September 2009 Archives
What did I have to talk about except Marlou's death and its aftermath and, in particular, traveling in its aftermath? It loomed for weeks, this bit of work. I went about the thing assiduously. Chatting with a rabbi. Reading a book or two. Writing a text, then reducing that to notes, then to whatever mental pattern would help me remember what to say and how to say it. My drash, or sermon, went well and I went out the door feeling satisfied, having crossed one range, heading downhill toward...the flats between the ranges. Odd that this level area seems so indistinct. Equally odd that I don't seem to pick up much momentum on the downslope. Shouldn't I be coasting now, everything effortless for a while?
Because this last Drash Range seemed awfully steep. I suppose the reasons would seem obvious to an outsider. I was writing and speaking about the stages of my grief. Every time I would mentally run through the talk, timing it, adding or subtracting something from my notes, I would find myself in a swoon and either nap or try to.
Monday, in giving the drash to my congregation, I could feel my own turbulent emotional state, how chronically overwrought things feel, how this seems to have become a way of life. So, on a day in which there seemed to be plenty of time to read a newspaper, open a book, meet with a friend and run through the drash...everything else would fall away. I would get to the drash, the drash would get to me, leaving newspapers unread, phone calls unanswered, friends ignored.
And what does it matter? After all, it's been six months, I keep telling myself. While others who have been down this road say, forget it. Even after six years, life won't be the same. And while I'm absorbing this bit of bad news, what about the next range? What hurtle am I facing? Trips, dealing with Marlou's possessions, writing a new book? The truth is I can't see any major slope ahead. Life for the moment does not seem to tilt upward.
So has everything sunk downward? I had that distinct feeling sitting before the Yom Kippur congregation and going through my tale. Yet the people who heard me had nothing but reassuring things to say. No, I did not sound down or crushed. There was plenty of energy in my voice and being. But things feel chronically sad. And mortality is everywhere.
I argue with Marlou. I am always trying to make a larger point, establishing some worldview. The smaller point, often having to do with regional politics, is just a learning tool. Marlou needs to be guided, by me of course. And as a learning piece, I generally offer up matters of, say, Bay Area transit or medical care or education. Giving things a manageable focus, then expanding into the larger issue.... The much larger issue of Marlou's deathly absence seems to elude my arguing self.
Sometimes I think we have unfinished business. Sometimes I focus on Marlou's unfinished business, which was no more unfinished than anyone else's.... But I feel the sadness of a life uncompleted. Whose life? After all, Marlou can't feel sad about this. And once I'm gone, I won't feel sad either, about my life or hers.
A pervasive sadness. The sense that important things will end up shockingly incomplete. That life will be ripped away from me with the most ragged edges showing.
Fairly early in Marlou's cancer saga, certainly before the midpoint, suddenly she began to have pain. This came on a Saturday afternoon. And we had a typical exchange. With the afternoon wearing on, and Marlou's pain not wearing out, I suggested it was time to head for the Urgent Care department at our clinic. No, she wanted to tough it out. Well, I suggested, toughing it out was going to get tougher as the medical personnel numbered fewer, particularly after 5 PM. No, she wasn't budging. Her pains were getting sharper and occurring more frequently, but she would handle it. In the best Cando American tradition.
I am a sort of amateur introvert compared to the professional-class introvert embodied in my wife. As her pain worsened, it was never clear to me what was happening to her anxiety.
By 8 PM, I was loading her into my van and heading for the clinic. Saturday night. Small staff. Big demands. All the meshugas of the week's Big Night Out was sitting in the waiting room of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Eventually, Marlou made her way into the treatment rooms. I read, then reread, a magazine or two.
When I was allowed inside Marlou's area, she was drugged and dozing. A bowel irritation of some kind, the doctor suspected. Nothing cancer related. This last part did not surprise me. Marlou had just had a PET scan, and the cancer was lurking and doubtless openly recruiting for additional forces. But right then, the cells hadn't spread. But what had spread, I was convinced, was fear. Terror, in fact. And as I observed Marlou's night I saw a real rage bubbling out of her pain.
Around midnight I drove us home. It unnerved me to see Marlou walking through our familiar environs like a staggering drunk. She was heavily medicated. It was all understandable. The terror. The rage. And the drugs. Hard to accept. Hard to avoid.
It was only about a week before her death that Marlou told me how frightened she was. I'd done my best to keep the emotional channels open. I kept raising the topic, telling her I would be terrified in her circumstances. Yet she barely confided. And tragically, all the pieces fit together. The irritated bowel, which Marlou had as long as we'd known each other. Anger and anxiety and whatever else, swallowed down and driven into the gut.
