade! I don't, particularly on this day, but this is not a good day. I seem to be drifting in a depressive fog. This may explain why I approach Seattle's busy Fourth Ave. and keep going, oblivious to the red light and headed directly into traffic. My brother yells. I come to slightly.

We find a vantage point at the edge of the parade route. Minutes later, it starts rolling by. And this procession through the city streets is so utterly American, one cannot but feel an affection. It's all the same everywhere in the USA. Drill teams. School bands, local dignitaries riding in open cars. Horses. Clowns. Ethnic constituents. The latter include Sikhs, who march along the street brandishing swords which, every block or so, they wield in mock battle. Alaska Airlines, the parade's official sponsor, appears here and there in small ways. It's a small airline, after all, and their float is just a jaunty little plywood airplane. Flight attendants march along with airline food carts, the sort of narrow rolling metal boxes normally pushed up and down the aisles. Here the attendants maneuver them in formation. It rains intermittently. We go home.

The next day finds us, all of us which now includes my sister, at the Bellevue Athletic Club. It's an executive sort of place. My brother belongs to it, and within about an hour I wish I did too. It takes a lot of athletic tape to tie my paralyzed right foot to the pedal of a recumbent exercycle. Still, my sister does an impressive job. True, the heel keeps hitting the pedal crank, and my good left foot keeps sliding out of the stirrup. But I do get sort of an aerobic workout over the next 30 minutes. If nothing else, the bike is easy to get off. This contrasts unpleasantly with the exercycle I use at home, an awkward model with a high center bar that requires elaborate maneuvering to get my foot up and over. So, just for the hell of it, I move to another exercycle here at the Bellevue Athletic Club. The workout is better, but my foot eventually slips right off the pedal. I stare at it in defeat.

Would I like to use the spa? Swim in the pool? My sister and sister-in-law are both there, all solicitous and patient. No, I tell them in disgust. This is one of those moments when it is an enormous struggle not to piss on everything, to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Okay, I say, the spa. On the way to which I am determined to shower, the morning effort being what it was. The latter proves to be the roll-in variety, a wheelchair-friendly stall at the end of the row. I am out and moving toward the hot tub, when I stop to take a look at the pools.

There are two of them, and one is only four feet deep. This minimizes drowning fear, always a considerable drag on the quadriplegic swimmer's flywheel. Furthermore, there is a disabled-friendly set of shallow steps lined with railings. I am in and do three laps before I know it. As for the spa, the Jacuzzi jets pummel my stiff neck and shoulders with penetrating blasts of warmth. Within 10 minutes, I am rigatoni. On the way out, working my way up the steps, my sister stands behind me, my brother in front. Our parents were inattentive in unfortunate ways, but both my siblings are now fully present and accounted for in taking care of me. I need to remember this. Especially since taking care of myself has become such a challenge.

I am pausing at the edge of it, staring at the empty tables as though I had left something on one of them or missed some espionage rendezvous. And yet the thing is no more than what it is, a food court in an airport terminal. Seattle. Marlou and I sat at one of those tables as we embarked for Italy last summer.

The whole thing could not have been easier. My sister-in-law drove us here for our midday flight. The Air France lounge was half-empty, and there was plenty of time for a snack. We wandered to the nearest eatery, a Japanese place with sushi and noodle offerings. We ordered soup, and Marlou carried the plastic bowls to the plastic table. The weak broth and sodden noodles had just enough green onion shavings to be credible. We kept an eye on the departure gate.

And now just over one year later, the truth about that moment comes at me as I roll my wheelchair off a flight from California. The underlying sadness and denial and fear. We were headed for Tuscany, after all, and what could be more romantic and buoy a couple's spirits higher? But there was nothing buoyant about this departure. We had our soup and carried on pleasantly enough, but we were not really taking off and up but out and down.

I can see it now, stopping en route to the baggage claim where my sister-in-law and nephews are waiting. It accomplishes nothing to sit and stare. There are no bona fide mysteries here. And people are waiting. And Marlou and I were waiting. And now I am waiting. For what? The other shoe to drop. My bag at carousel 5. Godot.

Could this have all played out better, if I had fully given voice to the dread? Could I have helped Marlou prepare better? Prepared myself better? Let's say someone had quietly presented the likely scenario. In about 10 months you will find yourself propped up in a bed, face paralyzed so that one eye will droop open while the other closes, while you either cannot hear or cannot respond, no one can say which, while you gasp away your final afternoon and onlookers gaze horrified and helpless. Check it out, 10 months. What do you say? And what do you do? Just let the horrid mechanism of life grind away? Grinding you away? Apparently. Apparently you get on your flight, get off it, get on another, then worry about the turnoff to Val d'Elsa. While the fear keeps seeping upward like water through a badly sealed floor.

And it's still seeping. Sometimes oozing fear, sometimes sadness. And beyond that an emptiness. A bunch of vacant tables, a plastic fork on one, a napkin on the other. Everyone has moved on, thousands of times, to their seats in row 12 and their uncle in Dubai or their girlfriend in Duluth. And here there's nothing.

It's a borderline cool evening in Seattle, my brother and family having gotten acclimated to the July heat. I vote for eating outside. Which is easy for me to say, having arrived in a London pullover. Why am I attired for the cool evening? Not by design. I cannot plan anything effectively these days. Eyeing my e-mail on my brother's computer, there is a message from an attorney. Marlou's estate, things need to be done. I do not know what he's talking about and make an appointment.

That evening is even marginally warm, not rainy and quite still, is a sort of July miracle in Seattle. There are beautiful things in my brother's garden. There are black-stemmed hydrangeas, a peony, a lush lawn, ambitious tomatoes and a resident garter snake with a green stripe. The latter has even molted, leaving its husk of skin under the shrubs. The folding electric wheelchair I brought on this trip for this very purpose, a portable moment outside, another portable moment elsewhere, has worked out. I click myself back and forth on the terrace, eating summer corn and northwest sausages.

Later, my brother having helped me undress, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare into the insomnia darkness. The bedside table is too low. And I am too old and too tired and too full of gin and tonic to do anything about it. My brother has already piled two telephone books to achieve sufficient height. I need to reach for plastic urinals in the night. I am still reaching for Marlou, that is the other thing. And tonight all I find is the past. The time before I visited Seattle with her, when I was single, and not happily so. My brother's house was a refuge. It was a place I visited for renewal. I didn't have a life, it seemed, but there was one here. And I am here again. I can't make the table any higher or myself any lower.

Let alone, any younger. Although recently I have been invited by no less than Virgin America, the burgeoning youth-oriented airline. I crutched my way aboard the Airbus, headed down the aisle and into a sort of cave. All the aircraft's window shades were down. Blue mood lighting seeped about the edges of the molded interior. An entertainment screen before my seat was presenting options. Television. Films. Just swipe your credit card at the bottom of the screen. Same for ordering food or cocktails. And we were airborne and the adolescent girl next to me was deep into a film, so the shade stayed down as California drifted on invisibly below us. I read. I wished I could have my iPod on and blaring while I talked to the passenger next to me while eyeing the screen of the woman next to him. Instead, I stole a glance at what the guy beside me was reading. Futures trades, a big printout of the transactions. God, but it's gratifying to see a secdurities trader sitting in coach. Trader, I wanted to tell him, why don't you try Trader Joe's?. Instead, I returned to my book. I didn't want to trade any futures. My future, however short and possibly bleak, would do.

The phone call that woke me from the rather pleasant midday sleep I was enjoying in my recliner came from no less than the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.  I'll be brief, the caller said.  Fully present in the way one can only be after an adequate nap, I responded even more briefly.  I am not giving any donations since the recent death of my wife.  Oh, I'm so sorry, and the guy was gone.  The most splendid of causes, doubtless, but that was hardly the point.  The point, or finding it, is the point these days.  Which would strongly incline one toward appreciating the worthiness of rabbinical education, and even tilt one's personal coin box in that direction, if one was making sense.  Which one isn't.  No one is.  After the reconstructionist-rabbinical fundraiser was off the line, I could only ponder his hasty exit.  My wife died, oh I'm so sorry, click.  Really, this could be a conversation opener as easily as anything.  Oh, your wife died, and are you considering a memorial gift, etc.?  Proving that whatever you do for the bereaved is wrong.  Pursue memorial gifts and you're insensitive.  Hang up quickly and you make the bereaved a pariah.  Lose lose.

Which is entirely appropriate, because it's all about loss, isn't it?  Loss and losing and being a loser.  And, no, don't argue about the latter.  I cannot lose someone and not be a loser.  The matter is irrefutable, definitional.  As for losing in the competitive sense...well, that's a poser.  Everything in American life is competitive.  There's no reason why death should be exempt.  That's why one has to continuously talk oneself back or down or sideways...into sanity.  Particularly if oneself is me.  I am a loser in that I have lost.  As for my competitive standing, I have stayed in the game much longer than predicted.

I let myself in for a staggering amount of travel this summer.  Each trip seems like a monumental strain.  But once underway, the journey is what it is.  You start here, you end there and in between you tire.  Honestly, it's no worse than life.  Bon voyage.  Meet me in Seattle.

In the bathroom, performing the morning ablutions, I grip the safety bar in front of the counter, swaying slightly.  This is the danger zone.  Bathrooms were designed for falling, and they have a gravitas about them, a matter of tile and porcelain and hardness.  They are designed to break humans.  Human bones, at least.  This is where the rubber meets the road, the femur meets the floor, and all orthopedic hell can break loose.  The question is, why am I swaying?  Morning fatigue could explain part of this.  Age another.  But I sense a different factor, the ebbing and flowing of life energy, vis-à-vis joy and depression.  Both come at me on an irregular basis, although the latter is more reliable.  Never mind.  There are definite upswings.

Take the local chamber music festival.  A friend and I wandered over to a magnificent evening of Bach and Mozart and Mendelson, not to mention the Menlo Park citizenry.  The music erupted in the most stunning ways, there being something mysterious about the quality of live sound made by live humans and shared by live listeners.  

This matter of what is live and dead is a tricky one these days.  Sometimes I consider myself dead, for reasons that are unclear.  It seems like a simple fact of looking into the future.  Near term or long term.  This must be the most essential, even banal, of human experiences, coming to grips with the finite nature of it all.  And I would think that early participation in gunfire and street violence would give me a head start in this arena.  But apparently not.  And this, or something like it, is what has me swaying before the bathroom mirror.

What gets us by.  Both statement and question.  What gets us by?  With Lorna, my morning helper, having absconded most irresponsibly with her husband to their so-called vacation cabin for an entire week, I am left rather high and dry in the sock-putting-on department these mornings.  Something defiant in me believes that one should carry on, keep up standards, even appearances.  Like a good British colonial governor who gets into black-tie
evening dress to sit down to his tropical dinner.  Which is madness.  Which is why the sensible quadriplegic goes to sleep with socks on, gets up leaves the socks on as he dresses for his day.  Is this disgusting?  Only in the eye of the beholder.  Think of them as perma-socks.  They will have a two-day life.  Their overall life will, by dint of reduced laundering, be extended.  Yes, socks have a life and a right to life on my feet.  With dressing speeded in this fashion, I am up on my feet, whatever their condition, in minutes.

