October 2009 Archives
I climb off the morning's exercise machine, regard my watch and seriously consider reclining for half an hour. But 30 minutes gets burned up with desktop trivia. And soon it's time for the train. The train has plenty of time on Sundays. It makes every conceivable stop between Menlo Park and San Francisco, including a couple of towns that lost their weekday service due to low ridership. So the weekend stops represent a compromise. Something just short of shutting down two suburban stations altogether. With the added stops, it's more than an hour to San Francisco. And once there, I'm not in a particularly good mood standing in the globally-warmed morning and waiting for the Muni tram.
'How often do these run?' I stare at the man on the platform asking a question that strikes me as inane. I state what is, to me, the obvious. It depends on the time of day. Not to mention the day of the week. Now, he asks me if this is the right tram for Golden Gate. I am genuinely baffled, not gratuitously condescending. Golden Gate, I respond? In America, due to our national penchant for convenience, we like to drop the last bit in place names. Which can make things terribly confusing. The Golden Gate is the entrance to San Francisco Bay. There is also a bridge favored by tourists. Golden Gate Avenue runs through the heart of the city. Just last week I saw a play at the Golden Gate Theatre. This man means Golden Gate Park. Yes, I tell him, the N Judah tram will do.
Several twentysomethings stand nearby. They ask him what it was like. He says it was very crowded. They tried to charge one dollar for a bottle of beer. Did he drop acid, they ask? No, he just got very stoned on marijuana. The man is talking about Woodstock, being commemorated this day in Golden Gate Park. As this dawns on me, I instinctively back my wheelchair up the platform. I don't want to be around him or Woodstock remembrance. And why? Really, why not celebrate the famous concert?
I enjoyed the film, after all. But there's something about the concert that I don't want to celebrate on its own. A generation of young people found their joy. But they also found their political voice. And many acted with great courage. I would rather recall all of this, for it seems so important today.
By the time Woodstock was happening, I largely wasn't. In the summer of 1969, I was getting used to a new body. I was already in London. Dealing with paralysis and its aftermath sobered me, saddened me. And even viewing the film of the music performed that muddy summer weekend in upstate New York, made me realize how much I had lost. I was reasonably adapted to camping, flexible concerning rain and mud, but not after my injury. I couldn't imagine myself sleeping on that ground, dealing with the toilets, swimming nude...things that had once been easy. So 40 years later, the man on the San Francisco tram platform made me uneasy. But maybe remembering that joyous time will remind people of the serious business of stopping a war and exposing a government that lied.
When you don't really know your way around opera, you stumble into things. And some are quite pleasant. Take this afternoon's 'Daughter of the Regiment.' Donizetti. I had never heard it. Well, not exactly true. Once the overture burst into life, then the singers into song, bits became familiar. The San Francisco Opera seems to have a true flair for this sort of thing, lyric and comic confections. 'Dazzling,' I muttered to a familiar doorman on my way to the men's toilet at halftime. I thought of saying something similar to people waiting with opera programs on the platform of BART, where subway trains were barely running. Sundays are bad travel days. Public transport wanes. And I had thought that hurtling underground to the Millbrae station, then joining Caltrain for the journey home, was a such a good plan.
But no. And with Caltrain running every hour on Sundays, I would have a long wait at Millbrae. I saw the couple standing with their programs as we gazed disappointed at the electronic sign for the trains. The woman smiled at me. And for reasons that still elude me, I did not smile back. She was giving me that condescending smile one gives to cripples...wasn't she? I mean, can't you just tell? There's that...well, it's hard to say what it is. But it definitely is, isn't it? I mean, can there be any doubt? She wouldn't be genuinely friendly, one person to the next, would she? After all, she was of my mother's age, more or less, always a bad sign.
I was doing something archaic and emotionally primitive but couldn't stop myself. Being delayed an hour, having chosen the wrong public transport home, it all added up to just enough depressing stuff to send me in a bad direction. The general direction of grief, which easily coaxes itself into existence. The way the skin blushes in the sun. And now I was at Millbrae, emerging from the subway system, checking my watch and thinking I might just find someplace for a quick snack before the train for Menlo Park. Not much in the neighborhood, but there was a coffee shop. I could roll in and get a quick sandwich. Or a bowl of soup. And here came the same couple, walking up the street, heading for the same restaurant with the same thing in mind. Hello again, the woman said. Hi, I said. I let them get their dinner in peace and headed back to the station.
'How often do these run?' I stare at the man on the platform asking a question that strikes me as inane. I state what is, to me, the obvious. It depends on the time of day. Not to mention the day of the week. Now, he asks me if this is the right tram for Golden Gate. I am genuinely baffled, not gratuitously condescending. Golden Gate, I respond? In America, due to our national penchant for convenience, we like to drop the last bit in place names. Which can make things terribly confusing. The Golden Gate is the entrance to San Francisco Bay. There is also a bridge favored by tourists. Golden Gate Avenue runs through the heart of the city. Just last week I saw a play at the Golden Gate Theatre. This man means Golden Gate Park. Yes, I tell him, the N Judah tram will do.
Several twentysomethings stand nearby. They ask him what it was like. He says it was very crowded. They tried to charge one dollar for a bottle of beer. Did he drop acid, they ask? No, he just got very stoned on marijuana. The man is talking about Woodstock, being commemorated this day in Golden Gate Park. As this dawns on me, I instinctively back my wheelchair up the platform. I don't want to be around him or Woodstock remembrance. And why? Really, why not celebrate the famous concert?
I enjoyed the film, after all. But there's something about the concert that I don't want to celebrate on its own. A generation of young people found their joy. But they also found their political voice. And many acted with great courage. I would rather recall all of this, for it seems so important today.
By the time Woodstock was happening, I largely wasn't. In the summer of 1969, I was getting used to a new body. I was already in London. Dealing with paralysis and its aftermath sobered me, saddened me. And even viewing the film of the music performed that muddy summer weekend in upstate New York, made me realize how much I had lost. I was reasonably adapted to camping, flexible concerning rain and mud, but not after my injury. I couldn't imagine myself sleeping on that ground, dealing with the toilets, swimming nude...things that had once been easy. So 40 years later, the man on the San Francisco tram platform made me uneasy. But maybe remembering that joyous time will remind people of the serious business of stopping a war and exposing a government that lied.
When you don't really know your way around opera, you stumble into things. And some are quite pleasant. Take this afternoon's 'Daughter of the Regiment.' Donizetti. I had never heard it. Well, not exactly true. Once the overture burst into life, then the singers into song, bits became familiar. The San Francisco Opera seems to have a true flair for this sort of thing, lyric and comic confections. 'Dazzling,' I muttered to a familiar doorman on my way to the men's toilet at halftime. I thought of saying something similar to people waiting with opera programs on the platform of BART, where subway trains were barely running. Sundays are bad travel days. Public transport wanes. And I had thought that hurtling underground to the Millbrae station, then joining Caltrain for the journey home, was a such a good plan.
But no. And with Caltrain running every hour on Sundays, I would have a long wait at Millbrae. I saw the couple standing with their programs as we gazed disappointed at the electronic sign for the trains. The woman smiled at me. And for reasons that still elude me, I did not smile back. She was giving me that condescending smile one gives to cripples...wasn't she? I mean, can't you just tell? There's that...well, it's hard to say what it is. But it definitely is, isn't it? I mean, can there be any doubt? She wouldn't be genuinely friendly, one person to the next, would she? After all, she was of my mother's age, more or less, always a bad sign.
I was doing something archaic and emotionally primitive but couldn't stop myself. Being delayed an hour, having chosen the wrong public transport home, it all added up to just enough depressing stuff to send me in a bad direction. The general direction of grief, which easily coaxes itself into existence. The way the skin blushes in the sun. And now I was at Millbrae, emerging from the subway system, checking my watch and thinking I might just find someplace for a quick snack before the train for Menlo Park. Not much in the neighborhood, but there was a coffee shop. I could roll in and get a quick sandwich. Or a bowl of soup. And here came the same couple, walking up the street, heading for the same restaurant with the same thing in mind. Hello again, the woman said. Hi, I said. I let them get their dinner in peace and headed back to the station.
Surely introverts are not the only ones who approach group activity with a mixture of anxiety and disdain. But they are probably more practiced and, therefore, the best at it. To me, the construction, improvement, funding and general proliferation of trains is a sacred cause. What else could get me to attend, that is to say, actually appear, at a meeting of the California Rail Political Action Committee? Trust me, nothing. Not guilt or even substantial bribery. I don't like meetings.
But there I was, and if some of the details made my brain glaze over, the gist was often quite buoying. Things kicked off with a talk by a regional transit figure, long out of management and politics, but consistently active in a think-tank way. He's now on the board of the California High-Speed Rail Project, and damned if the thing isn't looking kind of real. Here, on a provincial level, it's very hard to tell. That's partly because California hasn't built a major new rail line in the better part of a century. Political leaders are flying on instruments when they support the project. As for those at the helm, the whole thing seemed encouraging.
I didn't know that the project management has built in regular consultation with French engineers. Also, it must be acknowledged, Italian ones. The scariest prospect: California trying to build such a railway on its own. We gave up on passenger rail construction over 70 years ago, began abandoning rail operations 50 years ago. And there's no catching up. Which everyone understands, I was pleased to see. Amazing. A new railway...fast enough to make a difference...and, possibly, in my lifetime.
The other speaker runs one of the state's regional passenger lines. He has run it awfully well. Thanks to him, and people like him, California has set a national standard for...how shall one say...building a passenger railway out of nothing? All quite amazing, heartening, and an excellent reason not to be at home on a Saturday. Still, home was exerting a considerable pull. I had come to this meeting by request, and there was a mission to fulfill. But, for better or worse, after two hours of stirring railway discussion, I bolted. Heading home to something else. This blog, for example. Dinner with a friend. Maybe a quiet moment with a book.
Right or wrong? Did I do a good thing or a bad thing? With the Marlou vacuum in my life, grief aside, I feel an increasing need to be part of something bigger than myself, a cause, even a group. And the railroad folks are splendid. Just the sort of thing that might be my sort of thing...unless it's the sort of thing that involves people and meetings. And then I am not so sure.
The railway group has a newsletter, and the newsletter, a friend assured me, needs a writer. So, how could I dip a toe in this endeavor without immersing my entire leg? The problem is that newsletters have a way of appearing at regular intervals. That is, they entail a commitment. And so what? Commitment being closely allied with involvement. Thing is, this can drift perilously close to entanglement.