And there is, and never was, anything wrong with any of this. Everyone has driven some dark feeling out of sight and into some harmful place. It's just that Marlou and I never had the time or opportunity to bring light into this particular darkness. Marlou brought plenty of light into my life, and I into hers. I only regret that there wasn't enough time. Or that we didn't make the best use of the time we had. It seems that death is too big to consider. But the incompleteness of life...well, eventually the psyche can wrap itself around that.
According to the program notes, Coward's original piece was indeed brief. A very short one-act became a wartime film. Which I have never seen and don't particularly want to.
Middle-class Brits meet in a railway station. They meet again and have tea. They meet elsewhere for chaste moments in a cinema and a park. They meet some more and things get un-chaste. And fearing that they will be outed, the lovers say goodbye. Set in 1938, it's all happening on the brink of war, in an era of stifling social convention. And if the story sounds at once timeless and dated, and you find yourself politely suppressing a yawn, well that's understandable. The Cornish director of the production at the Geary understands this completely.
By the end of the two hours you have been invited to examine every creak in the creaky story. Which was once a period film...and begins as a period film, with scratchy footage displaying the British Film Censor's classic mark in a grainy print complete with scratches...taking us into a scene deep within the story in which a husband laments his wife's remoteness...and an audience member at the Geary stands, says something to the woman beside him and she flees up the aisle and he mounts the stage and steps right through the film screen. In seconds he is in the film's story, which is now on the stage, and so is she...the two of them meeting for the first time in a railway station. The station café with its poseur of a proprietress, a waddling charwoman, the railway platform guard and assorted others, provide comic relief in moments, an uncomic chorus at others.
At one instant we are laughing at the café matron with her rockhard Banbury cakes. At the next moment, as feeling between the soon-to-become lovers mounts downstage, grainy British waves crash in black-and-white period footage upstage. And somewhere in between, the café proprietor and station crew make deliberately stiff, long-armed bows in rhythmic obeisance to the waves...and if they are mildly mocking the proceedings or waving in the romantic current, we cannot tell. Nor do we know what is happening with the next romantic crescendo, as the man and woman are fumbling their 1938 way toward a kiss and the café crowd humms a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. Or, later, beyond the kissing stage of the romance, when the waves crash, they also throw up black and white stars, while the café matron matter-of-factly plucks shiny golden stars from a tea tray and throws them over the lovers' heads.
Romantic. Schmaltzy. Late 30s restrained. With all these tones acknowledged in a way that could be mocking or amplifying, the story continues. It's love. It's frustrated. It's doomed. It's beautiful and sad. While life around it, and reactions to it, carry on as they will. And the lovers do not care. And we care about the lovers, or maybe we don't. But emerging from all this...we care about their love.
When the catwalk descends once again from the fly...sometimes serving as an upstairs at the woman's home, at others as a bandstand and now...a place from which the heroine seems to be lowering herself into the darkness.... Which suddenly isn't darkness, for a stage-wide projected passenger train is crossing. And will she throw herself off the railway bridge? No. After all, we have met her children. Human-sized puppets dressed in pajamas. They jar us backwards from any sentimentality concerning kids. We stare at them, puzzled by the adult actor's voices. No, there is more life to come. The officious platform guard reveals himself not only announcing his train, but guiding it across the stage, a big wooden model choo-choo, lights blazing. And soon it's only the film screen with the Rank Organization or British Pathé or some sort of period version of The End.
And even now it's not quite over. For no one can say what sort of exhilaration sends the Geary crowd to its feet. Or precisely why the audience is being applauded by the cast. Things are being turned at an angle for better viewing. And beyond historical period and mannerisms and lost ideas of what is profound and clichéd notions of the romantic...there is what? The antic human imagination and capacity for invention. And at the core, eternal love and loss.
I fly into action, which consists of scanning the environment for authorities. The latter are usually very much in evidence, this being the suburban epicenter of Menlo Park, the police station only 500 meters away. In fact, I have half a mind to roll up to El Camino, the main thoroughfare, and actually a flag down a passing cop. I have half a mind, full stop, being spacey and preoccupied from recent rabbinical discussions of death. But the very mindlessness creates a sort of barrier-free metal state in which I do things instinctively. And this is one of them.