Where are we?  Oh, yes, getting by.  Several of the chamber series' constituents told me about the promising debut of the local Performing Arts Center.  And there it was, joy and depression, meaning and meaninglessness, in one portentous phrase.  Only someone well down the road to eccentricity, and currently in a grief-distorted reality, would flinch.  But I do.  At 487 seats, the thing is a civic theater.  The Menlo-Atherton Civic Theatre, or, better, the Menlo-Atherton Theater, would do nicely for a name.  But my countrymen have a penchant for name inflation.  Which is allied with arts inflation.  And the result does not look promising.  Think of the Wild West with the likes of the Deadwood Opera House rising anywhere people had two gold nuggets to rub together.  Aspirations are splendid.  It does not logically follow that if you build the Cochise Concert Center the Cactus Continuo will just materialize.  Sober up, I say.  I just didn't say it to anyone last night.  Being poised on the knife edge of meaning and meaninglessness, the upbeat and the downbeat, at all times.

I am traveling a lot these days.  Rattling like a pit in an apricot.  Seeds in a gourd.  I feel that the courageous thing is to sit still.  But feelings have a way of piling up on me.  And this subtly panicky suffocation gets me up and going.  Nowhere particular, but going.  The Flying Dutchman.  The Flying Cripman.  If it's aimless, it's also effortless.  I'm drifting with the current.  At least there is one.

I would not describe it as a cloud lifting, but more like a gallstone blasting.  Or a clot dissolving.  A vessel widening.  I'm referring to the improvement of mood, opening up of emotional range and the general sense that life is moving again.  It's been about a week of blockage, the certainty that some painful knot was draining me.  Physical and downright tangible it was.  Always there, muting everything into a low-level depressed wheeze.  But I could feel it this morning, the slight change, much like the weather which has returned to the cooling breezes of a normal Bay Area summer.

It started with the bad news.  Because there has been so much bad news, that is to say, my recent souring has turned every occurrence negative, I could sense the contrast.  Lorna, morning helper and reliever of the day-starting burdens of getting dressed, particularly in the sock department, not to mention tea-preparer, breakfast-maker, exercise machine assistant and all around maternal soother, was pissing off to her mountain cabin.  For a fucking week.  How any human being would have the gall to do this in my quadriplegic hour of need boggles the mind.  However, there she was on the phone boggling away with this very unwelcome information.  See you next week, I told her.

The thing that is inexplicable, particularly to outsiders, and unfortunately even to me, is that, say just the last week, I could find a way of blaming myself for Lorna's departure.  Oh, things would get twisted around to...why am I so dependent on her...why don't I have a backup person...some form of self-recrimination and self-loathing.  But not this time.  This time I simply got pissed.  Angered at her, the situation, but not myself.  Well, not too much anyway.  This redirection of the guns of psychic war makes all the difference.  It is what counts as progress these days.

Even better, I interrupted Perry on the playing fields of Stanford, and sought his assistance.  Would he come over and wedge my foot on the exercycle?  Sure, he said, about 10 AM.  And by 10:15, damned if I wasn't going at the thing like a hamster in heat.  Heat being pleasantly absent this morning, the cool night breeze stored in the carport's concrete floor.  So, I was cycling up a cardiovascular storm, listening to the BBC Radio 4 podcast of 'Analysis' on the rapid disintegration of Pakistan...and damned if the whole Pakistan thing, the parts I could hear between the thuds and creaking of the exercycle, didn't just send me into an aggressive state.  Pakistan pissed me off.  Having to exercise pissed me off.  Having spent a morning hour of my life span paying bills and opening a week of ignored mail, that pissed me off.  The fact that it was 10:45 pissed me off.  And Lorna's preposterous absence pissed me off all over again.

Which is to say that my lower extremities were now in neuromuscular hyperdrive.  The digital readout was clocking me at a virtual 30 mph, which is not bad for a guy with 1.2 legs.  And the energy kept coming.  Angrier and faster and faster and angrier.  The legs were pounding and I was pounding my opponents into dust.  Fuck them all.  Yes, there was the usual bladder race against time.  I could feel the water pressure building.  But, what the hell, I was only wearing shorts, easy to change, easy to rinse out if necessary.  And this workout was going to go as long as possible...just short of the point of sphincter exhaustion.

Getting off the exercycle is not such an easy matter.  But a deft blow from the right paralyzed hand knocked the right paralyzed foot off its clip.  The latter fell to the exercycle's plastic base with a satisfying metal crash, as the steel clip smashed down.  Easy to twist off the good leg, stand and lift the foot onto the central exercycle bar...working it back and forth in the mysterious way that somehow gets the cleats up over and down...always a mildly terrifying moment, relying on the spasticity of the paralyzed right leg to hold me up while the working leg gets over the bar and down to the concrete.  But there was less terror this time, more eyeballing of the situation, straining to lift the foot when a little strain might help.  And it did.  I collapsed back into the wheelchair with nothing to worry about except peeing.

Unthinkable to try to maneuver my legs onto the wheelchair footrests and head indoors, with only seconds before bladder meltdown.  So, the good foot holding up its bad counterpart, I did what any sensible man would do and headed for the back garden.  That's way back, in back of the vegetables, to my landlord's patio.  My landlord being gone, his Mustang having thundered out of the driveway half an hour earlier.  Problem was, by the time I got in position, a wet trail was visible on the red concrete.  And yet, due to a miracle, something on a par with Manon of the Spring, albeit less contrived, my shorts were not soaked.  This was due to the miraculous, inadvertent positioning of personal equipment in a forward pointing direction, right under the edge of my shorts.  Okay, a splatter here and there on the legs.  But otherwise dry.  And not shamed.

Who knows what changes a mood?  I wish I could say, but one thing seems clear.  You can't avoid the dark journey.  It's like the Mont Blanc tunnel.  The thing goes on and on, and there are too many fucking diesel trucks, and the air gets worse and worse, and all that raw jagged granite is starting to make you believe in Wotan and this is all the more credible, considering that if you back out of this tunnel, you'll have to spend days driving in Austria, so there's no alternative but forward...and there it is, daylight and France.  Both good.

The day begins, as they so often do, with a massive dose of physical medicine.  At 8:30 AM, my solar plexus already drained, Lorna walks me out to the recumbent exercycle and begins the process of snapping my bike shoes onto the pedal clips.  For some reason this takes her longer than usual, and I watch her sweating and straining in the morning heat with a certain amount of pleasure.  Every moment spent preparing me for the exercycle is another moment I don't have to exercise.  How on earth do I do this?  How does a quadriplegic pedal a virtual 5 miles, according to the machine's digital screen, before he has had an adequate cup of tea?  

This adds to the sacrifice, the reduction of tea input.  I simply don't dare drink a major diuretic before beginning an hour's work out.  Lorna is squatting on her haunches, peasant-style, while she has a go at the bike shoe clip.  She shoves the thing this way and that and finally snaps into place.  Now there's nothing to do but listen to the podcast of Friday's comedy on Radio 4.  I reached some critical point in Britain on this last trip, learning just enough to appreciate more than half of the topical jokes...and now I want to fill in the blanks.  The comedy is pleasantly irreverent.  What it lacks is rhythm.  One needs music for that.  The Volga Boatmen would do nicely.  After a while, I switch to Cole Porter.  Not quite right either, but I may actually get through the ordeal with this.

Once I'm done, the chasm of the day opens and I fall into it.  But only for 15 minutes.  Perry arrives bursting with chat about this and that.  Mostly that.  He is a Stanford trainer, physical therapy assistant and all around accomplished dude.  It's just that he was born with an abundance of extravert genes.  I tune in and out of his banter.  Until I have to pee.  And then the session is over.  There is plenty to do in Menlo Park today.  The annual arts festival has the main street closed, with constituents wandering about with garlic fries, listening to rock bands and eyeballing watercolors of Carmel.  It's all happening three streets away.  But I am not happening.  I am waiting for friends to arrive and, at 3 PM, see what happens to Manon of the Spring.

Meanwhile, I have four hours of life ahead of me, time unaccounted for, unplanned and, no, it cannot all be spent reading.  Sitting and staring will take up the bulk.  Whenever I slow down, it settles in, the reality of my state of depression.  Something is knotted inside me, gripping and constricting my heart.  I seem to get into neither extreme of emotion, the desperately despairing or the ecstatic.  Things coast, gray and somewhere in between.  

Grieving people are accident prone, a social worker told me.  I keep this in mind when en route to the office with a recently boiling cup of tea, the contents slosh onto the Marlou Memorial Carpet.  Instantly, I flare into anger at myself.  Wisely, I abort the process and roll to the dining table.  Yes, there is every reason to hurry, get to work, if it can be called that, and get on with the day.  But my anger is so easily self directed, my feelings so volatile, that like a kid in timeout I need to...well, cool out.  I can't do this, and I can't do that, and as a psychologist reminded me, I can't, or couldn't, save Marlou.  So there are a few timeout minutes drinking tea at the table...then on to the office.  When will this all end?  When my friends arrive for the matinee.

We only know what has happened to Jean de Florette, Manon's cinematic father.  Manon tries her hand at revenge early in the film, with a bold attempt at arson -- but the rain saves her from crime.  Something inside me flinches.  The rain is awfully friendly to the plot of both 'Jean' and 'Manon.'  Too friendly, and it's a matter of tone.  In something openly fabulist rain-as-plot-device would not matter.  The problem comes with realistic cinema.  And I make note of this tiny quibble for my own improved storytelling.  Back to Manon.

She seems to have a moral capacity that her Provençal tormentors do not.  This restrains her revenge to the blocking of a regional spring.  And from this much good springs, and, yes, the pun is intended.  Okay, so 'Manon' runs afoul of Hollywood, with a blond bombshell starlet in the lead...and too much implausibility and bad storytelling.  Never mind.  The moral problems it tries to present still grip me.  Can human beings meter out revenge in such perfect dollops?  Assuming the answer is no, how can they get close?  Manon keeps her humanity.  Perhaps she is too young to have lost it, perhaps not.  But what I like about both films is that all characters have a quality of humanity.  Look at what we learn about César.  He once loved a woman with great dedication, it seems.  What's missing for me is how the fortuitous loss of this love has soured him, made him so callous...or does this quality spring from something else?  Ugolin is both pathetic and poignant in his love for Manon.  Every character tugs at the heart just a bit.  For me, the flaws lie in the storytelling.  The plot-device arrival of an old woman who reveals César's history in narrative seated on a village bench...just seems too pat.  Not to mention static.

Still, the interesting question: to what extent is the village truly culpable?  Theirs is the guilt of silence.  That's all.  And, we are reminded, that's enough.  All this is a great lesson, or reminder, for me.