The newsletter needs more than submissions. It needs to be dynamited, bulldozed, and once thoroughly razed, re-architected and reconstructed. I find it hard to look at the thing. I always balk at the word 'lame,' but no other term seems sufficient. There is no news about this newsletter. The photos might not make it into a child's album. The intent and strategic purpose elude me. It's bad.
So, I had thought of an alternative. I would write occasional op-ed pieces in support of the Coast Starlight, the overnight Amtrak train that frequently captivates, and certainly captures, me at regular intervals. Then, once published in some newspaper or newsy website, republish pieces in the newsletter.
In this way, I could steer a course around any awkward discussions with the editor. Although such discussions are badly needed, I don't seem to have the energy. Or the commitment. Or, disappointingly, the involvement. Which was the whole idea, wasn't it? Which brings me in a circular fashion back to the introvert's dilemma. To be...involved...or not to be?
Problem is, this can be said of anything. As I was rolling out of today's meeting, leaving early to return to my current life, I noticed something on a display table. Several rail groups had provided their own newsletters and brochures. Caltrain has produced a glossy piece on the virtues of electrification. Which, by the way, I support in every dimension. I would gladly donate, even electrify, several liters of my own blood, if this would get things moving. Never mind. Among the brochures was a small information sheet from a group supporting the Coast Starlight. If I had just stayed a bit longer, I might have met some of these people, and that might have been good, a connection with like minded humans. But, no, I skipped out the door. And whether I missed out...or got out just in time. Well, only time will tell. Meanwhile, there will be other meetings. And what's important, as Woody Allen says, is to keep turning up.
But there I was, and if some of the details made my brain glaze over, the gist was often quite buoying. Things kicked off with a talk by a regional transit figure, long out of management and politics, but consistently active in a think-tank way. He's now on the board of the California High-Speed Rail Project, and damned if the thing isn't looking kind of real. Here, on a provincial level, it's very hard to tell. That's partly because California hasn't built a major new rail line in the better part of a century. Political leaders are flying on instruments when they support the project. As for those at the helm, the whole thing seemed encouraging.
I didn't know that the project management has built in regular consultation with French engineers. Also, it must be acknowledged, Italian ones. The scariest prospect: California trying to build such a railway on its own. We gave up on passenger rail construction over 70 years ago, began abandoning rail operations 50 years ago. And there's no catching up. Which everyone understands, I was pleased to see. Amazing. A new railway...fast enough to make a difference...and, possibly, in my lifetime.
The other speaker runs one of the state's regional passenger lines. He has run it awfully well. Thanks to him, and people like him, California has set a national standard for...how shall one say...building a passenger railway out of nothing? All quite amazing, heartening, and an excellent reason not to be at home on a Saturday. Still, home was exerting a considerable pull. I had come to this meeting by request, and there was a mission to fulfill. But, for better or worse, after two hours of stirring railway discussion, I bolted. Heading home to something else. This blog, for example. Dinner with a friend. Maybe a quiet moment with a book.
Right or wrong? Did I do a good thing or a bad thing? With the Marlou vacuum in my life, grief aside, I feel an increasing need to be part of something bigger than myself, a cause, even a group. And the railroad folks are splendid. Just the sort of thing that might be my sort of thing...unless it's the sort of thing that involves people and meetings. And then I am not so sure.
The railway group has a newsletter, and the newsletter, a friend assured me, needs a writer. So, how could I dip a toe in this endeavor without immersing my entire leg? The problem is that newsletters have a way of appearing at regular intervals. That is, they entail a commitment. And so what? Commitment being closely allied with involvement. Thing is, this can drift perilously close to entanglement.
The newsletter needs more than submissions. It needs to be dynamited, bulldozed, and once thoroughly razed, re-architected and reconstructed. I find it hard to look at the thing. I always balk at the word 'lame,' but no other term seems sufficient. There is no news about this newsletter. The photos might not make it into a child's album. The intent and strategic purpose elude me. It's bad.
So, I had thought of an alternative. I would write occasional op-ed pieces in support of the Coast Starlight, the overnight Amtrak train that frequently captivates, and certainly captures, me at regular intervals. Then, once published in some newspaper or newsy website, republish pieces in the newsletter.
In this way, I could steer a course around any awkward discussions with the editor. Although such discussions are badly needed, I don't seem to have the energy. Or the commitment. Or, disappointingly, the involvement. Which was the whole idea, wasn't it? Which brings me in a circular fashion back to the introvert's dilemma. To be...involved...or not to be?
Problem is, this can be said of anything. As I was rolling out of today's meeting, leaving early to return to my current life, I noticed something on a display table. Several rail groups had provided their own newsletters and brochures. Caltrain has produced a glossy piece on the virtues of electrification. Which, by the way, I support in every dimension. I would gladly donate, even electrify, several liters of my own blood, if this would get things moving. Never mind. Among the brochures was a small information sheet from a group supporting the Coast Starlight. If I had just stayed a bit longer, I might have met some of these people, and that might have been good, a connection with like minded humans. But, no, I skipped out the door. And whether I missed out...or got out just in time. Well, only time will tell. Meanwhile, there will be other meetings. And what's important, as Woody Allen says, is to keep turning up.
Some days, it just doesn't happen. It starts, it seems to be happening, and then it stops. Or pauses, or freezes, but definitely ceases. I am referring to life activity. And if I hadn't had a succession of grief specialists explaining this phenomenon to me, urging me to abandon hope of getting things done, just let go and be nonproductive...well, I might be signing up for clinical trials of Prozac 24-hour intravenous.
I am not there. But I'm in my armchair at 1:30 in the afternoon in the midst of major slumber. I had a routine meeting this morning concerning the Menlo Park Chorus, chatted about Marlou's ideas for community singing. And that, it seems, was enough work for the day. She loved singing, my wife, and anything that involves love, that is hers, brings back Marlou's living connection to certain things. And why do people have to die? Why so young? And considering that people die all the time, and at 59 years of age, for virtually all of human history, Marlou would have been considered old and fortunate to have lived a long life. And so the only question, the only real one, involves grief. And that question is too daunting to ask. Particularly when one's feet are cranked up in the air, armchair reclining.
By late afternoon, there was action. The handyman from the apartments across from mine had arrived with his pickup, a bona fide working vehicle, with a pipe frame around the bed. My landlord stood outside and conversed with him. He's in his late 70s now, Tom, and his days seem monotonously regular. He drives a few blocks north or south for coffee at 9 AM. Some days he takes his late-model Mustang. On others, he drives his 1967 Dodge Charger. The latter, he tells me now and then, will soon be donated. I respond, now and then, with the news that his car is a classic, sought by collectors, will fetch a pretty penny. And I hope he finds a worthy charitable cause.
But the handyman cometh, with clanking, but mostly talking. Tom always engages workmen in conversation. Plumbing, roofing, electrical activity being among his favorites. I don't know what they chat about. But chat, they do. Tom can be seen standing about the driveway apron that our four-plexes share, while some truck stands double-parked, unloads its pipe or coaxial cable or floor sander, Tom talking up a storm with the equipment owners. Which is odd. Tom is a virtual recluse. With evident pain, he told me he could not attend Marlou's funeral. He was kind of withdrawn, he explained. Not to worry, I told him. Tom's life's work involved the Air Force. He was a maintenance guy. So now he talks to other maintenance guys. And since he hardly talks at all, this is good.
Which reminds me of how hard it is to understand other people's worlds. The layers are too complex. A friend recently sent me a video of a hardy paraplegic-athlete having a go at bungee jumping. I responded that even in watching the video I could feel the cervical impact. Sorry, he e-mailed back, but he meant no harm, noting that e-mails lack nuance. To which, I responded, not to worry, that I was feeling A-OK about the whole thing, and sorry that he'd missed my irony. But by then, the whole exchange it gone on to tiresome lengths. And since we both have excellent senses of humor, there was nothing to do but drop it.
Actually, I am making pure suppositions about my landlord. I don't know if he is really talking to the plumbers, carpenters and floor polishers, maintenance-guy-to-maintenance-guy. As though such guys share a language, culture or experience.
Our local PBS television station has devoted itself to the regular presentation of programs on 'disability culture.' Let us filter out the politically correct San Franciscan tendency to believe in such things as disability culture and see what's on offer. This week I have missed a documentary about eight disabled people taking a river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. According to the program notes, they face challenges, these rafters. Physical and/or mental. And we see them overcome. The challenges, that is.
This is why I'm not making any particular effort to see this documentary. I suppose the basic premise rather bores me. My own week of river rafting down Utah's Yampa River was eminently pleasant. Disabled people cannot easily get into wilderness, and taking advantage of flotation and gravity makes total sense. Challenges? In all honesty, I don't recall the experience in terms of challenges. There was never any particular pride in the quadriplegic-going-down-the-rapids shtick. I treasured being in the wilderness. Danger? I don't know. Appropriately, the only close call came in utterly tranquil water. The raft in which I was sitting lazily drifted under an overhanging piece of sandstone. The pilot shoved my head down. Life's riskier moments are the ones that seem safest.
If you want to do a documentary about disabled life, try 'The Quadriplegic Takes a Shower.' Watch as he throws himself under the spray. Watch as he does it again -- this time, without a rubber mat. Now, see him swivel on a rickety shower chair, drop his spastic feet to the ceramic tile and, defying neuromuscular law, stand. There he is, folks, standing and dripping. Is this guy cool or what?
As for the river and the rapids and the cripples, all this holds great fascination for able-bodied cinematographers and their audiences, perhaps.... So, go ahead, do a film about the helpers. Really, the able-bodied volunteers who did all the work on my weeklong rafting trip got something out of it. What was it like for them? What did they observe about the disabled rafters that seemed interesting or admirable? What process unfolded for them? Honestly, that's where the story is.
My river rafting story would not interest anyone making a film. It amounted to lovely nights under the stars. Doing things without a nightlight. Such as emptying my urinal into the sand, or trying to, darkness being what it is...and pouring the contents into my shoe. Otherwise, the main experience: being waited on and being unable to do very much for myself. The rapids? Well, they're kind of fun. But all I did was sit there. Sit there, wear a life jacket and watch massive canyon walls going by.
In short, no one knows the stories. Whether it's maintenance guys, or river rafting cripples, or grieving husbands. As for the latter, they are the most clueless when it comes to their own plot. The action turns on nothing. Despair arrives with the morning paper. It departs with the barking of the neighbor's dog. It returns when the red light changes by the fish shop. It goes away when the weather report comes in from Scotland. It's back when UPS drops off your package. It has nothing to do with you, it seems. Much to do with mortality. The audience doesn't understand, the cast is baffled and the director may, or may not, be having his private little joke. At your expense. Give up. But keep selling tickets. An empty house is a bad idea.