Damned if I don't spot a uniformed woman striding past the railway station parking lot, just behind me. Surely she is wearing the wrong sort of uniform. It is an oddity of American life that law enforcement is scattered across a wide bureaucratic landscape. This woman could, for example, actually be an Amtrak police person. She could also work for Caltrain, most likely handing out parking tickets to absent commuters. It is impossible to tell what she is, but although I can't quite catch up with her, I do yell out a plea through her passenger-side window. I know this isn't your jurisdiction, I begin, explaining the brazen wheelchair-ramp infraction. I notice she has the emblem of another party to the policing game, the sheriff's office of the County of San Mateo. God only knows what laws these people enforce, why she is here, and what she can and will do about the miscreant at the corner. She shrugs and says she will ring the Menlo Park Police.
The truth is that there is nothing blocking my progress. There is another wheelchair ramp pointing at 90° in the same intersection, it's midday and there are virtually no cars about. And this is one of those California suburbs where even the so-called rush hour is easy to miss, population density being low and few houses exceeding one level. And yet I can't wait. I can't wait to get this guy. Whoever this guy is, this intersection blocker who, it appears, is inside the animal boarding facility. Or maybe the realtor's. Although the kennel makes more sense. He's dropping off or picking up. Which does not impress me in the least. In fact, it seems to fan my law enforcement ardor.
By the time I have made it from the sheriff woman's car back to the scene of the wheelchair crime, she is already out and walking about. I pause to see what will happen. She gives me the fisheye. I tell her I am just heading for the corner crosswalk at El Camino, as though she cares or this is even mildly relevant. I do what I described, crossing at the traffic signal, but I can't help looking back at the sheriff. She is still looking at me, so I look away and roll out of sight into the terrace of a big outdoor café. No more looking back. She will do what she will do.
But it's killing me not to be able to see the Geek Guy get his comeuppance. And what comeuppance is the guy really due? Haven't I parked where I shouldn't more than a time or two? Have I really been harmed, or even mildly inconvenienced, more than a second or two? I don't know. These are strange times. The Geek Guy is younger than I am, sufficient grounds for resentment. His able-bodied enough to leap in and out of a service van. Doubtless he is a PC repair person. He understands Microsoft Windows, and I hate him for this alone.
And there's the other thing, that in addition to having mobility and options, he has a pet. Okay, he might be signing a lease at the realtor's. But why double park? No, I see signs of animal care here. Which in my current mood is a trivial, self-indulgent pursuit. But which I also envy. No dogs in my apartment. I haven't had a dog since childhood. So why should he? And then there's the other thing, the wheelchair access thing. People routinely park their cars in ways that block wheelchair access. A rear fender overhangs the sidewalk. Big deal, people can walk around. But generally, I can't. I usually have to roll in and out of the street. Which being a retired person is hardly a cause for great concern. But it annoys me. It's this cars-uber-alles thing. Which is almost as bad as the rubbish bin sitting right in the middle of a sidewalk. So it's somewhat ambiguous, my position. Like most Americans, I am angry and I can't take it anymore.
I also can't take much more of 'woman, oh woman, have you got cheating on your mind?', a question on the mind of the 60s pop singer who made this song famous enough to permanently reside in background music of Trader Joe's. I am out of milk, but really out of patience with this 'cheating on your mind' refrain. For the woman in question has had no chance to respond to the singer for 40 years. And she really wants to stand up and say no, cheating was not on my mind until you started belting out your lyric, but now that I think about it, I'm going to shtup the next six guys I meet at Trader Joe's.... And this is on my mind until I make it through the checkout, and then there's something else.
A friend was driving me up El Camino, I glanced at a hotel, and a certain question arose in my mind. When did I speak there, addressing a small trade group on how to cut the costs of speechwriting? It was fun to have a client pull me out of retirement to talk to his colleagues for an hour. And it seemed that this was...well, mid-February? No, that could not have been possible, for Marlou died 2 April...and I recall the night of my talk so vividly. John, who has made many a speech with me in the background, had arranged the thing months before. And after it was over and all these freelance consultants were fired up about writing their own speeches with a little editing help, and after I'd had too much hotel chicken and chocolate mousse and was wondering how Marlou was...John followed me out the door.
The night was cool enough to wear a sports jacket, but nothing more. And the hotel, being right at the edge of wheelchair range, meant a long roll home. So, it was a pleasant surprise to find John continuing with me, moving up El Camino in the general direction of my place. Halfway there, I pointed out that he would have quite a walk back to his car. But no matter, he said, and the two of us kept on going...until we found ourselves outside the apartment. It was maybe 9 PM, and Marlou might have gone to bed, but no, she was up. So John came in and met my wife. He had known me for the many years when I did not have one. And Marlou had heard enough of his speeches, and heard enough of me struggling to write his speeches, to want to meet him. And now, here they were, both sitting on Marlou's new designer sofa.