The best way to get back to sleep in those early morning insomnia hours is to lie there and feel your way into the true state.  The fear, panic, whatever unpleasantness is seeping to the surface, that's the place to go.  Everything forces you the other way.  It's too hot.  So, throw off the bed covers.  It's too cold.  Opposite.  This aches, that aches...so shift the afflicted bodily parts.  You're going to drown in your own panic....  Fear is stabbing you like an icicle....  Whatever.  Briefly turn your attention elsewhere, then back, back to the horrible feelings, and maybe you will wake up an hour or two later with a desperate need to pee.

The same, of course, should apply to the day.  Actually, the waking hours may be worse.  Distractions abound, everything in the modern world pushing us toward escape, amusement, satiation.  Perhaps it's harder to stay focused on the bad stuff, sitting in your reclining chair, knowing that beyond the blank screen lie 400 satellite channels.  Of course, the problem with the latter becomes obvious the minute you switch the 50-inch plasma on.  It's the net energy drain, a large portion of your cortex, and an uncertain amount of your soul, neatly sucked out of your body with the precision of an Electrolux.

Never mind.  One has things to do.  Among the pressing matters are the shorts.  Not just any old shorts, but the ones you are wearing these days.  The ones that fit.  Problem is, you have been wearing them a bit too much.  And since they comprise a single item of apparel, no other options available, there's no sending them out to be laundered with the weekly load.  That's why the current project in this particular morning is to give them a nice soapy go in the kitchen sink, rinse them and hang them out to dry.  So nip into the kitchen, place the stopper in the sink and....  There is no 'and' because there is no stopper.  Neither of the stoppers, the one for the garbage disposal and the one for the other sink, are in view.  Obviously, they are around.  Sink stoppers don't just walk away.  Don't walk away Renée, you won't see me following your sink....  So, a quick glance at either side of the sinks.  Nothing.  The adjoining drawers.  Nope.  How about the cupboards?  The pantry?

There comes a point when an efficient person, one with a real life, gives up on such a quest.  After all, there is also a sink in the bathroom.  One can even put the stupid shorts in a salad bowl, squirt in some soap and accomplish this task.  But, no.  The Quest takes over.  If you play it out, and torture yourself efficiently enough, you can spend a good two hours looking for the sink stoppers.  Which don't just walk away.  Although there is no available literature on the subject.  Stopper walking.  I must speak to My Sister the Choreographer regarding one of those National Science Foundation crossover grants for the arts.

The problem is that by the time one has dealt with the morning dozes and the time-wasting errands, particularly the fool's variety, there's not much to the day.  The stoppers are still missing.  Walking only in your mind.  And the day yawns like an empty dump truck.  So, why not call up a friend?

Sure enough, the friend is lunch-compatible.  So is the mate.  And now I have a life again, luncheon with those dearest and oldest friends, Clint and Phyllis.  Of the generous hearts.  Of the adventurous let's-eat-outside-at-Café-Borrone disposition.  And damned if they haven't gotten there first.  Clint waves at me from a spot near the entrance.  I haven't quite adjusted to his slowing down, the result of a series of musculoskeletal misadventures involving his leg tendons.  He uses a cane these days.  But it's no big deal.  And here's Phyllis who has found a table in the shade...except that she has her own shade...I can see it in her stricken face.  A natural earth mother, this is one of those moments when Phyllis needs the mothering.  I can tell, somehow I can tell everything, not the details of course, but the drift.  Clint has had a recent lung biopsy.

Bad news, he tells me, as my wheelchair footrests slide neatly around the patio table leg.  I turn to him.  He says it simply.  Clint has a more or less untreatable cancer.  At first, it seems I don't have enough information, then I decide the details don't matter all that much.  What matters is Clint's expression, his ambience, the vibes.  He looks frightened, even uncharacteristically diminished, vulnerable.  This takes more adjusting for me.  We hear little about the Earth Father, but Clint is the best representative I know.

Do I have any advice?  Separately, and in different ways, both Clint and Phyllis ask me for wise words.  Surely I have none.  And wouldn't it be presumptuous to advise in such a momentous time?  Isn't it better, in the inestimable California tradition, to simply say 'I hear you?'

There's an attitudinal shift of gears.  This is new for me.  I have never been a parent and don't think of myself as a leader.  Taking charge, or even holding forth, presents uncomfortable ground.  But here we are.  And we are all in various positions on the same plain.  I tell Clint and Phyllis that household help matters.  Paid or unpaid.  I speak of my own experience.  And I point out that after 40 years of hiring help in one form or another, this is natural to me.  Suggesting that it may not be so natural to them.  Advice?  Yes.  Mild and preliminary.  Perhaps later I will have more.  For now, this will do.  As for 'I hear you,' they know I do.  This is the part that does not have to be stated.  This is why they wanted to have lunch with me today.  Interestingly, neither of them is worried about overburdening me.  They seem to know I can take it.  And that I can give.

It's this latter part that I forget myself.  Which is why the afternoon, for all its sadness, has been a gift.  Our lunch is over now, and we are all heading out for the next mortal experience.  And being brought close to the specter of death is, in this instance, oddly enlivening.  I have something to offer, some life knowledge.  And I am not alone in loss.  Which is the day's best news, even though it springs from someone's sad news.  Loss and facing the end of life have no regular place in our day-to-day experience.  Which can make grief all the more isolating.  Which doesn't make sense.  At times, I even have the sense that Marlou's death has made me some sort of loser.  It's just a vague feeling.  But living in a society that is all about winning, somehow it has become a secret that we all lose.  And what we lose is everything.

I  hasten to point out that my bodyworker is not the automotive sort, clarifying what is mostly a west coast and east coast term for massage guy...and that this guy, Ross, comes to my home, which separates him from most massage guys, not to mention automotive bodyworkers, a.k.a., sheet metal artists.  Yes, I am blessed with Ross.  He is well schooled in the art of calming, or as the practitioners say, releasing, muscle tension.  And damned if I wasn't immediately sinking into it, Ross with his table set up next to the one I dine on, me with my clothes off, tensions fluttering away.  Not without some pain, of course.  Ross has a way of digging into my scapula as though after something buried.  I want to tell him that there are no abandoned coins, oysters or truffles under my shoulder blades.  But he digs anyway.  A spade and a crowbar would feel about the same at times.  But not the aftermath.  There's a lightness about my heaviness in the wake of Ross and his kneadings.  And a profound relaxation.

Which makes it all the more strange that long after Ross departed and I had slept deeply, my eyeballs bolted awake.  It was 3 AM, and do you know where your children are?  Dancing about the ceiling with hooves and sharp tails.  Something had jolted me into wakefulness, and it was not going anywhere.  Not soon.  Not at 4 AM or at 5 AM.  And why?  The bodywork.  That's my answer.

'How's the tension level?'  I already knew the answer.

'What have you been doing to yourself?'  Ross told me my body was a mass of knots.

And, okay, so with the unraveling of the knots comes...no sleep?  Apparently.  The body awareness end of psychology holds that we retain all sorts of emotional energy in our tensed flesh.  Some practitioners can draw a sort of psychic map of the body and its stresses.  I can only nod dumbly at such observations.  But I do nod.  There is truth to all this, even if I don't understand it.

So, there I was, eyes bugged out of my head, wondering if the ceiling was 10 feet from the floor or 9 3/4 inches from the floor.  And thinking that there really was a way to measure the problem without getting out of bed.  A laser.  That's what was missing.  That or maybe a really accurate GPS system.  SatNav for the home.  Just a matter of bouncing beams.  And what was radar but bouncing beams?  Like a rubber ball, I come bouncing back to you.  You, hoo-hoo.  Bouncing, bouncing.

Some describe insomnia as boring, but this is precisely what it is not.  Boredom is fatiguing.  This is stimulating.  Annoying, but stimulating.  Yes, the difference between 4:35 AM and 5:11 AM, revealed in successive glances at the bedside clock, may seem dull as tofu, but the experience is utterly captivating.  After all, there's enough to keep you awake when every cell in your body wants to sleep.  Fascinating.  And, what time will the carport light automatically switch off?  Its beams are visible through the open door of the bathroom.  They flood the hallway, brighten the night, all night, well, not quite all, on account of the timer.  Somewhere there's a electric timer.  Actually, one does not really know this.  The electric timer is assumed to exist, its workings visible, no invisible, but one cannot prove this.  One could place a bet on 6:15.  But one might lose that bet, the timer being an imprecise mechanism, one supposes.  And dammit if it isn't 6:12 glowing on the clock screen, and the big moment will pass or not pass.  Just keep an eye on the hallway.

At which point, the night's critical mass of anger reaches its latest crest...the previous peak having come half an hour before.  Which suggests, in the nocturnal rhythm of insomnia, an acceleration.  Because when you think about it, and I now am, transportation is never profitable.  It's too capital-intensive, according to this guy on the old Amtrak Reform Council.  Really, and when you add up everything, say, publicly funded airports, air traffic control and the other tax-support impacts, air travel is a loser, completely dependent on public investment.  Which is why this anti-tax movement in California is so risible, Marlou.  Really, it is.  As though high-speed rail ever made a profit anywhere, including the Chunnel trains...or absolutely any trains run on a schedule.  And, Marlou, however you grew up, surely when you look at the modern world....

Quite remarkable how long these pseudo-conversations with the deceased can go on.  But this one has halted.  Because it's after 6:30.  Which is utterly infuriating, so galling that I pound the pillow next to me.  Yes, well, not completely ignoring the former occupant and her unceremonious departure.  I pound and pound.  After which I'm tired and need a little rest.  After which it's 8:45, and I've had a couple of unexpected hours of sleep and...I sit up and make my way to the wheelchair.

Grief?  Most of the time it feels like wading through a shallow, septic and featureless pond.  Unless one is slogging uphill on a cross-country skiing trek.  Which isn't a trek, by the way, but an open-ended circling of some unremarkable geographic feature, like a nameless hill or rusty water tank or, if life is terribly rich, both hill and tank.  Wade, wade, circle, circle.  The whole thing is not only Sisyphean, but tiring.  There is some level of fatigue unreachable by sleep and a quality of purposelessness that does not admit of remedy.

'Don't expect to get anything done.'  This from the social worker at Jewish Family Services.  Good advice for the recently employed person.  And any person who feels impelled by the work ethic.  Actually, it is quite remarkable what constitutes a current workday.  That is to say, the number of things one can do in a 24 hour period has shrunk.  In many ways, this feels like the most indulgent phase of my existence.  I am responsible to no one and no thing.  Messrs. Social Security now contact me on a regular basis, infusing my bank account on a reliable intravenous drip.  All I really have to do is get up in the morning, not slip in the bathroom and eat.

If I can be said to have a project, it involves the latter.  I am trying not to eat, at least not to eat anything that has any food value.  Staring at the bathroom scale, the part that is visible beyond my waistline, memories of youthful derision pop up like targets in a shooting range.  The older crowd, all of them now dead, were so concerned with dieting.  As though not eating was a purpose.  They are laughing in their graves.  I am waddling off to begin my day.