I am not there. But I'm in my armchair at 1:30 in the afternoon in the midst of major slumber. I had a routine meeting this morning concerning the Menlo Park Chorus, chatted about Marlou's ideas for community singing. And that, it seems, was enough work for the day. She loved singing, my wife, and anything that involves love, that is hers, brings back Marlou's living connection to certain things. And why do people have to die? Why so young? And considering that people die all the time, and at 59 years of age, for virtually all of human history, Marlou would have been considered old and fortunate to have lived a long life. And so the only question, the only real one, involves grief. And that question is too daunting to ask. Particularly when one's feet are cranked up in the air, armchair reclining.
By late afternoon, there was action. The handyman from the apartments across from mine had arrived with his pickup, a bona fide working vehicle, with a pipe frame around the bed. My landlord stood outside and conversed with him. He's in his late 70s now, Tom, and his days seem monotonously regular. He drives a few blocks north or south for coffee at 9 AM. Some days he takes his late-model Mustang. On others, he drives his 1967 Dodge Charger. The latter, he tells me now and then, will soon be donated. I respond, now and then, with the news that his car is a classic, sought by collectors, will fetch a pretty penny. And I hope he finds a worthy charitable cause.
But the handyman cometh, with clanking, but mostly talking. Tom always engages workmen in conversation. Plumbing, roofing, electrical activity being among his favorites. I don't know what they chat about. But chat, they do. Tom can be seen standing about the driveway apron that our four-plexes share, while some truck stands double-parked, unloads its pipe or coaxial cable or floor sander, Tom talking up a storm with the equipment owners. Which is odd. Tom is a virtual recluse. With evident pain, he told me he could not attend Marlou's funeral. He was kind of withdrawn, he explained. Not to worry, I told him. Tom's life's work involved the Air Force. He was a maintenance guy. So now he talks to other maintenance guys. And since he hardly talks at all, this is good.
Which reminds me of how hard it is to understand other people's worlds. The layers are too complex. A friend recently sent me a video of a hardy paraplegic-athlete having a go at bungee jumping. I responded that even in watching the video I could feel the cervical impact. Sorry, he e-mailed back, but he meant no harm, noting that e-mails lack nuance. To which, I responded, not to worry, that I was feeling A-OK about the whole thing, and sorry that he'd missed my irony. But by then, the whole exchange it gone on to tiresome lengths. And since we both have excellent senses of humor, there was nothing to do but drop it.
Actually, I am making pure suppositions about my landlord. I don't know if he is really talking to the plumbers, carpenters and floor polishers, maintenance-guy-to-maintenance-guy. As though such guys share a language, culture or experience.
Our local PBS television station has devoted itself to the regular presentation of programs on 'disability culture.' Let us filter out the politically correct San Franciscan tendency to believe in such things as disability culture and see what's on offer. This week I have missed a documentary about eight disabled people taking a river rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. According to the program notes, they face challenges, these rafters. Physical and/or mental. And we see them overcome. The challenges, that is.
This is why I'm not making any particular effort to see this documentary. I suppose the basic premise rather bores me. My own week of river rafting down Utah's Yampa River was eminently pleasant. Disabled people cannot easily get into wilderness, and taking advantage of flotation and gravity makes total sense. Challenges? In all honesty, I don't recall the experience in terms of challenges. There was never any particular pride in the quadriplegic-going-down-the-rapids shtick. I treasured being in the wilderness. Danger? I don't know. Appropriately, the only close call came in utterly tranquil water. The raft in which I was sitting lazily drifted under an overhanging piece of sandstone. The pilot shoved my head down. Life's riskier moments are the ones that seem safest.
If you want to do a documentary about disabled life, try 'The Quadriplegic Takes a Shower.' Watch as he throws himself under the spray. Watch as he does it again -- this time, without a rubber mat. Now, see him swivel on a rickety shower chair, drop his spastic feet to the ceramic tile and, defying neuromuscular law, stand. There he is, folks, standing and dripping. Is this guy cool or what?
As for the river and the rapids and the cripples, all this holds great fascination for able-bodied cinematographers and their audiences, perhaps.... So, go ahead, do a film about the helpers. Really, the able-bodied volunteers who did all the work on my weeklong rafting trip got something out of it. What was it like for them? What did they observe about the disabled rafters that seemed interesting or admirable? What process unfolded for them? Honestly, that's where the story is.
My river rafting story would not interest anyone making a film. It amounted to lovely nights under the stars. Doing things without a nightlight. Such as emptying my urinal into the sand, or trying to, darkness being what it is...and pouring the contents into my shoe. Otherwise, the main experience: being waited on and being unable to do very much for myself. The rapids? Well, they're kind of fun. But all I did was sit there. Sit there, wear a life jacket and watch massive canyon walls going by.
In short, no one knows the stories. Whether it's maintenance guys, or river rafting cripples, or grieving husbands. As for the latter, they are the most clueless when it comes to their own plot. The action turns on nothing. Despair arrives with the morning paper. It departs with the barking of the neighbor's dog. It returns when the red light changes by the fish shop. It goes away when the weather report comes in from Scotland. It's back when UPS drops off your package. It has nothing to do with you, it seems. Much to do with mortality. The audience doesn't understand, the cast is baffled and the director may, or may not, be having his private little joke. At your expense. Give up. But keep selling tickets. An empty house is a bad idea.
For someone who has mood swings, there's nothing like swinging altogether out of Mood Land into something else. And the human body provides a splendid other world, particularly for those of us who tend to be lost in our heads, a.k.a., feelings. That's why God invented bodyworkers. The job description once focused on the pounding out of dents in one's Ford. Now it has to do with loosening up your brachial radialis. Our great nation has given up manufacturing, embraced spilkes, and where does all this lead except a Great Letting Go?
Which brings me on a regular basis to Ross. Not the clothing discounter, the body guy. One thing I like about Ross: he is a manufacturer. The guy cranks out home electronics software on an impressively regular basis, then cranks up his massage table in the evenings. It all makes for a grounded experience. I don't expect Ross to fine-tune my astral body. I expect him to loosen up my neck. That's all I can hope for, or anyone should hope for, and that's a lot.
Two hours of Ross may sound like a lot, and it probably is. But on this particular Sunday, even after much painful kneading of bodily components, even mild and eminently professional Ross could only lament the sorry state of my muscular tension. He suggested another session. Why, I asked, didn't he do what he usually does, working my neck back and forth to provide more side action. He shook his head. Too much tension. Way too much.
Kind of a conversation stopper, if you ask me. Ross followed me silently up his hallway to the door. I couldn't think of what to say except next time. I needed a next time. And maybe next time we would get to the neck. Before the neck got to me. Which it has a way of doing, which was why I had made this appointment with Ross. And so, here we were, at his front door, Ross helping me into my wheelchair. And goodnight.
And it was a good night. South Palo Alto in the globally warmed autumn, the street quiet, my white Ford van still illegally parked facing the wrong way. And me in my loosened and substantially improved body, fumbling for the electronic key that operates the lift. I ascended. The lift turned, as it always does, and dropped me onto the blue Ford carpet. Well, not quite. Thing is, my wheelchair is just a little too big for the lift. Nothing new about this. And no big deal, really, but sometimes inconvenient. Such as now, with the small front wheels of my chair trying to swivel their way to freedom, but not quite managing. Usually, by steering hard to the left and advancing a few inches on the lift, then backing at an angle, I get my wheelchair free of the obstacles and back into the lockdown, the electronic clamp that holds the thing in place while I drive. And surely that was about to happen now. Forward, hard left, back. But, no, not quite enough room to maneuver. And it was late. And I was old. And fuck this shit.
I jammed the wheelchair control stick down hard. There's a safety bar extending across the front of the hydraulic lift. It is there to prevent me from rocketing forward and into thin air. Problem is, it also constitutes an obstacle. That's what this hard left, reverse back, is all about. Trying to curve around the base of the safety bar, slipping the joystick under it...and getting my aching body home. And I was beginning to feel it. Ross had placed his fingers deep into my neck, shoulders and lower back. And the zones were starting to ache. I knew this would not last long, but it was happening now, and I wanted to be in bed. Instead, I was rolling back and forth, on a small metal platform, making no progress, and making myself crazy.
Only one thing to do, testosterone-wise, and that's put wheelchair pedal to metal, bending Mr. Joystick down very hard, and forcing the whole wheelchair-versus-obstacle problem to resolve itself by dint of sheer battery muscle. And damned if the control stick didn't shoot back under the safety-bar base -- and stop. It was stuck. The joystick couldn't be jammed anywhere, because it couldn't be moved.
But the chair was moving. The wheelchair would zip backwards, bending the joystick forward, which would cause the chair to zip forward, bending the joystick backward. The chair would reverse again, bend the joystick forward. Slamming itself backwards, forwards. And there was no prying the joystick loose, such was the state of things, both mechanical and neuromuscular. These wild oscillations had to stop, so I hit the switch. Creating another situation. For to restart, the wheelchair has to go into a self-test mode, requiring that the joystick stand straight as a flagpole. And it was bent under the bar. Wunderbar.
But maybe if I lowered the entire assemblage of wheelchair lift and wheelchair-with-jammed-joystick to the ground.... Why not? I hit 'up' on the lift's control and heard the safety flap behind me rise and hook itself under the anti-tip wheelets of the wheelchair. And it is simply impossible to have so many things mechanical go wrong all at the same time.
Jammed or not, I decided it was better to lower the whole mess to the ground. I sat there in my knotted steel and felt the night. It was mild, still warm. And I was still here. I yelled 'Ross.' This was futile. He was across the street, and his house was behind a garden, and no one could hear. And 40 years earlier, I'd been lying on the pavement and yelling for help, and no one could hear then, except for the someone who did. And this time the someone was Ross, who wandered out of his house, fresh from a shower. He eyed the situation with an engineer's detachment. And so, more or less, did I. He lifted the back wheels, I dropped the safety gate. He shoved the wheelchair backwards, and the joystick broke off. Well, slipped off. I jammed it back in place. Everything was working. We said goodnight for a second time. And for a second time it was what it was, good and night.
You can tell when the gears of life are grabbing, meshing and pulling something, perhaps other gears, along. It's the painful place. Maybe more generally, it's the unsettling place. Which could be happy, of course, even ecstatic. But still off balance. Out of the rut, which is to say, uncomfortable. One needs the slightest reminder on a regular basis of this essential life truth. Especially when life is essentially predictable. And routine is everything, and everything is routine.