And I couldn't help but feel a strange pride in having married this woman, and showing her off to John. She was wearing a dress with a high collar, a style she favored for reasons that might have been clear to someone less oblivious to fashion. But to me, it was just Marlou, the way she dressed, one of her characteristics. And now there was a new characteristic, something sagging behind the cheerfulness. John only stayed a short while. He was barely out the door before Marlou said she was going to bed. How much longer this would go on, this weakness and fatigue, and what lay before us...these matters were on my mind. But I had no real idea of what lay in store. Surely her horrifying disintegration of body and mind could not have rocketed Marlou from sofa to grave in seven weeks?
And yet, having put away the Trader Joe's bag and opened my calendar, there it was, speech, Park Hotel, 11 February. My sense of time was badly off. Which seems to accompany moments of heightened danger and trauma. And reconstructing the present seems to require reconstructing my past. You'd think I was a Bosnian refugee, the way my psyche is carrying on. But it's carrying me on to somewhere, and like it or not, I'm just a passenger.
I really don't know what
to do about the friendly phone call from the volunteer at Jewish Family
Services...who wants to drop off a holiday gift pack. Fortunately, my answering machine saved us
both some embarrassment. And I now have
a useful record, a sonic archive, of the proposed visit. 'It contains some food items,' the man said,
as though this news would push me over the edge in holiday pack
enthusiasm. Food items. Who needs more food items at Rosh
Hashanah? Am I supposed to gaze fondly
at these things while I fast for Yom Kippur?
Whatever.
As a Jewish Family
Services client in a wheelchair, I must fit all the earmarks for Person in
Need. I don't believe anyone has ever
dropped off a gift pack for me, personally, ever in my life, including the
Menlo Park Welcome Wagon, if there ever was one. Remember those things? A suburban Chamber of Commerce would welcome
you into the retail fold with an enticing wicker basket full of long-shelflife
goodies and coupons. Perhaps this
practice long ago died a mercantile death, and there's no reason why the Jews
pick should up on it.
But they're not. Community being such a weak commodity in
America, our efforts to reach out to each other naturally founder. That's why I don't know what to do but call
the guy back and play this thing out. If
I ignore him and his good intentions, well, that seems rude. If I suggest that I get out of my house as
much, if not more, than he does...well, what's the point? Okay, I'm not ready to be on the list of
Elderly Jewish Shut-Ins who want, need or otherwise appreciate gift
baskets. But why not let the guy come in
and talk to me? Can there be too much
generosity? Who really gets harmed? What is there to do but be gracious, thank
the man for his efforts and, who knows, we might just hit it off? Become coffee buddies. One never knows.
Besides, Jewish Family
Services has done an excellent job of grief maintenance and backup. Two social workers, one nurse, a volunteer
and a rabbi have been on the job over the last six months. And the rabbi is still on the job, meeting
the only this morning to talk about Yom Kippur.
That's because I have to speak on, and about, Yom Kippur.... The third time I've given a drash, a sort of
sermon, on the high holidays. And this
time, somehow I've run out of ideas or energy.
Or so it seemed.
The rabbi and I have a way
of meeting at a coffee bar across from the San Francisco railway station. And after an hour's discussion in the
September sun, there was no shortage of material. In fact, there was too much.
This matter of 'how grief is
much like fear' puzzled C. S. Lewis, and it always baffled me...but not
now. Rolling out of the cappuccino
joint, having said goodbye to the rabbi, in search of the Caltrain station's
toilet, I had a certain handle on the anxiety.
The generalized dread, the sense that bad things are coming. Which as Lewis describes it is 'like' fear,
but not precisely the same. So, I had a
certain handle on the feeling...and the feeling had a grip on me.
Errands. I had errands to do. What precisely? Well, certain objectives and preoccupations
that can only spring from the soil of retirement. While I would not describe these as aimless,
the objectives were nattering among themselves in a most unpleasant way. And the general consensus was that this guy
is nonproductive and undirected and must be watched.
I could sense something
was wrong while waiting for the tram.
Electronic signs announce the comings and goings of the light rail line
from Market Street. But somehow I was
waiting in the middle of King Street, instead of Fourth Street, having gotten
the two confused...and damned if the next tram didn't slip right by. I am not like this. But the rabbi and I had gotten into the Land
of Death, and I was still on the outskirts.
In between tram updates,
the electronic sign board was perking along with general observations on the
state of transit health. Which was
looking pretty bad. There was no
elevator working at Montgomery Street.
The elevator was also broken at Civic Center. Which in disabled access terms, puts 40% of
the tram stops in central San Francisco out of action. I found this utterly galling. I also found it hardly surprising. California is in a state of budgetary
apocalypse, the no-tax crowd determined to go down with the sinking ship. And what can sink faster than a
lead-acid-battery-powered wheelchair?