There are three things to do.  Count them, three.  I never set my sights on more than three things, because the burdenous weight of, say, four things would crush me utterly.  So, the three...call my friend about lunch on Saturday, phone SuperShuttle regarding a lift to the airport and return the battery charger to the Romanians.  Can these things be done?  How many steppes are there in Central Asia?  Surely the caravans set limits...a 12-steppe program...some way of making the journey seem possible.  It's just humiliating to settle for three steppes, and it's even more humiliation when you don't know what a steppe is.

Lunch.  The friend isn't home.  Message on the mobile phone.  Done, mildly exhausting, but the limit reached quickly.  SuperShuttle.  Which airport?  Does she want my phone number, I respond?  I don't want to make this call go on, and on and on, when all critical data is stored under my phone number....  Airport, she demands?  Fuck her.  The limits of my  patience run out almost instantly.  It takes a deep breath, staring at the ceiling...and no, this is the right flight number, I tell her.  And fuck her again.  No, that's not the number, she insists...and okay, it's one of these stupid flight numbers for an airline selling tickets on another airline...a Delta flight operated by Northwest.  Which makes as much sense as a surgical procedure conducted by Dr. Smith but actually performed by Dr. Jones.  Dr. Smith will bill you, by the way.  You needn't worry about Dr. Jones.  He will only appear after the anesthesia.  I want to tell the SuperShuttle woman all this, but she is busy making mistakes.  She reads my reservation back to me, and it's one month off.  Oh, she says.

The Romanians prove to be more entertaining.  Summertime, and the livin' is not easy when the spinal-cord-injured person, deprived of normal sweat response, roams about the Menlo Park suburban center under the lap weight of a battery re-charger.  I have in recent months invested heavily in the matter of battery charging.  I've purchased two devices to amp up my wheelchair, one for 110 V current, another for 220 V.  And now, shamed by the AAA truck guy, I have decided to acquire another.  It's a little charger thing you plug in your home, keep full of power, then attach to your battery-dead van or car when needed.  Why am I so obsessed with battery death?  Kind of a no-brainer, I would say.  This way, not only can I count on the towtruck, but I can count on the Black & Decker charger in my bedroom.  Except that the latter makes this squealing sound.  I have read the manual, thought about the matter and concluded that I need to talk to the Romanian owner of Menlo Park Hardware.

Michel is my kind of guy.  He knows that American-style customer service means you jump on any need, fill it, then head for the cash register.  But he has sufficient Eastern European sense to understand that you can do these things without smiling.  He is attentive, swift and grim in an existential sort of way.  He eyeballs the Black & Decker box, extracts the instructions and wanders to the front counter.  'Is good,' he tells me, 'see, no light flashing, just solid.'  I agree with him.  Somehow, maybe because he has encountered grief in his own life, having lost, if nothing else, his homeland, none of this annoys me.  In fact, I am all patience.  Look at my grave nodding, sympathetic and sincere.  The light is solid, I agree, but unfortunately it is red.  I do not draw the obvious parallels to the traffic mechanism outside.  Michel is back at it.  Push that buttonj, I urge him.  The thing begins to squeal.  He shakes his head.  He gives me a refund.

What do any of us want but a refund, or the possibility of one?  Marlou and I invested so much in learning to talk to each other, particularly how to deal with anger.  And what do we have to show for it, but the end of 'we?'  Maybe someone can show me the ROI.  But for the moment, the balance seems blank.

I am early for the monthly meeting of the Caltrain Advisory Committee.  Early and nervous.  I have missed two meetings this year.  Miss a third, so the rules go, and I'm out of a job.  Problem is, I'm out of the country in August.  I stare glumly at the audience waiting for the meeting to start.  Marlou encouraged me to join this body.  She wanted the best for me, saw what the best was...and encouraged me to stretch.  And now it's come to this.  Whatever 'this' is.  Which turns out to not be much.  A quick word to the committee member to my left, mayor of one of the Peninsula towns, and she pipes up.  We don't need an August meeting, she says, and do I hear a motion?  All I hear is emotion.  But I come to my senses long enough to second the thing, and I'm off the hook for August, on board for the year.  And Caltrain still loves me.

What's funny is that this is not a joke.  This feels like loving acceptance, my officeholder's reprieve.  It is nothing of the sort, just a worldly manifestation of power.  But these days everything is about feeling, particularly feeling or not feeling, loved.  Which is part of what makes grief so confusing.

It's a good day when the urinary effects of morning exercise do not manifest too soon, when the one-hour bout with the exercycle ends without incident...and this was such a day.  One learns to be grateful.  By contrast, one remembers yesterday.  How approximately 55 minutes into the ordeal, the bladder made its presence known, and hasty efforts at snapping the foot from its position locked into the right foot pedal proved frustrating, then difficult, then impossible.  Which resulted in desperate maneuvers, pushing one pedal against the other, during which the entire left foot pulled itself out of my bike shoe.  The latter dangled clipped to the pedal as though in mockery, eroding the quadriplegic's sense of safety and increasingly religious belief in the general philosophy manifest in Monty Python.  

Not that there was much time for laughs, racing as one was against urinary time.  One foot locked in place, the other shoeless and useless, and me all alone in the carport.  Making one grateful for, in this particular circumstance, shorts.  Not hard to maneuver the shorts up a critical inch or two, maneuver the personal equipment down, and pee off to the side.  Well, not exactly the side, more the front.  But not my front.  The exercycle's front.  Shameful, disgusting, but personally dry.  And, still, of course, trapped.

'Hello.'  I called out to the landlord across the way, a 75-ish woman, fit in that California way, just parking her Mercedes for some quick business with the tenants.  We have always been on good terms, passing acquaintances, me waving, she smiling.  And doing this for about 15 years.  She heard my call, wandered over and kicked my foot free.  I was most grateful, assured her I could take it from there.  And that was that.  Not a big deal.  Maneuvering the left non-paralyzed foot into the shoe, then standing...and despite the perilous moment when I drag the foot across the exercycle's center strut...over soon enough.  I was free.

As for the puddle of pee under the exercycle, well....  Quick dash inside for a little water, brief rinse down of the bike.  And the newspaper recycling bin being close at hand, what better to soak up the evidence?

'Can I help you?'  This from the landlord getting back in her Mercedes.

'No, thank you.  I'm fine.'

'It doesn't look like you're fine.'

Oy.  I was at the worst possible juncture in the pee mopping up operation.  There were all these newspapers, sodden.  And there was she, what's her name...I don't even know...grabbing them and stuffing the urine-soaked newsprint into the recycle bin.  What could I do?  Humiliating?  Of course, but this all represented great progress.  I had peed on the machine, not myself, embarrassment be damned.  And then I had asked a stranger for help.  Too much help, it turned out, or maybe not.  Humiliation does, after all, lead to humility.

Which brought me inevitably and fatefully to Jean de Florette.  The Netflix DVD had been sitting about since May, it is embarrassing to report.  And having paid two months' rent on the thing, it was long overdue to finally shove it in the player.  It did not take long to feel something like a thrill.  The Pagnol story springs from the same honest roots as his other stuff.  And, yes, it's all about springs and roots.  The heat and aridity of Provence feel tangible, the protagonist's struggle to scratch a living from the parched earth grueling....  And he is a disabled guy, a hunchback.  More specifically, he is a dreamy disabled guy, which puts us in similar territory.

Gérard Depardieu's Jean, the crippled hero, never mentions his disability until desperate conditions mount, his family faces starvation and ruin.  And then he is outside, raising his fists at the sun, reminding God that it's very difficult being a hunchback.  And wouldn't it be just to cut him a little slack?  And in the sun-baked Provençal silence, Jean de Florette complains there is no one there.  And all of this is utterly familiar to me, the desperate bargaining, shoving the disability aside until moments of extremis.  Even the disabled urbanite, now faux farmer, desperately schlepping water via mule day after day in the merciless sun...for anyone with sympathetic nerve damage and poor temperature regulation, this is powerful drama.

And yet, there is the other thing about Jean de Florette.  He never gives up.  Or to put a finer point on it, he never loses a sense of possibilities.  Hope may vanish, but not options.  A curious distinction, perhaps a false one to many people.  But I have no doubt that Jean is past hoping.  There is no God.  At least, there is no God for hunchbacks.

Jean's tormentors run afoul of his endless optimism.  The evil neighbors hatch plot after plot.  Jean keeps turning every nefarious scheme into a positive way forward.  Despite his ultimately fatal naïveté, one can only admire his stumbling on.  I identified with this too, a quality people tell me about in myself, but something I tend to shrug off.  The dreamy survivor.

As for the film's evil...well, it felt unpleasantly realistic and true to life.  Jean is overly trusting.  It's the intuitive daughter Manon who knows what's going on, but at eight years old she is powerless to intervene, of course.  Meanwhile, Jean's wicked neighbors are forced to come face-to-face with his goodness, perseverance and decency.  In certain moments, one of the tormentors wavers in his endless lust for land, admitting that Jean has become a friend.  They get too close to him, I believe.  And what happens next in the decades-later sequel Manon of the Spring?  I'm already enjoying some speculation.

The casual rustic brutality of the Provençal locals must give way to something else.  Surely certain essential, primal taboos have been violated here.  Getting so close to Jean and seeing the workings out of their plots upon his family must undermine the evil duo.  

I wonder if Pagnol believes in karma or something like it.  I wonder if I do.  Actually, having seen a few serious films by Woody Allen in which people seem to get away with crime...the plots don't quite seem credible.  Maybe it's the human sense of guilt, or maybe it's something collective, or maybe it's something bigger.  I have always assumed, and perhaps deluded myself, that the three young men who shot me in 1968 paid some sort of price, that in the sum of their lives, they did not get away with anything.  I can offer no logical reason for this belief.

In any case, I wonder if Manon will simply get her revenge decades later.  I doubt that anything will happen 'simply.'  And I predict that the neighborly intimacy with Jean will somehow lead to the undoing of his evil tormentors.  With Pagnol, so grounded in his storytelling, whatever happens in the next film is bound to be both interesting and credible.  Maybe even illuminating.  Actually, I can't wait.

Step #1

Become a quadriplegic.  This is difficult, but it is not impossible.  See Appendix.

Step #2

Prepare your vegetables.  Note that Trader Joe's will prepare your vegetables for you, vis-à-vis Trader Joe's Mirepoix, $2.50 cheap -- but not sporting.  In fact to be truly in the spirit of the endeavor, grow your own.  At least your own onions and garlic.  Carrots?  Buy the colorful ones at the Sunday farmers market.  Celery is celery.

Onions in their natural state come attached to an enormous stem, a.k.a., onion top, which makes the crop easily transportable but confuses the issue.  The issue: what is edible?  Are you supposed to eat the green part, like a spring onion?  How springlike is an onion you buy in the summer?  What about a spring onion you buy in January?  If you tend to think about these things, have someone deal with the onions for you.  Chop off the tops, dispose of them in a distinctly non-compost way, and get on with it.  Getting on with it is very important in making pea soup.

