Everywhere....

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.