Something in me still can't quite believe that I don't have a video script due at Apple Computer or a ghostwritten article late at Xerxes Systems. That's over. All I have to do these days is to swing my neuromusculature off the edge of the bed, onto its feet and into its wheelchair. Schedule? Well, there is the daily help. It's arrived early this morning in the form of Paul, who actually volunteers for Catholic Social Services but is having an ecumenical hour with me. The putting on of socks and shoes being the sort of high point of our Judeo-Christian exchange. For which I am most grateful.
Paul has some extra time, so we make use of it, opening a backlog of mail. Why should mail be backlogged, particularly if one is unemployed? Ask the Jewish Healing Center grief support group, of which I am now a card-carrying member. Go ahead, ask. The answer: things are fucked.
Paul doesn't seem to care, his life being in transition too. Separated from me by more than 30 years, he is an ex-Stanford graduate student experimenting with community work, and I am an ex-husband experimenting with...well, I don't even know, this experimenting having gone so awry. No, Paul is young enough and free enough to be experimenting. Somehow, I am not. Life is experimenting upon me, and I'm just along for the ride, bumping with the petri dish...not even expecting to read about all this in some future issue of the peer-reviewed American Journal of Spousal Mortality.
Paul hands me the monthly bill from my auto insurance company. Open it, I say. My insurers are requesting money. Why not? With the computer screen right before me, I log onto my bank's website and give the insurance company some virtual cash. The Friends of the Menlo Park Library want money. Actually, they want some more money. In the trash, I tell Paul. ACLU, already paid. Trash. Macy's wants to sell me a sweater. Trash. And so it goes. With Paul opening the envelopes and handing me their contents, I make snap decisions and the mail gets handled in...you guessed it...a snap. Even my driver's license renewal. A quick trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles website, a tapping in of name and birthdate.
Wow, Paul observes, I didn't think you were that old. The morning gears are meshing now, this being a reliably painful realization. And what is there to do but put a brave face on things? Yup, I tell him. I am that old. He thought I was 10 years younger, he sends. I thank him. I didn't think I was 10 years younger. Every time I get my eyes tested, the fact hits home. I click okay on the DMV website, and I'm out of there. And I decide I have to get at it here, out of home and out into the so-called real world. Or at least the larger world. Or just the different world. I shift to the rowing machine for my morning workout, Paul strapping my feet into place. It's an absurd endeavor, if one considers. There are even videos of rowing across a lake or river, for the serious indoor exercise enthusiast. At least we are out of doors, more or less, me rowing up a cardiovascular storm while Paul sits and waits. Normally, I would thank him and urge him to shove off, but not this morning. My usual sending Paul on his way...go my son, you have your own life...seems hollow. For we are talking now, from the mail to the rowing. So I have asked Paul to stick around, and we'll go out for breakfast.
On the way to the town's big outdoor café, Paul tells me he has been burned by a woman or two. I tell him the truth, that when I was his age I had not burned nearly enough women or they me...and was still staggering through life post-injury. Over oatmeal, he asks me if I have been married before. By now, my marriage is sounding much like his last girlfriend. Which is to say, he is learning lessons in his 20s that I learned in my 40s. And somehow this is another painful realization. And precisely why, I am not entirely certain. After all, I'm alive. Marlou was not so lucky, and this fact hits me hourly. And by now haven't life's lessons and losses begin to even out for all of us...all of us in our 60s? How can I be in my 60s? The 60s were supposed to be about Janis Joplin and tear gas.
I should have done more, should have been more...but I am no more than a rolling stone, battery powered and steered with a joystick. And it's odd to see how little the outer world affects me these days. It's one of those arts-and-crafts weekends on the town's main street. The vendors are hawking their wares, the latter drifting by my wheelchair, mounted on sidewalk display shelves and easels. I glance at a ceramic woman with a Madonna feel to her, heavily twisted to one side to give the work a pleasant abstraction. Everything else blurs until the metal sculptures, big rusting and welded junkyard figures...and the artist has a surprising number of new works, I see. I see this stuff all the time, it feels, but actually these artisans only turn up twice a year. It's just that there have been so many years, all of them here in Menlo Park...as Paul the younger so accurately observed just an hour ago. They are adding up. And they may, or may not, add up to something.
Something in me still can't quite believe that I don't have a video script due at Apple Computer or a ghostwritten article late at Xerxes Systems. That's over. All I have to do these days is to swing my neuromusculature off the edge of the bed, onto its feet and into its wheelchair. Schedule? Well, there is the daily help. It's arrived early this morning in the form of Paul, who actually volunteers for Catholic Social Services but is having an ecumenical hour with me. The putting on of socks and shoes being the sort of high point of our Judeo-Christian exchange. For which I am most grateful.
Paul has some extra time, so we make use of it, opening a backlog of mail. Why should mail be backlogged, particularly if one is unemployed? Ask the Jewish Healing Center grief support group, of which I am now a card-carrying member. Go ahead, ask. The answer: things are fucked.
Paul doesn't seem to care, his life being in transition too. Separated from me by more than 30 years, he is an ex-Stanford graduate student experimenting with community work, and I am an ex-husband experimenting with...well, I don't even know, this experimenting having gone so awry. No, Paul is young enough and free enough to be experimenting. Somehow, I am not. Life is experimenting upon me, and I'm just along for the ride, bumping with the petri dish...not even expecting to read about all this in some future issue of the peer-reviewed American Journal of Spousal Mortality.
Paul hands me the monthly bill from my auto insurance company. Open it, I say. My insurers are requesting money. Why not? With the computer screen right before me, I log onto my bank's website and give the insurance company some virtual cash. The Friends of the Menlo Park Library want money. Actually, they want some more money. In the trash, I tell Paul. ACLU, already paid. Trash. Macy's wants to sell me a sweater. Trash. And so it goes. With Paul opening the envelopes and handing me their contents, I make snap decisions and the mail gets handled in...you guessed it...a snap. Even my driver's license renewal. A quick trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles website, a tapping in of name and birthdate.
Wow, Paul observes, I didn't think you were that old. The morning gears are meshing now, this being a reliably painful realization. And what is there to do but put a brave face on things? Yup, I tell him. I am that old. He thought I was 10 years younger, he sends. I thank him. I didn't think I was 10 years younger. Every time I get my eyes tested, the fact hits home. I click okay on the DMV website, and I'm out of there. And I decide I have to get at it here, out of home and out into the so-called real world. Or at least the larger world. Or just the different world. I shift to the rowing machine for my morning workout, Paul strapping my feet into place. It's an absurd endeavor, if one considers. There are even videos of rowing across a lake or river, for the serious indoor exercise enthusiast. At least we are out of doors, more or less, me rowing up a cardiovascular storm while Paul sits and waits. Normally, I would thank him and urge him to shove off, but not this morning. My usual sending Paul on his way...go my son, you have your own life...seems hollow. For we are talking now, from the mail to the rowing. So I have asked Paul to stick around, and we'll go out for breakfast.
On the way to the town's big outdoor café, Paul tells me he has been burned by a woman or two. I tell him the truth, that when I was his age I had not burned nearly enough women or they me...and was still staggering through life post-injury. Over oatmeal, he asks me if I have been married before. By now, my marriage is sounding much like his last girlfriend. Which is to say, he is learning lessons in his 20s that I learned in my 40s. And somehow this is another painful realization. And precisely why, I am not entirely certain. After all, I'm alive. Marlou was not so lucky, and this fact hits me hourly. And by now haven't life's lessons and losses begin to even out for all of us...all of us in our 60s? How can I be in my 60s? The 60s were supposed to be about Janis Joplin and tear gas.
I should have done more, should have been more...but I am no more than a rolling stone, battery powered and steered with a joystick. And it's odd to see how little the outer world affects me these days. It's one of those arts-and-crafts weekends on the town's main street. The vendors are hawking their wares, the latter drifting by my wheelchair, mounted on sidewalk display shelves and easels. I glance at a ceramic woman with a Madonna feel to her, heavily twisted to one side to give the work a pleasant abstraction. Everything else blurs until the metal sculptures, big rusting and welded junkyard figures...and the artist has a surprising number of new works, I see. I see this stuff all the time, it feels, but actually these artisans only turn up twice a year. It's just that there have been so many years, all of them here in Menlo Park...as Paul the younger so accurately observed just an hour ago. They are adding up. And they may, or may not, add up to something.
What to make of all this lyric theater?
It's coming at me from all directions, pushing and shoving. Naturally, I'm shoving back. It started it.
The Marx Brothers have forever ruined me for Il Trovatore. Sorry, but once you've seen the anvil chorus with Harpo about to strike, there's no going back. Same with gypsy fireside arias. It's a bad set up, singers knocking out a story so lame with Groucho and Chico in the wings tearing up contracts. Me no like this article, rip. For one thing, the actions of the Marx Brothers couldn't be clearer. Their motivation may be surreal, their purpose Dada, but what they are doing is what they are doing. Verdi's story turns on a mistaken identity, a woman who throws the wrong baby in a fire. Whoops. And an oddly timed and interminable self poisoning. Both of these plot twists are enough to make you hit the side of your head a few times to loosen up some brain cells. Go ahead. Try head hitting. Crazier things happen in Il Trovatore.
Which would not matter if only a week or so earlier you hadn't seen three Puccini one-acts, each story complete, twisted, tragic or comic. I guess that an opera company is like any industrial plant. Once you crank it up, you sort of have to keep it going. Shutting down is costly and inefficient. Although a shutdown would be welcome. Thing is, everyone knows the Verdi music is magnificent. It's just that I need at least a month, maybe two, before I can take it, mixed as it is with all this balderdash. Even if Il Trovatore was rebranded as Scenes from the Gypsy Camp and the Guys in the Castle, I would need a break. Maybe this makes me not a big opera fan. The real question is what makes me plan to see Abduction from the Seraglio on Saturday.
As for the squeeze, well there's only so much time. I'm an aging disabled guy doing stuff in a wheelchair. And it's taking a lot out of me, this opera season. And yes, I know, lots of people would like my tickets. Actually, this may not even be true. Maybe no one wants them. Maybe I don't want them.
Which may explain why this afternoon's matinee of the Lincoln Center production of South Pacific also drove me into something of a frenzy. Not that the production isn't charming, and quite moving. The latter quality has much to do with me these days. There was something about Lieut. Cable's tortured love and the offhand way he volunteers for life-threatening military action...yes, even this clichéd story moment struck a chord. There is nothing abstract about facing death anymore, not after Marlou.