Growing your own garlic is fun, unless you bugger off to Europe around harvest time and return to find that the green garlic tops, pointing like a street sign to the subterranean treasure, have withered, even rotted, into nothingness.  Other crops have displaced the garlic airspace...which means you will have some frantic digging to do.  Never mind, for a head of garlic is unmistakable, even with dirt clods on it.  In fact, all you need do is shake off the dirt and roll inside for your Garlic Preparation.

Place a head of garlic inside a small plastic bag, seal the bag and place it under your left wheelchair tire.  The big tire, of course.  Roll forward.  There will be a crunching sound, but do not be alarmed.  If you must, really must, open the bag and look inside.  You will find that the first tire roll did very little but separate the cloves.  Roll back and forth a few more times to actually separate the peels from the cloves...and the men from the boys.  This is a gratifyingly macho activity, and it doesn't hurt to yell various things like 'die you garlic fuckers' while you roll about with your wheelchair.

Empty the contents of the plastic bag onto a plate.  Yes, it looks a bit chaotic, but so did early Jackson Pollock.  All you have to do is separate peels from garlic.  And, okay, so there's probably a little dirt in there too.  There's probably a little dirt everywhere.  Don't worry about it.  Cleanliness is not next to godliness.  Cleanliness is next to San Diego.

Once the garlic is peeled and crushed, you will feel so good about yourself that the rest of the cooking process will occur almost naturally.  Carrots are foolishly designed with green tops and stringy root ends.  No problem.  Bite off either and with your teeth.  That is correct.  This is a dental process.  Is anyone looking?  I should hope not.  Quadriplegic cooking is no one's business.  What happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen.  The alternative to end-and-top carrot biting involves the use of a knife.  This is to be avoided.  If God had intended quadriplegics to use knives, he would have given them fingers.  Which means, of course, bite not only the ends but the middle...in fact, bite as many times as necessary.  If you fear the addition of saliva to your recipe, rinse the suckers off.  Remember, no one need know.  And if they ask, refer them to the soup.  Which, I assure you, will be very good.

Celery, onions...well, here one must cede ground to the neurologically complete.  Briefly, very briefly, grab a knife, stab each onion on a cutting board with nails sticking up (a standard rehabilitation kitchen device, believe it or not) to stabilize things.  Then cut the onions into quarters, slipping them free of their peels.  The celery...either bite or cut...it takes as long either way, the stuff being so stringy.  Then move on to automation.

The Cuisinart.  This is a Serious Machine.  It is French.  The French invented other Serious Machines such as the guillotine.  So don't buy a wimpy little Cuisinart.  Get a big mother.  Throw all the vegetables described above into its maw and then: press 'chop.'  Don't press 'on,' because your big macho Cuisinart will, within a couple of nanoseconds, reduce all the vegetables to subatomic particles.

Step #3

Meat.  The trick is to worry a lot about this step.  In fact, don't take a step unless it is a guilt-ridden step.  Why guilt?  Because you have made efforts, albeit nominal, to be something of a slightly practicing Jew.  And you know, just know, that pea soup is inescapably German, and that other inescapably German thing, a.k.a., schwein, can be avoided the way scones spurn Devon cream.  You need the ham hock, known in the UK as a ham knuckle, if you are to make a credible pea soup.  The trick is to make the ham hock/knuckle kosher.  How to do this?  The technology may not yet be available, although this is not entirely clear.  I believe the answer is in development and under wraps and will appear shortly.  Meanwhile, in the absence of Pork Koshering Technology, one will have to settle for virtual PKT.

Step #4

Purists will insist that you must add peas to pea soup.  Very well, have it your way.  Dump in some dried peas.  Okay, add some broth or something.  But to be really cool, and to give the sense that you actually know how to cook -- throw in some frozen peas at the last minute.  Frozen peas are, you know, green and bouncy.  They will make the soup feel green and bouncy.  So set off for Trader Joe's with frozen peas in mind, and by the time you have bought some cooked brown rice, noted what's new in chicken burritos, seriously considered the fresh batch of Stilton and thought hard about another bottle of wine...you will have forgotten about the frozen peas and return home without them.  Never mind.  You didn't need them anyway.

Step #5

Cooking is the easiest step of all, the one that requires the least effort and absolutely no knowledge.  Plug in the crockpot.  Slightly differently, plug in the slow-cooker.  You've heard of slow cuisine?  Well this is the slowest.  In fact, expect your pea soup to cook overnight.  Even for a week.  Don't rule out a year.  And maybe for the entire Obama Administration.  Go slow, that is the general quadriplegic rule under any circumstances.  This pertains both to cooking and to....

Step #6

Eat slowly.  Remember, there are many little bones in the Koshered Pork, and because you have committed an obvious transgression, you can count on those bones to drift to the bottom of the cooker, leap invisibly onto your spoon -- then lodge directly in your gullet.  Be careful, and if you're not too stressed out, enjoy.

At times it feels like a lump, at others like a clenching.  A knot.  A giant walnut or a small cantaloupe.  Whatever the words, it's a physical presence, the emotional mass I carry around inside these days.  Grief?  Oh, I suppose.  Although the word is rapidly draining itself of meaning.  Whatever resides in my chest, okay, lower chest/upper belly, feels like a permanent resident in my body.  Alien.  No visa, no work permit, and as foreign and entrenched as mistletoe or truffles.  Definitely parasitic.  The alien mass is draining me.  This morning, my friend Laurel and I set out for coffee at Peet's and three blocks later my wheelchair sat parked in front of a streetlight, my foot braced against the pole.  Needed a rest.  Too much strain.  This is how it's been.

The mass of sadness/pain occasionally punctures like a balloon to drain a couple of drops...my teary moments...but mostly it stays inflated, full as my quadriplegic bladder.  Except for interludes.  One came this afternoon, just after a one-hour dose of exercycle endorphins, followed by a spell of meditation in my front room, after which I came to and found myself in a much improved state.  Downright euphoric, albeit short-lived.

I want people to leave me alone.  I want people to be with me.  I want them to talk, but I don't want them to say anything.  Get out of my face.  And run your hand along the side of my face, soothingly.  You have no idea what I'm going through, and why don't you give me some ideas?  The balance these days, the best achievable, comes with my leg off the lamp pole and back on the wheelchair footrest, the two of us rolling toward coffee, me present and absent, craving human contact and irritated by human company.  Laurel has been talking about dog breeders and the oddity of their relationships with animals.  The prevalence of chain-link fencing strikes her as harsh.  At this moment, it strikes me as nothing.  I cannot register the emotional tone in anything.  I have become emotionally tone deaf.  Caffeine may help.

It does, slightly.  Laurel and I have been arguing about clothes.  I tell her that I cannot buy them on my own, lacking taste, oblivious to style, rather dim when it comes to color, and so on.  Though there is one exception, Marks & Spencer.  I can wander into their premises, fumble about and come away with something acceptable.  Laurel tells me this is pretentious.  No, I say, this is me and Marks & Spencer is JCPenney in Britain and...what do I mean?  I am working my way down a Peet's mocha and somewhere near the bottom, where the chocolate settles and things get granular, it dawns on me.  That at age 22 I was buying my own clothes for the first time, M. & S. was what there was, and fortunately the stores are still around and so am I.  Beyond that, I am making no sense.  Nordstrom, Laurel reminds me, is a good place for California guys to shop.  I nod.

My straw hat is worn out.  Laurel lets me know this as she nears the end of her latte.  I once had an in-house consultant who advised me of the wearing out of garments, their disposition and replacement.  Now it's Laurel.  This is the woman who introduced Marlou and me, and although I am inclined to argue about the hat on grounds of pure feistiness, I drop it.  The hat can be re-woven, Laurel points out.  As the possessor of a portable loom, her credibility in this area is high.  'Hawaiian Prince,' reads the blue band about the hat.  A vestige of an early visit in Waikiki while visiting the in-laws who live over the mountain in Kaneohe.  Even at its best, the hat reeked of touristic irony.  I decide to renounce my Hawaiian Princedom.  I will throw in the hat.

Post-coffee, Laurel wants to walk through the center of town.  We may find a new hat along the way, she says.  I roll my eyes.  Menlo Park is what Marlou called Tiny Town, a suburban main street that runs to Afghan carpets and walnut furnishings, and is rather short on mundanities such as straw hats.  Never mind, I will let Laurel have her illusions.  I notice that the African carvings boutique is going out of business.  The whole street will be out of business soon, I fear.  Oh look, says Laurel as we approach the hardware store, hats.  I glance across the street.  Women's, I assure her.  Straw boaters and garden gear.  Laurel wants to take a look.

Romania produced Eugene Ionesco, an old physicist friend Irvin Friedlander and Menlo Hardware.  The Bucharest proprietors have stocked the small shop like Noah's ark.  There is one of every kind.  And in the preposterous way of things, there is a hat, a hat that is better than my current one and, if Laurel is to be relied upon...one that suits me better than its Hawaiian Prince predecessor.  I glimpse at my reflection in the store's plate glass.  It will do.  The hat is more expensive than my current one, also more tightly woven, more permanent.  It represents a step forward.  A releasing of something that was never meant to last.  It has to be done, and now crossing Santa Cruz Ave., I have two hats, but not for long.  There is a rubbish bin at the corner.  I attempt to stuff the old straw hat inside, but a street musician intervenes.  He wants it, I want him to have it, and now I want to tackle the next barely surmountable summit of the day.  Laurel and I are striking out for Safeway.  And I can see it, the next objective, no less exhausting than any other, but limited in scope, achievable, and some might even argue, necessary.  I am going to buy some soup.

In my last days there, the University of London residence halls acquired an overwrought, tropical feel.  Devoid of air-conditioning, my wing of the block boasted an unfortunate combination of glass and sun.  During the northern European winter the effect must be salutary in that weather-defying modern way.  It is probably fun to watch wintry blasts denude Bloomsbury's plane trees from the warm side of a plate glass window.  

But not in June.  At least this particular June, when London had its first heat wave in ages, and I made my nightly way back up the glass corridor to the sauna of a room.  To keep me late night company as I undressed, I played Radio 4 or the comedy on Radio 7.  I needed company.  Not only was the room close, but bad feelings were closer, closing in.  The whole thing felt fetid and septic and a good place for bed bugs.  

Jake, my cousin's son, mentioned the latter, how there was something of an epidemic about London.  I woke each morning to red welts on my legs and knew the ugly truth.  The bugs, bed bugs, the insect vermin which infested Leslie Caron's L-Shaped Room, had also infected mine.  With the oppressive quality of the night heat, the faux tropical Petri dish of a bathroom...it was all to be expected.  I regretted not showering on my day of departure for the States.  Perhaps if I had had a final go at bathing before the flight back, I would not have brought the infestation home with me.  But it was too late.  In Menlo Park, I awakened to more red welts.  And unless I was seeing the obscure symptoms of disease, and this was not to be ruled out, the bugs had come home to roost.

'Let's have a look.'  I pulled down my trousers.  The dermatologist shook his head.  He wasn't hard to read, this guy.  He pulled off these 15-minute skin inspections on a regular basis, often blasting away at my forehead with his can of liquid nitrogen.  I liked him, liked him quite a bit, particularly liked him since he kept nipping things dermatological in the cellular bud.  We would chat about his holiday, my holiday, then go our mortal ways for another six months.

