Confusing

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.