During the intermission, I blasted out of my back row wheelchair space and zipped into the disabled toilet. I was congratulating myself on this extraordinarily deft move, when someone began pounding on the door. The man not only pounded but offered advice such as "hurry up" and "others have to use this," a form of external pressure that has an inverse effect on bladder pressure, extending the men's room process. Pound, pound, pound. When I finally emerged, I wanted to run him over. He was just a guy with a cane. What sort of audience is this?
Something about the performance drove me dementedly into traffic afterwards. "Stop," yelled the theater's traffic guard, standing in front of the crowds and trying to let rush-hour traffic get by on Taylor Street. I did stop. I was dashing right into a red light. And for what reason? Too much musical theater, I think. Being too caught up in all the crescendos and schmaltzandos. While, at the other extreme, magazines and newspapers are piling up unread. I do have an occasional go at the San Francisco Chronicle which, at least, gives me a satisfying sense of having completed something. The newspaper itself having completed its own demise, more or less, stripped down to a few pathetic pages an issue.
Which doesn't explain why on Saturday I'll be back on the Opera Express, nonstop for the wheelchair space in row xx. There is a compulsive quality to my days. Not to mention an element of danger. I see the mortality part popping up here and there. Aside from that, I don't see much, except the scenery going by. The fact that a lot of the scenery is going up and down doesn't matter. At least I pay attention to the soundtrack now and then.
It's coming at me from all directions, pushing and shoving. Naturally, I'm shoving back. It started it.
The Marx Brothers have forever ruined me for Il Trovatore. Sorry, but once you've seen the anvil chorus with Harpo about to strike, there's no going back. Same with gypsy fireside arias. It's a bad set up, singers knocking out a story so lame with Groucho and Chico in the wings tearing up contracts. Me no like this article, rip. For one thing, the actions of the Marx Brothers couldn't be clearer. Their motivation may be surreal, their purpose Dada, but what they are doing is what they are doing. Verdi's story turns on a mistaken identity, a woman who throws the wrong baby in a fire. Whoops. And an oddly timed and interminable self poisoning. Both of these plot twists are enough to make you hit the side of your head a few times to loosen up some brain cells. Go ahead. Try head hitting. Crazier things happen in Il Trovatore.
Which would not matter if only a week or so earlier you hadn't seen three Puccini one-acts, each story complete, twisted, tragic or comic. I guess that an opera company is like any industrial plant. Once you crank it up, you sort of have to keep it going. Shutting down is costly and inefficient. Although a shutdown would be welcome. Thing is, everyone knows the Verdi music is magnificent. It's just that I need at least a month, maybe two, before I can take it, mixed as it is with all this balderdash. Even if Il Trovatore was rebranded as Scenes from the Gypsy Camp and the Guys in the Castle, I would need a break. Maybe this makes me not a big opera fan. The real question is what makes me plan to see Abduction from the Seraglio on Saturday.
As for the squeeze, well there's only so much time. I'm an aging disabled guy doing stuff in a wheelchair. And it's taking a lot out of me, this opera season. And yes, I know, lots of people would like my tickets. Actually, this may not even be true. Maybe no one wants them. Maybe I don't want them.
Which may explain why this afternoon's matinee of the Lincoln Center production of South Pacific also drove me into something of a frenzy. Not that the production isn't charming, and quite moving. The latter quality has much to do with me these days. There was something about Lieut. Cable's tortured love and the offhand way he volunteers for life-threatening military action...yes, even this clichéd story moment struck a chord. There is nothing abstract about facing death anymore, not after Marlou.
During the intermission, I blasted out of my back row wheelchair space and zipped into the disabled toilet. I was congratulating myself on this extraordinarily deft move, when someone began pounding on the door. The man not only pounded but offered advice such as "hurry up" and "others have to use this," a form of external pressure that has an inverse effect on bladder pressure, extending the men's room process. Pound, pound, pound. When I finally emerged, I wanted to run him over. He was just a guy with a cane. What sort of audience is this?
Something about the performance drove me dementedly into traffic afterwards. "Stop," yelled the theater's traffic guard, standing in front of the crowds and trying to let rush-hour traffic get by on Taylor Street. I did stop. I was dashing right into a red light. And for what reason? Too much musical theater, I think. Being too caught up in all the crescendos and schmaltzandos. While, at the other extreme, magazines and newspapers are piling up unread. I do have an occasional go at the San Francisco Chronicle which, at least, gives me a satisfying sense of having completed something. The newspaper itself having completed its own demise, more or less, stripped down to a few pathetic pages an issue.
Which doesn't explain why on Saturday I'll be back on the Opera Express, nonstop for the wheelchair space in row xx. There is a compulsive quality to my days. Not to mention an element of danger. I see the mortality part popping up here and there. Aside from that, I don't see much, except the scenery going by. The fact that a lot of the scenery is going up and down doesn't matter. At least I pay attention to the soundtrack now and then.
I cannot recall what my mother set out to buy in places like Redlands, San Bernardino or Riverside...provincial towns that fairly burst with urbanity compared to the post-cowboy, tumbleweed village of Banning...for remote shopping was part of the family landscape. To buy real stuff, you drove over the hills, about 30 miles, in search of larger shops and finer goods. The latter included school clothes, which may be why I have forgotten the practicalities of these trips. God only knows what my younger siblings were watching for as we sped along the highway. I was on the lookout for only one thing: flowing water.
The high point was the Santa Ana River. The highway crossed over it, affording a spectacular view. The weedy, arid Southern California plain sank into a sandy bottom of water courses, dotted with shrubby versions of junipers, cottonwoods and willows. And, oh yes, somewhere winding through the center of it, a meter's width of water with at least 10 cm of depth.
That was enough for me. This was the whole purpose of the trip. Maybe I lived in the desert, but this was not desert, not this bit with the open water running among the leafy trees, however stunted. The mighty Santa Ana River. It rose in the not-too-distant mountains, descended to rush over the Southern California plain and...I had sighted this once...widened into a mind boggling estuary before doing its bit for the Pacific Ocean.
The problem was that from a speeding car, a meter of water goes by awfully quickly. My mother had no patience for my river-watching obsession, and my brother and sister openly derided my wackiness. I didn't care. I was a man with a riparian mission. See the rivers. And this was one. Actually, it wasn't the only one. There was another, unreliable version. And it must be said this other one tempted and tantalized.
The San Gorgonio River. It ran only a short distance from my home and occupied a stony gorge a quarter-mile wide. The problem was that it didn't so much run as sit. A narrow rivulet of water snaked through it a few months of the year, and even that was a mile or two up stream from my desert home. In short, despite its impressive canyon, dubbed by locals "the water canyon," the thing was dry as a stone. The quarry near our house probably sucked the last water out of the river bed to rinse gravel.
Still it had such potential. Looking up the deepest part of the water canyon from a country road that wound into the hills, the wide, straight-sided gorge turned, steepened out of sight into the mountains. At the bend, one could see a few pine trees creeping toward the desert. There the piney waterworld gave up, the wide river canyon becoming a spent, desert thing. Unless there were heavy rains, and then the San Gorgonio River almost looked like one. The flow widened to maybe 10 meters. This didn't last. Worse, it required prodding the parents to drive up the water canyon. Neither had patience for mindless kid excursions, particularly this one, motoring along a familiar rocky wash. Still, after pleading, I usually got my way. The river had its own way, of course. And rains or not, sometimes it simply stayed small.
There were alternatives. The road grader had left a ditch along the edge of our driveway that filled with water when the storms came. On rainy days, probably numbering less than 10 per year, I stood at the edge of the drive and stared into the muddy course. The water gurgled brown and red. Somehow, it didn't look like a miniature river. The ditch flowed with what might have been my mother's ground-up flowerpots. I followed the runoff downstream. The clay-red fluid coursed away from our house and into the county land that bordered the Morongo Indian Reservation. Here the chaparral was taller than I, a greasewood forest. For several years, I had a go at damming the course of the runoff. But engineering was never my strongest suit. The earthen dams, even the ones built with a crew of boys and reinforced with the odd board, washed away before I could ever see the tiny reservoir that must have briefly built up behind.
Still, without the dam, there was a place where the greasewood extended over the running wadi like an arbor and the liquid clay gurgled underneath, conveying an almost pastoral sense. As though the desert actually flowed with water. As though the desert wasn't a desert. The gray skies accompanying the storms slightly undermined this effect. Water flowing on a sunny day was more my idea of how things should be. Still, with a little imagination, one could see the desert greening and softening. This was particularly true for a few months in the spring when the wild grasses sent their sprouts up through the prickly ground.
Too bad about the San Gorgonio River. It was built to disappoint. The thing was actually designed more like the river equivalent of a ski jump. Starting about 3000 meters above, waters hurtled down the canyons, joining forces above Banning, then flowing into a few remarkably primitive concrete channels owned by the municipal water company. There wasn't much, in the end. The mountains rose out of the desert, after all, squeezing the clouds dry. The town squeezed the canyon dry. And that was that.
Still, I couldn't let go. Once or twice, crossing the Santa Ana River on some shopping expedition, the rains had spread the waters into something that actually looked like the rivers one saw in films. Why I cared about all this one way or the other fascinates me to this day. Are we born attuned to land and climate?
I can see the contrasting effect in others. Some people take up life in the desert like reptiles. They bask in dryness. In the mornings, they wander outside and watch the rocks begin to bake, the seed pods blow, the snake skins rustle. The enjoy the way glass turns blue in the solar blaze. When the heat rises, they retreat. Water never worries them. There isn't much. And not much is needed. Desert rats.
Which must make me a Norwegian rat. It is raining now in Menlo Park, hard and relentless. Optimists have termed this the first storm of the season. I am never convinced. Rain, its presence or absence, is a personal matter. I have the conviction, rarely confessed, that my personal worrying and concern over the precipitation can only help things along. As far as rainfall is concerned in California, we are never out of the woods. Except when we are in the desert which is permanently and tragically out of the woods. Not to mention out of the question.
When I was 17 years old, my graduation present was a Santa Fe train ticket to Chicago. The journey was an interesting one. But it only became fascinating in Iowa or the train tracks let go of the land, meandered over something that looked like a lake that was actually the Mississippi River. I'll be in Dubuque next month. Guess when I must see.
The high point was the Santa Ana River. The highway crossed over it, affording a spectacular view. The weedy, arid Southern California plain sank into a sandy bottom of water courses, dotted with shrubby versions of junipers, cottonwoods and willows. And, oh yes, somewhere winding through the center of it, a meter's width of water with at least 10 cm of depth.