He was talking to me now with that grave, head-shaking tone that was all credibility, diagnostic prowess and doom.  What he was seeing in the contrasting white and pink of my welts, note the outline...surely we could skip the Introduction to Skin 1A...these were all telltale, not to mention classic, indications of hives.  Like for bees, I wanted to ask?  My addled brain already drifting in the general direction of the bee shortage, problems with pollination and California's almond trees....  

I looked up at him.  It's nerves, isn't it?  He slowly nodded.  I buttoned my trousers, told him about Marlou's death.  The morning sagged.  He leaned against an examining table, folded his arms, stared at the floor.  His father had died of melanoma, he said.  That's why he became a doctor.  His wife dying...he couldn't even imagine.  Outside, a metal cart rumbled down the hall.  Well...he was filling in a slip...come back in six months.  

'I guess this bruising comes with age.'  I held up my forearm, showing him the dark purple spot.  My 83-year-old father in law bruises this way.

'Take aspirin?'  The dermatologist was back at the form, pen scratching.  Yes, I said, I did take aspirin, two pills a day.  Another nod from him.  Yeah, well, it's mostly the aspirin, slightly your age, partly sun exposure on the forearm.  Hand this to the receptionist, he added.

And having had two reprieves in almost as many minutes, having evaded tenement insects and taken two decades off my dermatological age, what was there but to roll into downtown Palo Alto and kick up my quadriplegic heels?  I deposited Marlou's beneficiary check in my investment account.  The burden had been lifted from this day.  And it stayed lifted.

In the late afternoon, journeying with Marlou's visiting parents into San Francisco for dinner with their niece, I stared down the Caltrain tracks into the sun.  A sliver of sun began dancing around my eye, growing jagged in a frightening and familiar way.  There's a history to this, a detached retina, and dark blobs of blood still floating around my eyeball.  But history is history.  This particular pattern, I had learned, meant an optical migraine was in full gear.  About which there was nothing to do but avoid my usual panic.  And get out of direct sunlight.  And believe in tomorrow.  Dick and John and I headed up Fourth Street to the restaurant, and at some point not noted, the glowing incisor teeth pattern of the optical migraine simply went away.

'So you found each other late in life.'  Outside it was March, and inside my office it was me, two nurses, one hospice social worker and the Angel of Death.  We crowded into the small space with equal readiness.  Medical veterans all, we were highly adaptable.  A meeting was wherever life jammed you at any particular moment, with or without chairs, comfort or, of course, sleep.  Everyone had gathered to discuss Marlou's dying...how much pain...how much dosage...how much longer.  

And how was I?  Crying, of course.  My defenses had grown as thin as my aging skin, easily going purple at the whisper of a bruise.  I said the same thing more or less each time I got in a small space with the hospice team.  How could this be happening just as life was getting good?  The fiftyish nurse Kaye mentioned the found-each-other-late-in-life angle, thereby collapsing another emotional floor, one of the endless levels of loss and tears.  She pushed a box of Kleenex my way.

Like a fireman in a burning building, step the wrong way, the timbers collapse, and you plummet from the substantially bad to the incredibly worse.  For I could feel it now, how our romance always had this bittersweet just-in-time quality.  And now there wasn't even time.  Loss of childhood, loss of body, loss of wife.  And I wonder, wonder, wonder, who, who wrote the book of love....  Because I know who wrote the Book of Job, and he or she, or more likely a Republican committee, is a vile mother fucker and is going to pay.

The pattern of recollection, the way things come at me from the past, the thread unwinding...this must be honored.  Which was why this morning as I stared blankly at the tea brewing and the kitchen dawning and the refrigerator humming, there it was, Marlou's redwood deck.  In the first couple of years we dated, me taking the train to and from Sacramento, she driving the freeways to Menlo Park, we saw a lot of each other's homes.  And in the years following her divorce, Marlou's backyard had fallen into decay.  

Gazing through her bedroom plate glass there was, she said, in that tangle by the back fence, a hot tub.  I could see nothing.  Marlou assured me it was a ruin.  To my left, along the splintering redwood boards that separated her property from the elderly woman next door, there had once been a vegetable garden.  I could see no evidence.  And in the foreground, just outside the window, was the deck.  Redwood, fabled for its longevity and virtual immunity from weather, was not supposed to look this way, steps broken, boards collapsing, paint flaking and nails emerging.  The Deck of the Hesperus.

Marlou rolled over in bed, put her arm around my shoulder and said things had been hard since her divorce.  This was a no-no, letting the property go seedy.  Marlou, whose interior-decorator bedroom was all about drapes and bedspreads and carpets that worked together in ways I could barely grasp...for her, the lapse of maintenance, the descent of landscape architecture into ruin...all of this must have been hard to bear.

Yet life has its dissipation, its entropy, its depression.  Sometimes the road to ruin leads to knowledge.  And things have to fall apart.  I can see that, understand it, but the insight would be bearable in someone else's story.  Somehow in Marlou's...and by extension mine...this truth seems crushingly sad.

And there is more to it.  Marlou had joined a Sacramento woman's group.  Led by a psychologist, the weekly therapy sessions could only have been a milestone.  Marlou's parents subscribe to the flinty, American conservative self-sufficiency ethos.  Which, it must be acknowledged, can get you and the oxen through a sod hut winter in Nebraska.  But possibly not without the neighbor's help, even if the neighbor is 15 prairie miles away.  And so, now it comes to me, the story unwinding, how Marlou asked her women's group for help.  Would they come by and lend a hand in the garden?  

I wasn't present the day this question got asked.  I know nothing more about it.  But I knew Marlou well enough to know that asking for help was very difficult.  The divorce...the abandonment of the home Miss Haversham style...needing psychological help, not to mention practical help...this is how we become.  It's how Marlou became.  How I became.  The burden of sadness about it...well, somehow that's me...and like radioactive waste or formaldehyde in a mobile home...it just takes time to dissipate.

At 7:30, something in the morning shifts, the pleasantness of Monday and unemployment curdling into a sort of personnel meeting with Robespierre in the Revolution's conference room.  Guillotine?  It's in the next apartment.  The simplest morning tasks have, for the second day in a row, spun out of control and grown monstrously.  I am chained to the toilet.  I cannot leave.  Nothing is wrong, no gastrointestinal problem, just alimentary business as usual for the quadriplegic.  Abdominal muscles are handy for all sorts of things, and in their absence one has to just, well, wait.  Yes, things are on the move, but they are moving slowly, like the German army at the outskirts of Moscow.  Things will advance, but in a good time.  And there is no good time, only bad time, for I have to be on the 8:39 train to San Francisco...and for the second incredible day...I am fucked.  Incompetent.  Cursed.  Although there was plenty of time...but now and then even plenty is not enough.  I'm cursing myself, and the more I curse, the more objects spring from their resting places.  I drop washcloths.  Bath brushes.  Towels.  Mouthwash bottles.  Razor cords.  And this is my life.  It is an accursed life, and it is getting worse, and 8:00 is approaching.  And Caltrain waits for no man.

And by the time I get to the station, in plenty of time I must add, my life is no better.  If anyone asked me what would make it better, I would have no answers.  I am in a state, in a mood, and this condition seems to feed on itself.

Which is precisely what a San Francisco friend explains to me.  These self-defeating rages are not just patterns, but chemical events, neuropeptide festivals.  And when you've got a bad act on stage, do what you can to pull the amplifier plug.  Which is obvious advice to many, but not to me.  Doubtless there are reasons, but for the moment they don't matter.  This is a time to listen to the friend, open up and go home to the suburbs sadder but wiser.  

There are things to do, of course.  My fingernails.  Back in Menlo Park, I roll into Sky Nails, present my ragged fingers for inspection, and Mai plops them into the bowl with the mystery fluid.  She chatters in Vietnamese to her colleagues.  I wonder what she is saying.  Once, apropos of nothing, she looks up and tells me I am looking thin...maybe I am not eating since Marlou died.  For this alone, I decide she deserves an enormous tip.  I let her do the forearm lotion massage thing.  No, she does not need to wipe the stuff off.  You never know when you might need a little forearm lotion.

What is going on?  In my few sane moments, I ask this question.  What is happening?  My mood swings wildly, hourly.  At the heart of it is some working out of the mortal condition.  How we are here making the husband's coffee latte, foam hissing in the kitchen, and the next moment we are reduced to a small cold box on a shelf in the pantry.  How someone can be opening their heart and yours, then vanish.  I know all this, or my mind does, but everything else rejects the facts.  All these strange unsupportable thoughts...that I might have done something to keep Marlou alive...that I don't deserve a life...and did I deserve a wife?

It keeps coming at me, particularly in sidewalk-bouncing trips, especially the ones headed home.  We are mortal.  Love and security can slip out the door.  I am moving along the south side of Roble Ave., steering clear of familiar sidewalk cracks and tilted sections of concrete.  Getting used to dying.  Getting used to love going.  And somewhere in the distant future there may be the other thing.  Getting used to living...however long.  And love arriving.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.  Not that there is any other side.  The one extant is mine.  Marlou's side, once the site of shared slumber, amorous activity and death, is now blank as a sidewalk.  So there's my side, neither right nor wrong.  Good morning, good mourning.  Things started going wrong early, that is what I'm trying to say.  I had these tickets to the opera, and I was going to see the end of the season, the final matinee, La Traviata on jetlag.  This required nothing much of me, only that I get up, get dressed and either hit the train or hit the road.

Which?  Rails or asphalt?  These days, both seemed fraught.  On Sundays, Caltrain runs on an hourly basis, and the trains stop at every tree on the Peninsula.  A slight miscalculation on the way home can result in a 55 minute sojourn in Milbrae, gateway to Burlingame.  As for the drive, that seemed even more formidable.  The battery in my van had gone dead, according to Tom my landlord and personal protector.  So an AAA towtruck would figure in the journey, and maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.  Get the van jumpstarted, drive to San Francisco, and after 70 miles on the freeway, coming and going, the thing should be charged.

Such were my options as I made tea, listened to NPR drone, and tried to feel good about Sunday morning.  I had not slept well.  Saturday's Fourth of July party was quite pleasant, but I didn't like staring at a familiar Palo Alto backyard without Marlou.  A quiet rage drifted into my consciousness around 5:30 AM, and there was no getting back to sleep.  And now Sunday morning, having started unpleasantly early, was progressing in a functional way.  Things were taking too long, yes, and the unpleasant combination of jetlag and chronically bad balance was making me feel woozy.  But, what the hell.  Shower completed.  Underwear and socks somehow on.  Green gabardine trousers off the hanger, moving up the legs and ready for closure.  Just a matter of slipping the little metal thing into the other thing, then buttoning the button.  

Bound to be a bit of a challenge.  Definitely put on some weight during the month away.  Easy matter of lying back on the bed, pulling the waist tight.  Even better, lying back on the bed and resting the legs on the seat of the wheelchair for best stomach-flattening effect.  Better try that again.  And again.