Worse, I had forgotten my
disabled tube ticket. The BART subway
system is entirely separate from the trams and requires its own fare. So at Embarcadero Station I got off the tram,
went upstairs to buy a tube ticket, got back on the tram and got off at the
next stop. Which wasn't the right stop,
but one station too early. And since the
central San Francisco tram stops number six in total, it's hard to get
confused...unless one is confused. Or
very preoccupied. Death daze.
So, back on the tram and
off at Powell Street for my first objective, the Geary Theatre box office. About which I had certain misgivings. I don't rush out to experience Noel Coward
any more than I wear spats. But, okay,
the production had boomed along in London for some time, and what the
hell. I'm just not in the mood to miss
anything. Naturally, I popped for the
Wednesday matinee. Good weekday train
schedule. Weekdays being eminently
free. And, when one considers the 20
people milling about the sidewalk in front of the not-yet-open box office,
well, I was hardly alone.
Americans don't know how
to queue, of course, or so when the doors finally opened, what was there to do
but let the cripple go more or less first?
For which I was enormously grateful.
The play was essentially sold out, but I got something. A little high in the theater architecture,
but maybe the Geary provides oxygen. The
only problem involved the price.
Wheelchair seats come with a discount...if they are sold, which
sometimes they aren't. Meaning that the
non-wheelchair price still resided in the computer, the box office manager was
nowhere to be seen, so the ticket guy decided that a 50% discount would be just
the thing. Slightly justifying my
aimless wanderings about town, time being money. How much time I have and how much money I
could be earning present such imponderables that my bouncing around San
Francisco's Tenderloin began to drift from the distracted to the dreamy.
Right down Taylor Street,
which is something of a major Schizophrenic Highway. But in broad daylight in the middle of a warm
late summer day...ah, no big deal. The
curb ramps are too steep. One
constituent did tell me that I was next and should follow that one. But these are small potatoes
hallucination-wise, and I rolled into the Golden Gate Theatre unharmed. Did I really want to see 'South
Pacific?' Hard to say. I just didn't want to miss it. Yes, the silly thing was also approaching
sellout. The last row of the orchestra
for me, but also a steal.
There was this thin veneer
of time-equals-money practicality settling over things. And now back to Caltrain...but maybe
not. Debating the next move, I looked up
to witness a major dose of urban and social collapse. Not that one can really tell the
difference. Vast stretches of Market
Street, San Francisco's mercantile heart, historic thoroughfare, the place
where the earthquake fire stopped ...well, the shops are shuttered, the
businesses are gone and there's nothing but an empty feeling. Even the panhandlers avoid it.
I like the guys at the
Punjab Restaurant. I really like
them. The moment I roll in, they
practically knock half the diners out of place to make room for my wheelchair. Put a little sag chicken tikka in the stomach
and take a little sag out of the spirit.
And I knew this thread would be sagging for a long time. I don't like the word grief. It just doesn't do the experience
justice. Aftermath will do. And this may be the first epoque in my life
in which confusion, uncertainty, low productivity and purposelessness converge
-- without too much self-incrimination.
I knew that one of the afternoon departures of cash-strapped Caltrain
had been deleted from the schedule. I
would have to wait, and the trip home would be a long one. And somehow, all this was okay.
I hadn't seen him in seven years, and now here he was at the annual Minnesota Men's Conference, trenchant as always. Hitting the nail on the head and pounding it into my mine at a rate the cranium can tolerate. And, it must be noted, cranium tolerance is only so deep these days. Marlou's death has narrowed the bandwidth for the absorption of additional life knowledge. But this last week in Minnesota there was room for John Lee.
Male passivity, Lee believes, is a national affliction. American men turn passive at many, perhaps most, junctures. And this situation is so pervasive that one needn't feel bad about it. Let alone guilty or inadequate. It's hard enough to be aware.
Like many such confabs, the Minnesota Men's Conference combines big general meetings with smaller sessions. To facilitate the latter, all the men signing in for the five-day event choose a small group. How? By responding to the fanciful name assigned to each. The groups bear the names of fabular characters and events drawn from the Featured Myth. Each conference revolves around some legend or other. So there I was, emerging from the bus ride, confirming my credit card payment and scanning the sign-up sheets for discussion groups. I chose one named after wildflowers. My expectations were not very high. In fact, it was time someone at the conference did something about the small group problem.