That was enough for me. This was the whole purpose of the trip. Maybe I lived in the desert, but this was not desert, not this bit with the open water running among the leafy trees, however stunted. The mighty Santa Ana River. It rose in the not-too-distant mountains, descended to rush over the Southern California plain and...I had sighted this once...widened into a mind boggling estuary before doing its bit for the Pacific Ocean.
The problem was that from a speeding car, a meter of water goes by awfully quickly. My mother had no patience for my river-watching obsession, and my brother and sister openly derided my wackiness. I didn't care. I was a man with a riparian mission. See the rivers. And this was one. Actually, it wasn't the only one. There was another, unreliable version. And it must be said this other one tempted and tantalized.
The San Gorgonio River. It ran only a short distance from my home and occupied a stony gorge a quarter-mile wide. The problem was that it didn't so much run as sit. A narrow rivulet of water snaked through it a few months of the year, and even that was a mile or two up stream from my desert home. In short, despite its impressive canyon, dubbed by locals "the water canyon," the thing was dry as a stone. The quarry near our house probably sucked the last water out of the river bed to rinse gravel.
Still it had such potential. Looking up the deepest part of the water canyon from a country road that wound into the hills, the wide, straight-sided gorge turned, steepened out of sight into the mountains. At the bend, one could see a few pine trees creeping toward the desert. There the piney waterworld gave up, the wide river canyon becoming a spent, desert thing. Unless there were heavy rains, and then the San Gorgonio River almost looked like one. The flow widened to maybe 10 meters. This didn't last. Worse, it required prodding the parents to drive up the water canyon. Neither had patience for mindless kid excursions, particularly this one, motoring along a familiar rocky wash. Still, after pleading, I usually got my way. The river had its own way, of course. And rains or not, sometimes it simply stayed small.
There were alternatives. The road grader had left a ditch along the edge of our driveway that filled with water when the storms came. On rainy days, probably numbering less than 10 per year, I stood at the edge of the drive and stared into the muddy course. The water gurgled brown and red. Somehow, it didn't look like a miniature river. The ditch flowed with what might have been my mother's ground-up flowerpots. I followed the runoff downstream. The clay-red fluid coursed away from our house and into the county land that bordered the Morongo Indian Reservation. Here the chaparral was taller than I, a greasewood forest. For several years, I had a go at damming the course of the runoff. But engineering was never my strongest suit. The earthen dams, even the ones built with a crew of boys and reinforced with the odd board, washed away before I could ever see the tiny reservoir that must have briefly built up behind.
Still, without the dam, there was a place where the greasewood extended over the running wadi like an arbor and the liquid clay gurgled underneath, conveying an almost pastoral sense. As though the desert actually flowed with water. As though the desert wasn't a desert. The gray skies accompanying the storms slightly undermined this effect. Water flowing on a sunny day was more my idea of how things should be. Still, with a little imagination, one could see the desert greening and softening. This was particularly true for a few months in the spring when the wild grasses sent their sprouts up through the prickly ground.
Too bad about the San Gorgonio River. It was built to disappoint. The thing was actually designed more like the river equivalent of a ski jump. Starting about 3000 meters above, waters hurtled down the canyons, joining forces above Banning, then flowing into a few remarkably primitive concrete channels owned by the municipal water company. There wasn't much, in the end. The mountains rose out of the desert, after all, squeezing the clouds dry. The town squeezed the canyon dry. And that was that.
Still, I couldn't let go. Once or twice, crossing the Santa Ana River on some shopping expedition, the rains had spread the waters into something that actually looked like the rivers one saw in films. Why I cared about all this one way or the other fascinates me to this day. Are we born attuned to land and climate?
I can see the contrasting effect in others. Some people take up life in the desert like reptiles. They bask in dryness. In the mornings, they wander outside and watch the rocks begin to bake, the seed pods blow, the snake skins rustle. The enjoy the way glass turns blue in the solar blaze. When the heat rises, they retreat. Water never worries them. There isn't much. And not much is needed. Desert rats.
Which must make me a Norwegian rat. It is raining now in Menlo Park, hard and relentless. Optimists have termed this the first storm of the season. I am never convinced. Rain, its presence or absence, is a personal matter. I have the conviction, rarely confessed, that my personal worrying and concern over the precipitation can only help things along. As far as rainfall is concerned in California, we are never out of the woods. Except when we are in the desert which is permanently and tragically out of the woods. Not to mention out of the question.
When I was 17 years old, my graduation present was a Santa Fe train ticket to Chicago. The journey was an interesting one. But it only became fascinating in Iowa or the train tracks let go of the land, meandered over something that looked like a lake that was actually the Mississippi River. I'll be in Dubuque next month. Guess when I must see.
A few years ago I got mixed up with our local high school, and the result of that mixup is still falling out. The facts are modest enough. Menlo Park's high school has a parent foundation, and the latter wanted a PR person. Part-time, nonprofit, just the sort of thing for someone fed up with the corporate world and thinking about retirement. What does retirement have to do with anything? Good question. It was a question I should have asked then.
There's a difference between a job and work. The latter is something one can learn about in elementary physics. It's an essential part of the world and is reducible to an equation. A job is an arbitrary concept, a form into which human beings fit well or poorly. In my case, the job initially fit rather well. That was until the campus announced plans to build a civic theater, a facility it would share with the community of Menlo Park. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the theater quickly captured my entire attention. Soon, it was all I really wanted to do. I put up with the rest of the high school publicizing only to get the theater project blazing. Why?
Somehow, this had to do with growing up in the desert wilds. I have no regrets that my childhood transpired in an Upper Sonoran pass between two spectacular mountain ranges, right at the edge of ecological zones, chapparal creeping up the mountain slopes, succumbing to distant but visible pines at one end, a few scraggly cactus at the other. Hot sandy winds pitted the window glass all summer, a colder version blowing down from the snowy slopes in the winter. And culture, at least of the urban, artsy kind, always remote.
Of course, there were the parents' phonograph records. In an era when 'phonograph' was still a familiar word and had the aura of the not-yet-invented 'technology,' they were downright nifty, the 78-rpm platters. Die Walküre, urged the center label of one set. For a kid a learning to read, it was clear that someone wanted a guy named Walker dead. Why he had to die was irrelevant. The music blasted out all over the place, dramatic, wild and windswept as the surrounding mountains...but confined to a stage. A booklet that dropped out of the center of the folio of hard plastic records showed what a stage was.
Stages were hard to come by. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave its annual concert in Palm Springs, they held forth in the Polo Grounds. My family sat on hard wooden benches and stared at the orchestra in its canvas shell across the grass. This wasn't a stage, but one got the idea. Since stages were just an idea for much of my childhood, they were all the more pleasing in my adulthood. Building one in Menlo Park seemed a wonderful idea. And in my late 50s, somehow life had carried me along too far to put up with less than wonderful ideas.
When the husband-and-wife directors of the chamber music season at New York's Lincoln Center set up summer shop in Menlo Park, the news seemed as exotic as my parents' old 78s. When the two sat down in the high school with a planning committee for the new theater, well, it was like watching a concert across a polo field. David Finckel, cellist with the Emerson Quartet, walked in with his wife Wu Han, having just gotten off a plane, and leaned his cello case against a wall. The couple started in on acoustics. How you needed height. You needed an acoustic engineer to create a shape. But, no, expensive hardwoods weren't required. If you knew what you were doing, even concrete blocks could hold musical sounds.
Soon, there was an architectural competition. Firms from all over the country submitted bids, and in the end, five got to submit designs. The models went up for display, and I went all out for press coverage. The suburban weekly ran a two-page spread, complete with color photos, showing the architectural miniatures. The public came in for a reception. For a desert kid, this was big time stuff.
I quickly lost interest in the rest of the job. A new principal arrived, and she had no interest in the theater. I had lunch one day with the school district's assistant superintendent, the point man for the new building. Could I work for him, just publicizing the new theater? No, he said, there simply wasn't any money.
At which point, my spirit knew what to do...but my conditioned mind did not. I should have quit. Quit the job, that is, and begun the work. I grew to hate the principal. She openly wearied of talk of the new theater, all but drummed her fingers on her desk when I mentioned the topic. The chemistry, as we say in California, was bad.
The school foundation job wasn't paying all that well, and I could have scraped by on my private pension. But somehow my sense of duty, or my slavery to conventional wisdom, could not let me take a chance, do the real work...and worry about the income later. That is to say, I should have gone to work, unpaid, for the theater. And maybe in time some foundation or donor or magic spirit would have materialized with some money. Or maybe not. In the end, I hated the job, the high school parents were not terribly pleased with me. And it all ended badly.
But it all came to life again over the weekend. The Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center officially opened, and since the local suburban weekly refused to cover the event, I volunteered and wrote an article. I got a byline, no money, and endless delight. I even got to refer to the new building as a theater. It's an unfortunate Americanism, this performing arts center phrase. Definitely name inflation for a 500-seat house.
The local chamber series Music@Menlo performed in their usual dazzling way. Musicians included Anthony McGill, clarinetist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who played at Barack Obama's inauguration. Pretty damned far from cactus and an orchestra in a polo field tent, if you ask me. More important, writing the article and being involved in the weekend's opening was what I wanted to do. It takes a lifetime to figure out what you want to do. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one ever knows how long a lifetime is.
There's a difference between a job and work. The latter is something one can learn about in elementary physics. It's an essential part of the world and is reducible to an equation. A job is an arbitrary concept, a form into which human beings fit well or poorly. In my case, the job initially fit rather well. That was until the campus announced plans to build a civic theater, a facility it would share with the community of Menlo Park. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the theater quickly captured my entire attention. Soon, it was all I really wanted to do. I put up with the rest of the high school publicizing only to get the theater project blazing. Why?
Somehow, this had to do with growing up in the desert wilds. I have no regrets that my childhood transpired in an Upper Sonoran pass between two spectacular mountain ranges, right at the edge of ecological zones, chapparal creeping up the mountain slopes, succumbing to distant but visible pines at one end, a few scraggly cactus at the other. Hot sandy winds pitted the window glass all summer, a colder version blowing down from the snowy slopes in the winter. And culture, at least of the urban, artsy kind, always remote.
Of course, there were the parents' phonograph records. In an era when 'phonograph' was still a familiar word and had the aura of the not-yet-invented 'technology,' they were downright nifty, the 78-rpm platters. Die Walküre, urged the center label of one set. For a kid a learning to read, it was clear that someone wanted a guy named Walker dead. Why he had to die was irrelevant. The music blasted out all over the place, dramatic, wild and windswept as the surrounding mountains...but confined to a stage. A booklet that dropped out of the center of the folio of hard plastic records showed what a stage was.