By 9 AM, the train option was looking bad.  The trousers...well, by 9:15 what was there to do but give up on sliding the metal hook into place and just fasten the button?  After all, I had a quadriplegic button hook, which came in handy, although it was quite a stretch.  The real stretch, of course, having occurred in my abdomen.  And there were certain images coming at me now.  Wiltshire sausages, fried potatoes, Queen Mary china plates whizzing into position like flying saucers; London evenings of vindaloo curries, onion bajis, stuffed nan, Oxford blue cheese, Lincolnshire poacher cheese, Gloucestershire cheese.  Not to mention McVities plain chocolate digestive biscuits.  The latter are thinly coated in chocolate the way a good drug pusher thinly coats heroin.  And all these English foods were now marching at me like Grosz caricatures of fat and grotesque burghers.  And I was one of them.  My half fastened trousers could only partially zip.  Good thing my cotton pullover could be pulled low.

And where had the hours gone?  I had been awake since the dawn of time, missed the train, and now there was barely time to get my fat self out the door to wait for the towtruck.  The AAA woman on the phone asked if I was in a safe place.  No, I wanted to tell her, my home was not safe.  I was enraged most of the time, and particularly this time, and it was not safe to be here.  Twenty minutes, she said.  I hung up.  My belly hung out.  This was going to be a long day without exercise.

The towtruck guy got my hood open, clamped jumper cables on his truck and mine and stared in puzzlement.  My van demanded too much power.  This didn't surprise me.  With a hydraulic lift designed to raise and rotate over 400 pounds of wheelchair and lead batteries and human cargo, the latter expanding, my van deserves its own electrical substation.  To even function, it requires two robust batteries.  The AAA man shook his head.  I would need a new battery.  He looked at my tires.  I would need air.  He began poking around the engine.  

Sadly, I regarded my watch.  Yes, there was the opera.  But before there was, or was to have been, the psychologist.  We were meeting just a few blocks away from the Opera House.  I had already phoned to say I would be late.  While the AAA guy went at my engine with a spray can of something, I pulled out my mobile phone and canceled the shrink appointment.  After a month of grieving madness on the road...the New York road, the North Atlantic road, the Gloucestershire road and the London road...I needed an hour with a psychologist.  Perhaps a month.  What I did not need was anymore opera, having achieved all the grand lyric passions with excessive frequency and entirely on my own.

Okay.  The AAA guy was snapping shut his tool case, asking me to sign the credit card slip for the new battery and giving me leave to depart.  I ascended the hydraulic lift and for the first time in five, maybe six, weeks, started the engine of my van.  I was going to have to drive.  Routine enough, rolling through the leafy streets of Menlo Park and Atherton.  Accelerating for the freeway...the 65 mph reality settling in around me.  Fuel.  When had I last been to the service station?  Surely there was enough gas in the car.  I mean, this was 5 July and sometime around the end of April hadn't I filled up?  The answer should have been simple enough, but in my van the especially adapted automatic transmission shift obscures the gas gauge once I'm on the road.  

Well, it does not quite block it out.  Surely just by craning my neck to the right...or maybe the left...I can see how much fucking gas I have or do not have....  A car honked.  I had swerved out of my 65-mile-per-hour lane.  Another attempt to glimpse the fuel level, another swerve, and I was driving recklessly without even trying and without even drinking.  And it was 35 miles to San Francisco, the concrete cruel as sandstone.

And something was happening with my foot.  Something vague.  Not that things with my left foot are ever definite, everything there being neurologically numbed.  Some sort of slippage.  Of course.  I hadn't tied my shoe, just pulled the laces as taut as possible on my own, one-handed knotting being a very advanced occupational therapy goal, sort of the Eagle Scout level of quadriplegia.  And the freeway was getting even faster, crowded with more people speeding to the opera or Aunt Claire or the Rod & Tackle Show.  And with my foot slipping around in the shoe, the difference between the brake and accelerator and life and death were becoming mushy.  All the basic questions were coming at me, along with the concrete teeth in those grooves ground into the pavement.  Like what if it all ended now?  Life stopping the way a newspaper tears, the edge sloppy and ragged.  How much had been completed?  How much had been missed?  And all because of my shoes not being tied.

Because I can see how it will end, my foot slipping out altogether, going for the brake and catching the edge of the loose shoe now upside down.  In the final desperate moments, sock sliding along the accelerator...and because I can see all this, and am acutely aware of how it will happen, it doesn't.  Hypervigilant, adrenaline-charged I make it to South San Francisco, even Van Ness Avenue.  And it can't be an accident, the name of this street, not after the morning's harrowing ride, which is all about vans and vanness.

There was a sign in the lobby of the University of London residence halls explaining which unwanted personal items could, at the end of term, be donated or recycled.  Absolutely no traffic cones, said one notice.  They are iconic, as emblematic of an era as gaslights, and in the hightop disabled van space by the Opera House parking structure, an orange traffic cone is blocking the space.  Fuck it.  I drive right over the thing.  I am parked.  I am alive.  And because I am too late for counseling, but too early to meet my opera friends, what is there to do but find a latte?

This seems the noblest pastime, sipping a latte on Hayes Street.  I fumble through the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle looking for the Insight section, can't find it, decide it doesn't matter.  It's time to head for the north door of the Opera House anyway.  I roll across Franklin Street, and the bouncing of the uneven pavement jars loose inside me the thing that has been building, stretched over the hour the tow truck guy took to do his job on my car, enhanced by the white knuckle drive north and now manifest in all its fullness.  My bladder.  

No way I will make it to the Opera House men's room in time.  There is no way I will make it past Hayes Street, in fact, not without a smelly yellow stain flooding my too small trousers..  Failure and shame and humiliation heading toward me on the sidewalk.  But fortunately there are not many people, and although I am in plain view, and the occasional pedestrian will stroll by, I jam my wheelchair against the stage door of the Symphony Hall, stand up, unzip and pee.  This is a moment of supreme liberation.  I could be arrested.  But I will arrive in jail dry.

The night I arrived home from London, my first stop was the garden, and a quick glance at the tomatoes and the bursting squash, remnant potatoes and assorted weeds...not to mention the California poppies run rampant.  After that, something sagged in my spirit and there has not been a repeat visit.  Until today, Saturday, 4 July, when I had another look.  There is a point of garden engagement, some progression that makes the state of the vegetables, their physical supports, the diseases that threaten the crop and the weeds that offend the eye, all of this become so compelling that there's nothing to do but grab a trowel.  

I can't remember how a human being ever got to this point, staring at the tomato crop.  Cherry tomatoes are hanging in ripe array.  The medium-sized Celebrity crop is moving from dark to light green.  The big ones, their name long forgotten, are approaching huge.  I stare at all of it, pull at a nominal weed which breaks off in my hand, the insidious root still grabbing at the earth.  And I go inside.  The tomatoes do not matter.

I wonder why they ever did.  There was a time, doubtless the last growing season, when all this was exciting.  The quadriplegic tilling the urban earth and making it fructify.  The gopher mound bursting to the surface like a submarine periscope...and my landlord and I going at the enemy with every depth charge available at Menlo Hardware.  The mysterious mowing down of lettuce and the revelation of the squirrel attack squad.  The bitter rain of acorns upon the fertile ground.  All of these things once constituted agrarian drama in my own backyard.  And now I stare at the two raised vegetable beds as though they belong to someone else.

Barbara, my English cousin, gave me a book by Bruce Chatwin describing how Australian aborigines sing their world into existence.  It is highly appealing, this cosmology, for it acknowledges that reality is a matter of perception and the product of active human will.  The aborigine goes on his walkabout to ensure that creation will continue.  It's a big job, and someone has to do it.

When there is a partner in the house, when the house itself relies on two human support columns, each leaning against the other, there is a structure.  There is also a plan for the day, one for tomorrow, and probably a 10 year plan for the improvement of you, developed in secret and yet to be announced.  Dinner and when it happens and what it comprises need not be a concern.  What's the plan?  Whatever the answer, there is someone to ask the question.

There's more to it than being single, for I have been single before, and this is like nothing yet experienced.  It comes at me as a daily shock, how a human life can be uprooted and cast aside as easily as a weed.  Leaving behind all these remnants.  The Marlou shrine of photos has long since been dismantled on my dining table, but that leaves at least five portraits scattered in various rooms.  And it leaves questions.

Marlou's toothbrush, why does it stare at me?  The answer, get rid of it, never crosses my mind.  The wooden expanse of closet doors in the bedroom approximates the shape of an old Cinemascope movie screen.  I might as well buy some popcorn and sit and stare at the thing.  Marlou's clothes hang inside, and despite my natural obliviousness, the thought of seeing the puffy orange blouse she often wore...well, creates the strangest sensations.  Grab the hangar and hold the blouse in the liberating air, and maybe Marlou will fill it.  Or let it remain in the closet hanging next to the other lifeless cloths and feel the ghostly absence.  

My landlord's mother died at least 12 years ago, and he has never emptied or rented her apartment next door to mine.  I used to find this borderline ghoulish.  Now I can't blame him.  Yet the removing of clothes no longer worn, the shifting of objects no longer needed, the placing of hands upon the saddest evidence of loss...it seems thineeds to be done.  There's a ritual quality, like singing the world into existence or out of existence.  In any case, Chatwin knew he was onto some essential truth with the aborigines.  It's just that the prospect is a tiring one, singing my next life into existence.  The next phase of life promises to be an even sadder one.  But without active effort, it will be a paler one.   

By noon I have gone through the worst of a month's mail, but not alone.  Melinda, a paid professional in the area of mail and countless other office matters, has come in to move things along.  They need moving.  Or, more precisely, I do.  I stare dumbly at the pile of bills, checks, government notices, advertisements, periodicals, concert tickets and books...that constitute the June postal experience.  Even after 90 minutes, we are not done.  Melinda makes an arrangement to return.  But not without snapping my bike shoes into the exercycle.  I am back in physiotherapy-muscle-stamina-land.  As soon as my hips start flexing, calves start pumping and the general quadriparetic machine gets going, reality changes.  This is the path toward overcoming jetlag, regaining energy and blasting out bodily aches with a good dose of endorphins.  This is the missing link in my travels to Britain, and a gap I mean to close...one of these years.

By 1:00, my body is exhausted and invigorated, Danielle arrives to cut my hair, then Perry unfolds his padded table and begins an hour of post-exercise physiotherapy, stretching my joints back into their proper range.  What a productive day, one might say.  But I don't.  These are routine, background matters, and they are done now.  And it is 3 PM, my apartment is empty, and my overdue lunch...well, there is plenty of food about.  I could make a sandwich, heat a tin of soup, yank something from the freezer.  All of which seems too much work.  Which is frightening, the way my world is narrowing.  When did opening a can become such hard work?  Well, it has, and I stare out the office window considering next moves.