The problem could be witnessed at lunch in the cafeteria. The groups assemble there on the first day, chew over sandwiches and the morning's material...and then everything goes to hell. Fewer people gather at the next day's lunch hour. Less and less of importance gets said. Within a couple of days no one meets at all, or a few guys hang out for noon hour companionship, making small talk about their lives...tougher topics of myth and riskier self revelation being abandoned.
The conference planners have long neglected this problem with the small groups. And it was high time someone realized that important discussions weren't happening -- and did something about it, for Christ's sake.
And damned if John Lee didn't turn this "problem" around 180° and slap me up along side of my middle-aged head. Yes, he acknowledged, the small groups could easily go to hell. And if I, 12-year veteran of the conference, couldn't take matters in hand, inspire, entice, steer and generally guide my own discussion group, who could?
More to the point, why didn't this fact naturally occur to me? Maybe an endemic, cultural zeitgeist phenomenon has me, and many other men in America, by the balls. We do not easily see our power, rise to the challenge, get active and get involved. Someone ought to do something about...you name it.
So if nothing else happened in Minnesota this year, this much did. I saw myself as an actor who thought he was an understudy, someone eternally not listening for the cues, missing his entrances, memorizing useless lines. And what does one do with such knowledge?
The annual Men's Conference presents the wheelchair user with endless snags. I need a bedside table. There are no bedside tables. There was an alternative, the piano bench in the lounge, but what if someone wanted to play a little Chopin? Instead, the first night, I asked some guys to move an armchair beside my bed. But a slanting upholstered cushion really isn't the best surface to place one's urinal at night, as past experience has shown. And rather than set the stage for a midnight urine flood, self-recriminations drowning me like dead seaweed, I made the big switch. I stopped another guy outside my room, asked him to switch armchair for piano bench. And the deed was done. Fuck Chopin.
And...yes, there was more...I could not get my wheelchair into the main meeting room without help, so I loosed some other guys on the problem. Were there boards around? One guy knew where there to find some. Great. Let's take the boards, pile them up to create an incline...and suddenly I was rolling into the conference room on my own. And noting that the boards were getting knocked askew, one guy talked to the camp manager. Who told the grounds guy to tackle the underlying problem. He jacked up the ramp, creating a smooth incline. And so it went.
There's always a problem with getting dressed in time for the morning singing, one-handed manipulation of clothes and leg brace being what they are. And the struggle to get clothed in time to hobble, on someone's arm, down the long flight of stairs to where 50 men forget we're amateur singers and kick musical butt with everything from Gregorian chants to American spirituals...well, it's a big ordeal. And the frustrations mount in such a way that they actually metastasize and cause me to fumble socks repeatedly, mess up trouser snaps and twist my foot all over the place trying to get the leg brace on in time. So, fuck it, one challenging morning I slipped into my blue jeans, underwear be damned, managed a T-shirt, dropped my naked feet onto the wheelchair footrests and headed out. At the top of the stairs, one passing guy put on a sock while a friend put on the other, and together they wedged my foot into the brace. Within five minutes I was wailing out Latin with everyone else.
As for the wailing, well, talk to John Lee. He'll tell you that grief is a quintessential male experience. It comes at us all the time. And most of the time we swallow it down, don't even notice it. And what's grief? The sense of loss around almost any transition. Why is this a male experience? I don't know. But it corresponds to my own experience. And though you can learn about grief alone, you can't handle it alone. Not that I am alone when I'm more active. And certainly not aboard the crowded flight home...where I pushed for, and got, a bulkhead seat. Cool. At 62, you'd think I was a grownup.
The Inverness sun rose bright and fogless, then shortly after 7 AM it descended into a meteorological stupor. By 8 AM the mist had re-asserted itself, rolling in from nowhere, muffling the morning in gray. I took my cues from it, waking, then sinking back into the high bed. And by the time I made it up the stairs, the clouds were breaking up, blue returning. Though not really. Point Reyes and all lands north and west had sunk into foggy invisibility. Here where the North American land mass and the Pacific collide, sky and cloud ricochet in all directions.
And the trees keep thinking about the winter. And the ferns flap their fronds in watery anticipation. And the vultures check in late for the day shift. And one would think that after five days here I would have cranked up my electric wheelchair and taken a little spin up the road. But I've been covering too much ground elsewhere. The distance doesn't turn up on any odometer...unless one counts the solar plexus. The latter being drained.
The post-Marlou period, now stretching into five months, no longer feels like something new, but has become something permanent. A friend gave me one of the O'Brian sea epics to read on holiday, and I had a go at the mizzen-masts and topsails, and ran out of interest. When two sea hands wound up dead in a riproaring but otherwise pointless encounter with another ship, I decided to let the sails flap and the canons blaze without me. Which is odd. I go for adventure escapism. I eagerly await the next James Bond epic. Or I think I do. It's hard to say. Marlou's death has narrowed and sobered my focus. My interest in, and patience for, much of life, including some serious aspects, has waned. I can barely read the news, or even think about it. This fact mildly horrifies me, for I see it as disconnecting from community life, retreating into old age...but maybe not. My attention is elsewhere.