Stages were hard to come by. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave its annual concert in Palm Springs, they held forth in the Polo Grounds. My family sat on hard wooden benches and stared at the orchestra in its canvas shell across the grass. This wasn't a stage, but one got the idea. Since stages were just an idea for much of my childhood, they were all the more pleasing in my adulthood. Building one in Menlo Park seemed a wonderful idea. And in my late 50s, somehow life had carried me along too far to put up with less than wonderful ideas.
When the husband-and-wife directors of the chamber music season at New York's Lincoln Center set up summer shop in Menlo Park, the news seemed as exotic as my parents' old 78s. When the two sat down in the high school with a planning committee for the new theater, well, it was like watching a concert across a polo field. David Finckel, cellist with the Emerson Quartet, walked in with his wife Wu Han, having just gotten off a plane, and leaned his cello case against a wall. The couple started in on acoustics. How you needed height. You needed an acoustic engineer to create a shape. But, no, expensive hardwoods weren't required. If you knew what you were doing, even concrete blocks could hold musical sounds.
Soon, there was an architectural competition. Firms from all over the country submitted bids, and in the end, five got to submit designs. The models went up for display, and I went all out for press coverage. The suburban weekly ran a two-page spread, complete with color photos, showing the architectural miniatures. The public came in for a reception. For a desert kid, this was big time stuff.
I quickly lost interest in the rest of the job. A new principal arrived, and she had no interest in the theater. I had lunch one day with the school district's assistant superintendent, the point man for the new building. Could I work for him, just publicizing the new theater? No, he said, there simply wasn't any money.
At which point, my spirit knew what to do...but my conditioned mind did not. I should have quit. Quit the job, that is, and begun the work. I grew to hate the principal. She openly wearied of talk of the new theater, all but drummed her fingers on her desk when I mentioned the topic. The chemistry, as we say in California, was bad.
The school foundation job wasn't paying all that well, and I could have scraped by on my private pension. But somehow my sense of duty, or my slavery to conventional wisdom, could not let me take a chance, do the real work...and worry about the income later. That is to say, I should have gone to work, unpaid, for the theater. And maybe in time some foundation or donor or magic spirit would have materialized with some money. Or maybe not. In the end, I hated the job, the high school parents were not terribly pleased with me. And it all ended badly.
But it all came to life again over the weekend. The Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center officially opened, and since the local suburban weekly refused to cover the event, I volunteered and wrote an article. I got a byline, no money, and endless delight. I even got to refer to the new building as a theater. It's an unfortunate Americanism, this performing arts center phrase. Definitely name inflation for a 500-seat house.
The local chamber series Music@Menlo performed in their usual dazzling way. Musicians included Anthony McGill, clarinetist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, who played at Barack Obama's inauguration. Pretty damned far from cactus and an orchestra in a polo field tent, if you ask me. More important, writing the article and being involved in the weekend's opening was what I wanted to do. It takes a lifetime to figure out what you want to do. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one ever knows how long a lifetime is.
Out of Oakland. If university life was a journey, this was the crude itinerary of my junior and senior years. Just as no one expects the earth's core to cool any time soon, no one foresees any letup in the Berkeley housing squeeze. Not during the next two centuries. From today's reports, I cannot tell any real change in Berkeley's housing crisis since my late adolescence.
I found myself lucky to be living in a condemned house in North Oakland in 1967. For, at least, the place was near an all-night supermarket and less than 15 minutes from campus. The house's condemned status may have a Gothic ring to it, but the truth had much more to do with the California Department of Highways, which had decided to roll six lanes of traffic right through my bedroom. Not to worry. I soon found a rooming house in a section of Oakland known as Pill Hill for its proximity to hospitals, set up portable house there and began pedaling the 25 minute ride to campus on my precious French bicycle.
The rooming house's residents must have numbered at least 50, but the true count was never known. Opening the wrought iron lock on the front door only admitted more mysteries. The stale dust of ages wafted from bristly floral carpet in the hallways, followed me up the stairs and hung about my room. At night, a Murphy bed folded down from the wall. Of course, I brought my bicycle inside. With the bed down and the bike parked, there was barely room to plug in a small hotplate and heat the evening's soup. When I even bothered.
What I bothered was the tenants. The unseen and the undead of the Alcazar Apartments had a way of slipping notes under my door. I often discovered them days after their arrival, mistaking them for stray scraps of paper I had dropped myself. It was usually in the throwing out of my own detritus that I noticed a paper scrap was oddly folded or strangely lined and, when unfolded and inspected, contained a request that I not walk too heavily or slam doors too loudly or turn on the shower too mightily in the mornings. With the notes incomprehensible, the tenants invisible and my homework interminable, I skittered in and out of the place. The dust had an oddly disturbing effect on a 20-year-old, wreaking as it did of things hidden and dying. I was dying to get out of there.
I dropped in and out of the Berkeley campus housing office the way birds leap on and off a feeder, and one day, there it was. A room, a large carpeted room, in a shingled house on the north side of the campus. There was even an electric heater, shared use of a kitchen, windows on three sides and a lone tenant who often had his door open and did what I did, studying. Redwoods did what they did in that part of Berkeley. They grew on all sides of the house, shading it, darkening things, sidling up to the shingles on the exterior, woodsy, mossy surfaces nuzzling and moistening each other. A subtle atmosphere rose and mixed with the smoke from the stone fireplaces and brick chimneys of the neighborhood. Cozy and professorial and not even a bike ride but a five-minute walk to the edge of campus. Out of Oakland.
Naturally, with so much beauty around, and an atmosphere so attuned to my spirit, that is to say, darkly contemplative...everything had to go wrong. My love life saddened me. Then a bullet in the spinal cord paralyzed me. And it all happened in and around this shingled house on Spruce Street.
There was the downstairs. That was where the graduate students lived. They were already in a different epoque. They drank wine, albeit cheap, on a regular basis. And they talked, it seemed, for pure recreation. One had a girlfriend who was both Jewish and from Mississippi, giving her a drawl with a strange sharpness along with a sultry vibrance...all of which had me downstairs often. Another of the lower tenants sold LPs in a record store, disappearing into the shop's back room to type away at his PhD thesis in geology. He was a short, nondescript Jewish kid from LA. And he was so unimpressive in demeanor and conversation, that I would barely have noticed his existence, save for what he kept bringing home from the record store. Woman after woman. He kept meeting them, or they kept meeting him, in and around the record bins of late 60s music. The third graduate student was visiting from Britain, studying architecture. He had a girlfriend in London and was more or less counting the days until his return.
The brit was named Nick, and his household function had to do with anchoring any conversation. Things usually worked out so that no more than two graduate students were home at the same time. This meant that when I came downstairs, took my seat and took my wine, I was the third leg in a stool. The conversations wandered about. But they usually settled for an uncomfortable period on whichever grad student was absent. Unless Nick was absent. And for reasons that seemed utterly natural at the time, he seemed to be above or beyond discussion. Perhaps he had the status of visitor or foreigner, his presence known to be temporary, and was afforded the courtesies of a guest.
What was said about the two others? Well, the one with the Mississippi girlfriend had only that distinguishing feature. She was all over him, everyone said. Her Southern tongue was practically out and panting, the others agreed. He was all she was interested in, and he was doing a pretty good job of things, judging by her general air of sultry satisfaction. When the downstairs population reversed, the record-store and geology guy became the topic. He barely exists, Nick observed. There is no one there.
Nick's words seemed full of bold assertiveness and deep perspicacity. Yes, I could see what he meant. The L.A. guy said or did little to distinguish himself. He made no brash assertions. He did not come down heavily on one side or the other on anything. He was on time for work, even more or less on time with his thesis. Moving along in a colorless way, he was also getting laid constantly. In retrospect, I do not believe that anyone mentioned this point ever. Never mind. For the point of Nick's points was their pointedness. His tongue was neither acid nor sharp, just unsparingly precise.
News coverage from Vietnam featured the latest hundred-round-per-minute helicopter gunship. Nick observed that such armaments must 'efficiently convert a bloke into the past tense.' This turn of phrase hit home. The verbal wit cut away pretense. It restored the power of language -- just at the moment when words like 'escalate' were beginning to numb public discourse.
By mid-June I was lying in the campus hospital, paralyzed from the neck down, and receiving frequent visitors. Nick dropped in once before his departure for the UK. He said he was glad to be going home. My shooting was part of it. He didn't say more.
I didn't know what made me send $120 to P.O. Box 707, Berkeley, and buy a one-way charter flight to Gatwick Airport, complete with refueling stop at Niagara Falls. I needed a change. Or maybe I didn't, it occurred to me sailing down the night freeway to Oakland Airport. Lloyd Airways. Whoever heard of it? Well, there it was, and here I was with my friend Darryl, an otherwise extroverted member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who seemed inarticulate on the subject of my shooting...yet was often around, particularly at the roughest moments. Facing the aluminum stairs that lead from the floodlit tarmac into the midnight plane and God knows where, may not have been the roughest moment, it was among the most frightening. Darryl took a scarf off his neck, tied it around mine, and I clomped my metal leg brace up the steps. I recognized one or two of the students stashing rucksacks in the luggage bins. One was Mitch, a frantic waver of hands in several English classes. I did not say hello, certain he would not recognize the gaunt, recently paralyzed me. Soon everyone was seatbelted into their destinies, and it didn't matter.
In traveling to Britain, I needed some sort of entry point, and decided Nick would have to do. He met me at the airport, and together we boarded a train for Victoria Station. Another country. I had seen from the air that drivers really did use the left side of the roads. And now there was this authentic British train with a wall of passenger doors for quick exit from each compartment, all of it now passing modern high-rise blocks. Was this London? No, Nick said, this was Croydon. Which did not matter either way, Croydon, schmoydon. I was somewhere else, 6000 miles from the scene of my shooting. By the time the actual London rolled by the windows of a cab, the wrenching journey from California was beginning to hit me.
Would I like a pint? Nick stopped by his flat, ran my bags inside and guided me to a pub at the corner. It was all incomprehensible, this bonhomie in the 10 pm midsummer twilight. I didn't drink much ever, felt frail and physically vulnerable and, since my emergence from hospital, had hung at the edges of any social gathering. So what was I doing in a pub? Forcing a smile, forcing some beer and forcing myself to stay awake. Let's go for a spin.