I've been gone for a month from Menlo Land, and there's something agreeable about returning to old haunts.  Peet's for caffeination, baristas who know my name, and meeting the occasional acquaintance.  Or Café Borrone, which offers much the same to a predominantly younger crowd, under umbrellas, and what my cousin Caroline calls al fiasco.  Which to choose?  The answer comes at me with exhausted certainty.  I do not care.  I cannot decide, because there is nothing to decide.  

These were places I once went to get a break from the pressures of work or relationship.  And with Marlou gone, for the first time it strikes me how empty an exercise it is, making my battery-powered way along the streets and up the curbs to sit and stare at lunch, then reverse the process.  In the disabled person's quest to minimize time and motion, I know that wherever I go, the dry cleaning must go too.  But not now.  I don't care about dry cleaning or coffee or food or the sunny terrace restaurant or the coffee center or anything.  I care about the song going through my mind.

'Anywhere I wander, anywhere I roam, till I'm in the arms of my darling again, my heart will know no home.'

The sentiments seem so corny, the lyrics so banal, the whole thing embarrasses me...and yet the sweep of the mournful melody will not let me go.  I know the song is from my aunt and uncle's 1959 shelf of records in upstate New York, and the web reveals the rest.  Sung by Danny Kaye, written by Frank Loesser from the film 'Hans Christian Andersen', something I must have played during my six months away from California while my parents got divorced.  A lonely time of secret abandonment and hopelessness.  And the qualities of the music, who knows?  A Jewish singer, a Jewish composer...and maybe wandering and roaming and the heart finding its home...maybe this is in the blood.  Maybe it is not all so hokey after all, and certainly it doesn't matter.  If the heart finds its voice in the wrapper from a Big Mac, so be it.

And while the web is a splendid musicology source, and the day is perfect in its mild warmth and gentle breeze, a decision hangs in the window.  I can see it forming in the carport.  Stay in or go out?  Open can or open road?  With such low expectations, so little at stake, soup in the outdoor café does not disappoint.  I prop up my leg and attempt to read the San Francisco Chronicle.  Fortunately, my expectations being what they are, the ghostly newspaper, its blood thinned or drained, does not appall me.  One of the nation's great metropolitan dailies has shrunk to the stature of a toadstool.  Of course, I will continue subscribing.  They need all the dollars they can get at the Chronicle.

'Fucking Frogs', says the tavern proprietor of the Huguenots overrunning London.  'Fucking Micks', the publican says in the next scene.  'Fucking Yids' the barmaid observes as the vast stage makes room for another century.  And so it goes in the National Theatre's 'England People Very Nice', a rambunctious 2 1/2 hour tour of 400 years of immigrants.  And at the end of the evening, what was there to do but talk and argue and thrash out the issues of the day with my London cousins?  British theater is alive in this way.  

And this year's BBC Reith Lectures deal with Britain and America's lurch toward super capitalism and how this has damaged the 'civic project'.  The most fundamental questions confronted on a state-run national radio system...which now broadcasts on seven different channels, each running 24 hours a day, from the Orkneys to Penzance...and does not include the BBC World Service, which manifests in languages around the world...the Farsi version being the only source of real news in Tehran these days.

And what does this have to do with the soup of the day at Café Borrone?  Just that these are my thoughts.  Everywhere I wander....  My cousin Caroline has actually read Barack Obama's book, putting me to shame.  And when there is no individual to care about, no current 'we', there is still us, humanity.  It's everywhere.  Everywhere I roam.  Even at Walgreens, where the pharmacist has an insidious way of discovering the moment my health insurance lapses.  He denies this, denies that the drug chain's computer is not somehow linked to the insurer's.  Never mind.  I do not press the point.  My health insurance has been reinstated...just a bureaucratic shift following Marlou's death...but there is a bigger point.  Something I read in a friendly letter from the State of California.  As Marlou's survivor, I have health insurance for life.  Which in America, is something of a miracle.  But the miracle has its limits, according to the State.  And if I remarry, the insurance goes away.  Completely, forever.

And this is what I think about rolling up and down the aisles of my next stop, Trader Joe's.  That I am very lucky.  And what the fuck are we doing to the 'civic project', to use the Reith lecture's phrase?  How can health insurance turn on one's marital status?  Why should a couple of tubes of athletes foot ointment cost $10 as Marlou's insured widower, and $138 for the average citizen?  Everywhere I wander...past the frozen Indian food...among the sliced pineapple...and out the door, I care.  And at times, even the lonely times, it seems that in one way or another...my heart will find its home.

There always comes a time in the course of the 11-hour flight home from Britain when I ask myself why I am doing this horrible thing to my body.  Fortunately, that point came late in the most recent experience.  With some help from my nephew and a lifetime of not-quite-frequent-enough flying, I was in business class.  For once.  If there was ever a time for such a thing, this seemed the right time.  And despite that head-lolling moment near the end of the flight, when too much sitting combined with too much synthetic fabric and plastic and entertainment screens, after 9 1/2 hours or so...well, there was only a bit left.

Because I'm heading back in five weeks for a bit of UK touring with Marlou's nephew Eliot, it's important to summarize lessons learned.  Business class is all about foot rests and seats with adjustable lumbar supports and backrests that tilt into a near recline.  But all of this requires two hands, and even two legs, to use to any effect.  Not to worry, because the other thing about business class is a staff ratio that has flight attendants within easy reach, coupled with a service-intensive atmosphere.  But I'm not exactly used to this, and even half fear too much help.  Fear?  Well, loss of independence...the humiliating revelation that I am a 62-year-old cripple.  I like to think that I can still stand up an airplane and make my own independent way to the lavatory.

Which was why, at around hour eight with the abstraction of Hudson's Bay drifting by cartoon-style on the video screen map, I began the struggle for the toilet.  This always is a matter of some concern, the urinary experience at 39,000 feet.  I drink as little water as possible to avoid too many trips to the cramped airline toilet.  My constant fear is that I will relax too thoroughly, wake up from a nap and find that urinary matters have progressed to a crisis point...and in the space of a couple of minutes I have to get up on my feet, down the aisle and into the loo.  And this may or may not be possible.  The distance from seat to toilet represents one factor.  My fatigue level represents another, for not only do I have to be up but managing the balance issue as I move down the aisle.  No one wants a middle-aged quadriplegic toppling on their tray table, do they?  And in the worst scenario, I suddenly have to pee just at the moment that the flight goes into those telltale bumps and sideways jolts that make the pilot intone the seatbelt warning.  Trapped, seat belted, urinary urgency...the horrifying possibility of peeing into my pants, the cushy business-class seat dripping...oy.  Just the thought is enough to get the fearful quadriparetic unbuckled, sliding forward in his seat and preparing to stand.

The thing is, there's more to standing than standing.  In full light with the plane parked at the gate, say, rising to my feet is challenging but possible.  The seats are low, my energies challenged, but it's doable.  When the cabin is darkened so passengers can sleep and watch movies and the moving plane is making the occasional tilt, the whole thing changes.  Flight attendants, one in particular, kept telling me to ring my bell, ask for assistance, whenever I needed anything, including standing.  But standing?  This seems like such a minimal requirement for human activity...asking for help every time so degrading...I commence struggling in the dark.  Contrary to everything known about human psychology, I employ the most familiar and least effective approach.  I berate myself.  Stand, you fool.  Move.  Come on, idiot, up.  Now.  And so on.

Naturally, in the artificial twilight caused by too many closed window shades and too high expectations of the videos, I fumble.  My hand shoves against the armrest one moment, slides along it the next.  I try to grab something to push against at the base of the seat cushion and repeatedly slip.  Even in the darkness, this does not go unnoticed.  A male flight attendant appears.  How can he help?  Grab here, I say.  I have to pee.  I accept defeat.  

Inside the toilet, there's blood.  I seem to have scraped something, apparently my knuckles, and dragged bleeding fingers over my shirt and along my cheek.  Which occasions further self-loathing.  Staring at myself in the mirror, toweling at my face, trying to get the blood spots off my shirt, I decide I wasn't meant for business class.  I don't fit in.  This is for cool people.  Not uncool guys with blood on their shirts...and this would be an excellent time for me to finally accept some of the free alcohol flowing about this part of the cabin.  Unfortunately, I keep rejecting offers of cocktails and wine and God knows what else.  Why drink something that stimulates the bladder?

All of which stimulates thought.  There's plenty of time for thinking on flights.  Especially in view of the appalling array of films United Airlines is offering on eight channels.  So, my own movie unfurls...and there are some high moments.  Particularly, back at Heathrow, when I had a sober discussion with an airline agent.  I don't want to be stuck in the baggage claim at San Francisco with a power wheelchair that doesn't work.  Don't push me down to the SFO customs hall in a manual wheelchair and expect the Filipino escort to reconnect my battery cables.  I want someone there to help me.  Help me get the wheelchair reconnected, intact and running.  No problem, said the agent.  I heard her phone in the request right then and there.  He's in business class, she added, a superfluous bit of information that obviously wasn't.

There's a moment that keeps coming back to me.  I was arriving at the University of London residence halls last week and waiting to register.  There was one attendant and two windows.  Where should I be?  Which window?  I turned to Jake, 27 years old, and speculated that I was waiting at the wrong window.  No, Jake said.  We would wait here.  But what if I was at the wrong window?  Jake turned to me.  Wherever you are, Paul, it's the right window.  The attendant is at the wrong window, he added.  I made a mental note to stick with Jake.

And, flying eastbound, I will know better.  Let the flight attendants help me.  Take advantage of the posh travel.  It may not come again.  

And this may not come again, either, the arrival at SFO.  Never mind that SuperShuttle always tells me to phone them when I am actually out at the street.  I was still on board the airplane, nervously waiting to see if my wheelchair was rolling or reduced to rubble, when I called the van people.  SuperShuttle asked where I was.  I lied.  Just picking at my bags.  Which explains why rolling out of the terminal, I saw it, shimmering like a mirage.  A blue SuperShuttle van lowering its wheelchair lift.  I was home by 7 PM, 3 AM London time, but home.  Okay, so my bag was ripped.  There are limits to the strain a suitcase can take.  My friend Arnie helped me unpack, and we barely discussed the suitcase.  There are other suitcases.  There are other trips.  And there is more to come.

Which is really the issue these days.  When I awaken at 4 AM...not too bad, considering it's almost lunchtime in London...I seem to be asphyxiating.  I can't get enough air.  Which isn't at all true, but I worry that I can't get enough air.  I think about what my physiotherapist has told me, how I must maintain range of motion in my chest.  Which has nothing to do with my current experience waking up in California.  The chest stretching is good advice, but I am currently beyond advice.  I have awakened in panic.  I had this sensation when I was shot 40 years ago and lay in a hospital bed getting used to the effects of a half-paralyzed chest.  Diminished respiration was new then...but in the ensuing 40 years, it has become second nature.  But not now, because now there is not enough air.  And what is there to do in a state of panic but find another state?  Like the waking state.  I sit up, watch the room spin slightly, turn on the light and listen to California going bankrupt.  The radio news is oddly reassuring.

Soon I am up, considering tea and remembering that to hear Radio 4 all I have to do is get to the BBC website, turn on my stereo...and there is, and will be, more to come.