'I can feel it.' Marlou said this, perhaps as we were going to bed, in December or January. The cancer. Her words surprised me. What else would she be feeling? Yet until then, what she had been feeling was the chemotherapy, the drugs, the treatments. You look great, people would tell her. And she kept repeating this observation, as though baffled at her own disease. As though hoping the perception of others would supplant the diagnosis.
And then she could feel it. And all I could feel was her fear. Or imagine her fear. No, I could not feel what she was feeling, nor fear what she was fearing. Call it deep introversion or essential mistrust, but Marlou was going to reveal what she wanted. And my job was to accept and to listen and to meet her wherever she wanted to meet. I can feel it, she said. And I could barely imagine. Being invaded. Taken over. Weakened. Bloated. Seared with fiery jabs. Consumed with glowing aches.
And beyond the sensations, the rest. I understand about being traumatized, paralyzed, trapped in bed. But for Marlou, save for a surgery or two, the reality of physical collapse was all new. Everything came tumbling down at once. And there wasn't much possibility of comfort. She told me my presence did something. She wanted me there. We met where we met. Opening up, expressing all her fears and thereby...what? This is some fantasy of mine. It all happened in three, more accurately two, months. And she trusted and expressed herself as best she could. And it's hard to say if I could have helped her deal with fear...or coul not come to terms with the gulf that was opening between us. She was going somewhere else. We were separating.
At least, five months later, I am less consumed by fear. Though I cannot, even now, answer the obvious question: fear of what? Nor can I explain how something like a giant eraser has swept across my spirit. There's a vast array of things I no longer enjoy, or still enjoy but can't get started. I am sure that if the DVD, high resolution yet, of Eugene Onegin performed at Glyndebourne actually got inserted into my player and someone pressed 'start' an enjoyable evening would unfold. Instead, this Netflix offering arrived in May, sat around while I paid rentals on it through the months of June and July and August, and still remains unwatched. There is no particular reason. Some things have stopped, others slowed, a few faded away.
It's a new world. Stripped down, simplified, unvarnished. It's like the deck of O'Brian's dinky naval schooner. And, yes, doubtless it's not a schooner. But my attention began to waver when the deck filled with blood. There's no escaping blood. It gets shed, for various reasons, large and small. Just don't tell me that it doesn't linger, doesn't stain and doesn't resonate or accuse. Blood isn't just blood, but a set of questions. Most of which can't be answered, but all of which have to be asked.
I seem to have gone a bit passive in these, my first Inverness days. There's nothing to do here but slow down, I tell friends, as though this explains much of anything. The truth is that I've not felt terribly social. People have been a welcome accompaniment, and I'm glad my holiday house is spacious and comfortable for others. For me, comfort depends on the kindness of others. Only part of the house is wheelchair accessible, and the bedrooms and bathroom have their perils.
Take the master suite. There is a Grimm fairytale quality to the bed. Who's been sleeping in my...? The mattresses are piled high enough to accommodate the princess and her pea. I can neither get into the bed or sit upon its edge to dress, alone. The shower is cavernous. It rounds a right angle, presents a windowed view of the garden outside, then succumbs to conventionality in the form of a faucet and a shower head. The tiles are green and glassy, fired to a high ceramic slickness. There's nothing like a railing to break the lines. There's nothing like a femur to break in a shower like this one. No, I'm not exactly independent here in Inverness.
But with loving people around, who cares? I do have the great luxury of setting the schedule. My own, that is. I am hospitable but not a host. I am there when I want to be, absent when I don't. Nothing to do but slow down. This is only a ruse, and I know it. The absence of radio, television, even newspapers, this creates an emptiness into which something else can take root. Roots being a persistent theme in these parts. A tangle of them shot down through the scorched earth twenty years ago, laughing at destruction, sucking it up. The burned trees, tanned and rotting, show almost no charcoal, except on close inspection, here and there about the edges.
Do I have a right to a life? Since Marlou lost her own...what now? And do I have a right to my own 'now?' Where do such questions come from? Guilt, a genuine respect for the dead, where? I vaguely recall people asking me decades ago if I minded while they went hiking or jogging or strolling. Would I feel bad? Would Marlou feel bad? The thoughts are preposterous and worthwhile. Look at the life that emerges from destruction. Inverness Ridge.
It's not even dusk when a stage moon rises, full and smiling, from the hills behind Point Reyes Station. There's plenty of glowing light on the tops of the young trees, plenty of sunset to follow. But maybe not. Maybe this is the time to wander out on the deck, gaze at the west which improbably lies to the north, and not miss anything. The beauty of the dying day. There are only so many, and each dies only once. And there is a future. It will arise from discontent. Which is not the sense that things aren't happening, but the call of work. There is something to be done. And the way to find it is here, in a rented house, studiously doing nothing.
I suppose that at some point in my weeklong stint in Inverness, California, I may just lower my van's wheelchair lift, ascend into the driver's cocoon and hit the road. It's not much of a road, one might say, or too much. Drake's View Drive...everything around here is named after the Elizabethan pirate, a.k.a., explorer...there being some faint evidence that his ships pulled into the inlet just south of the Point Reyes peninsula...and one quickly gets Draked out in these parts. But never mind, for whatever it's name, and whether or not there is any view of anything Drakean, driving to the top of Drake's View Drive gives one pause. Actually, pausing is a very bad idea on this private and precipitous road. The significance of 'private' is that no publicly sanctioned road engineer would permit such a thing as the sheer inclines and hairpin turns that lead from Tomales Bay to the top of Inverness Ridge. In other words, having gotten my van here, I plan to stay here. Others can drive me up and down the hill in quest of meals and adventures. My plan is to stick around. Of course, I may not have all that much choice. My sister arrives tomorrow, boldly alighting from the West Marin Stage at the base of this very hill. And I may have no choice but to launch the van and roll down slope. I have thought this through, imagine myself at the terrifying wheel of my multi-ton Ford and decided not to worry, that this is why God invented low gear.
And low speed. The dial-up Internet connection available in my rented holiday home transfers, say, a photo of the Farallon Islands taken by my cousin this morning in about 40 minutes. Of course, slowing down is the Inverness thing. It is why I come here, and that's why I am pleased that I came here this year...even under the sad circumstances.
One visiting friend asked me about the natural level of forestation. Did the Bishop Pines once extend down the slopes and spread across the windswept moors that inspire the name of Inverness? I guessed at an answer, but admitted I wasn't certain. I would like to know. The human history of these parts is remarkably thin. Wander into the Inverness Museum, barely larger than someone's living room, and you'll see photos of a sparsely populated, barely settled coast and valley region that can boast no cities, barely a couple of towns and not even a port. When the occasional schooner dropped off cargo, people transferred to land aboard a launch or pitched over the surging seas in a bosun's chair. I do not doubt that they were hardy, but there were few of them and they seem to have left little behind.
So what's really left is what I see from the deck of this house. The top of Inverness Ridge intrigues me greatly for its powers of recovery. A big fire swept up the slopes a couple decades ago, taking out scores of homes and leaving an enormous black and denuded emptiness along the top of the mountain. The first year I returned, the charred trees and blackened ground seemed sadly permanent. But this is California. I should know better. The rare Bishop Pines don't even open their cones and release seeds unless they are burned. California is designed for burning. Within a couple of years the ground was green with seedlings of all kinds. The shrubbery grew up. Pines shot from the blackened, mineral-rich earth, and today you have to strain to pick out the brown hulks of dead tree trunks in the hilltop forest that has returned to Inverness. Seeing this, being here for the process, has calmed me down in some strange way. Things die. Things grow. It's all going to happen with or without me.
There are mysteries. The watch Marlou gave me a couple of years ago stops running at the merest sight of water. Sure enough, dipping my arm under the faucet in this unfamiliar kitchen sink, there was an unfortunate interaction between the Inverness water supply and my old Seiko. 6:36 PM acquired a permanence. The watch was frozen. I kept thinking it didn't matter, but it did. There are people coming and going here. Still something of a schedule. But I knew there was a reasonable chance that, with the watch on my arm, forearm heat and the passage of time would dry the thing out and, coupled with routine arm knocking, get the watch going again. And, yes, it is running now. So, am I grasping at profundities to ask if time is going again? Somehow, it seems to be. My summer's travels have seemed all about escape. But despite it all, I seem to be escaping into the present.
It's hard to get the lay of the Inverness land. The land isn't truly wild, although wild processes are underway in much of it. Volunteers keep ripping out the Mediterranean ice plant that is threatening...and perhaps this word overstates the situation...a lagoon to the north. I can't tell if the long, matted grasses that surround this house are replanted natives or something utterly ersatz. And I don't know the story of the forests. Whatever the truth, I am staying put. I'm staying in. I am honoring the 'in' in Inverness.