Somehow Nick had friends, an Austin Mini, me and a festive sense of night in London. I can't really recall where we drove. I'd had more to drink in the previous hour than I'd had in the previous year. And now things were rushing by, amber things, lights. This was one of the strangest new British experiences, yellow streetlights. They widened and the pavement reddened as we headed up Pall Mall. I had only heard of the cigarettes. But now there was this, a wide red road with yellow lights...as odd as the yellow brick road, which might have had red lights. And at the end, the most impressive wrought-iron gates, which fortunately were wide open, admitting our little car and its load of intoxicated youth.
Two policemen appeared from nowhere. Nick stared dead ahead. Talk, Paul, he hissed, this is Buckingham Palace. And so it was, I observed in the friendliest of ways to the cop leaning into my window. When was the place open for visitors? Well, the man said, in the most patient tone, this really isn't a place one can visit. Although there was a small museum to one side. He pointed, I looked, then thanked him, and Nick backed out a little too quickly, I thought. But we were off. Off the hook. Driving back to Harley Street.
When I climbed the stairs to the flat Nick shared there, I barely noticed the place. On the ground floor were doctors' offices, of course. On the upper floors at night all I saw was the bed. And in the morning nothing stood out except for Ascot water heaters. They seemed quaint to me, these miniature, heat-as-you-go producers of hot water. In my mind, I thought of them as emblematic of some British trait about thinking small. I may have been right about the latter. In terms of energy efficiency, they were way ahead of their time.
With the weekend approaching, Nick drove us to his parents' home in Welwyn Garden City, a postwar modernity experience on its own. The days were long, and this one inexplicably sunny. After dinner, which I don't recall but we must have had, Nick and I tooled about Hertfordshire. He had a remarkable capacity for speed in the country lanes, and by the time we shot out of the hedgerows and into a clearing big enough for a pub, my face was white. Nothing about the pub brought color into it. I was not used to being around groups of people, even six months out of the hospital. Something about the cheery badinage of Nick's country pub mates made me feel like a stone on the flywheel of life. I wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, standing then sitting, aware that beer would race through my body at a speed that could be measured with a stopwatch.
Aside from being physically frail, I must have been terribly depressed, dragging myself about from one British experience to the next. Eventually, I hooked up with another American friend, found myself a bed and breakfast near Kings Cross and liberated Nick. I saw him one more time, several years later, after stumbling into one of the other Berkeley downstairs graduate students at Sadler's Wells Theatre. Nick and I did not say much. We did not have much in common, after all. Still, something about him had pointed me in a new direction and given me, for my first days in Britain, a solid start.
I found myself lucky to be living in a condemned house in North Oakland in 1967. For, at least, the place was near an all-night supermarket and less than 15 minutes from campus. The house's condemned status may have a Gothic ring to it, but the truth had much more to do with the California Department of Highways, which had decided to roll six lanes of traffic right through my bedroom. Not to worry. I soon found a rooming house in a section of Oakland known as Pill Hill for its proximity to hospitals, set up portable house there and began pedaling the 25 minute ride to campus on my precious French bicycle.
The rooming house's residents must have numbered at least 50, but the true count was never known. Opening the wrought iron lock on the front door only admitted more mysteries. The stale dust of ages wafted from bristly floral carpet in the hallways, followed me up the stairs and hung about my room. At night, a Murphy bed folded down from the wall. Of course, I brought my bicycle inside. With the bed down and the bike parked, there was barely room to plug in a small hotplate and heat the evening's soup. When I even bothered.
What I bothered was the tenants. The unseen and the undead of the Alcazar Apartments had a way of slipping notes under my door. I often discovered them days after their arrival, mistaking them for stray scraps of paper I had dropped myself. It was usually in the throwing out of my own detritus that I noticed a paper scrap was oddly folded or strangely lined and, when unfolded and inspected, contained a request that I not walk too heavily or slam doors too loudly or turn on the shower too mightily in the mornings. With the notes incomprehensible, the tenants invisible and my homework interminable, I skittered in and out of the place. The dust had an oddly disturbing effect on a 20-year-old, wreaking as it did of things hidden and dying. I was dying to get out of there.
I dropped in and out of the Berkeley campus housing office the way birds leap on and off a feeder, and one day, there it was. A room, a large carpeted room, in a shingled house on the north side of the campus. There was even an electric heater, shared use of a kitchen, windows on three sides and a lone tenant who often had his door open and did what I did, studying. Redwoods did what they did in that part of Berkeley. They grew on all sides of the house, shading it, darkening things, sidling up to the shingles on the exterior, woodsy, mossy surfaces nuzzling and moistening each other. A subtle atmosphere rose and mixed with the smoke from the stone fireplaces and brick chimneys of the neighborhood. Cozy and professorial and not even a bike ride but a five-minute walk to the edge of campus. Out of Oakland.
Naturally, with so much beauty around, and an atmosphere so attuned to my spirit, that is to say, darkly contemplative...everything had to go wrong. My love life saddened me. Then a bullet in the spinal cord paralyzed me. And it all happened in and around this shingled house on Spruce Street.
There was the downstairs. That was where the graduate students lived. They were already in a different epoque. They drank wine, albeit cheap, on a regular basis. And they talked, it seemed, for pure recreation. One had a girlfriend who was both Jewish and from Mississippi, giving her a drawl with a strange sharpness along with a sultry vibrance...all of which had me downstairs often. Another of the lower tenants sold LPs in a record store, disappearing into the shop's back room to type away at his PhD thesis in geology. He was a short, nondescript Jewish kid from LA. And he was so unimpressive in demeanor and conversation, that I would barely have noticed his existence, save for what he kept bringing home from the record store. Woman after woman. He kept meeting them, or they kept meeting him, in and around the record bins of late 60s music. The third graduate student was visiting from Britain, studying architecture. He had a girlfriend in London and was more or less counting the days until his return.
The brit was named Nick, and his household function had to do with anchoring any conversation. Things usually worked out so that no more than two graduate students were home at the same time. This meant that when I came downstairs, took my seat and took my wine, I was the third leg in a stool. The conversations wandered about. But they usually settled for an uncomfortable period on whichever grad student was absent. Unless Nick was absent. And for reasons that seemed utterly natural at the time, he seemed to be above or beyond discussion. Perhaps he had the status of visitor or foreigner, his presence known to be temporary, and was afforded the courtesies of a guest.
What was said about the two others? Well, the one with the Mississippi girlfriend had only that distinguishing feature. She was all over him, everyone said. Her Southern tongue was practically out and panting, the others agreed. He was all she was interested in, and he was doing a pretty good job of things, judging by her general air of sultry satisfaction. When the downstairs population reversed, the record-store and geology guy became the topic. He barely exists, Nick observed. There is no one there.
Nick's words seemed full of bold assertiveness and deep perspicacity. Yes, I could see what he meant. The L.A. guy said or did little to distinguish himself. He made no brash assertions. He did not come down heavily on one side or the other on anything. He was on time for work, even more or less on time with his thesis. Moving along in a colorless way, he was also getting laid constantly. In retrospect, I do not believe that anyone mentioned this point ever. Never mind. For the point of Nick's points was their pointedness. His tongue was neither acid nor sharp, just unsparingly precise.
News coverage from Vietnam featured the latest hundred-round-per-minute helicopter gunship. Nick observed that such armaments must 'efficiently convert a bloke into the past tense.' This turn of phrase hit home. The verbal wit cut away pretense. It restored the power of language -- just at the moment when words like 'escalate' were beginning to numb public discourse.
By mid-June I was lying in the campus hospital, paralyzed from the neck down, and receiving frequent visitors. Nick dropped in once before his departure for the UK. He said he was glad to be going home. My shooting was part of it. He didn't say more.
I didn't know what made me send $120 to P.O. Box 707, Berkeley, and buy a one-way charter flight to Gatwick Airport, complete with refueling stop at Niagara Falls. I needed a change. Or maybe I didn't, it occurred to me sailing down the night freeway to Oakland Airport. Lloyd Airways. Whoever heard of it? Well, there it was, and here I was with my friend Darryl, an otherwise extroverted member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who seemed inarticulate on the subject of my shooting...yet was often around, particularly at the roughest moments. Facing the aluminum stairs that lead from the floodlit tarmac into the midnight plane and God knows where, may not have been the roughest moment, it was among the most frightening. Darryl took a scarf off his neck, tied it around mine, and I clomped my metal leg brace up the steps. I recognized one or two of the students stashing rucksacks in the luggage bins. One was Mitch, a frantic waver of hands in several English classes. I did not say hello, certain he would not recognize the gaunt, recently paralyzed me. Soon everyone was seatbelted into their destinies, and it didn't matter.
In traveling to Britain, I needed some sort of entry point, and decided Nick would have to do. He met me at the airport, and together we boarded a train for Victoria Station. Another country. I had seen from the air that drivers really did use the left side of the roads. And now there was this authentic British train with a wall of passenger doors for quick exit from each compartment, all of it now passing modern high-rise blocks. Was this London? No, Nick said, this was Croydon. Which did not matter either way, Croydon, schmoydon. I was somewhere else, 6000 miles from the scene of my shooting. By the time the actual London rolled by the windows of a cab, the wrenching journey from California was beginning to hit me.
Would I like a pint? Nick stopped by his flat, ran my bags inside and guided me to a pub at the corner. It was all incomprehensible, this bonhomie in the 10 pm midsummer twilight. I didn't drink much ever, felt frail and physically vulnerable and, since my emergence from hospital, had hung at the edges of any social gathering. So what was I doing in a pub? Forcing a smile, forcing some beer and forcing myself to stay awake. Let's go for a spin.
Somehow Nick had friends, an Austin Mini, me and a festive sense of night in London. I can't really recall where we drove. I'd had more to drink in the previous hour than I'd had in the previous year. And now things were rushing by, amber things, lights. This was one of the strangest new British experiences, yellow streetlights. They widened and the pavement reddened as we headed up Pall Mall. I had only heard of the cigarettes. But now there was this, a wide red road with yellow lights...as odd as the yellow brick road, which might have had red lights. And at the end, the most impressive wrought-iron gates, which fortunately were wide open, admitting our little car and its load of intoxicated youth.
Two policemen appeared from nowhere. Nick stared dead ahead. Talk, Paul, he hissed, this is Buckingham Palace. And so it was, I observed in the friendliest of ways to the cop leaning into my window. When was the place open for visitors? Well, the man said, in the most patient tone, this really isn't a place one can visit. Although there was a small museum to one side. He pointed, I looked, then thanked him, and Nick backed out a little too quickly, I thought. But we were off. Off the hook. Driving back to Harley Street.
When I climbed the stairs to the flat Nick shared there, I barely noticed the place. On the ground floor were doctors' offices, of course. On the upper floors at night all I saw was the bed. And in the morning nothing stood out except for Ascot water heaters. They seemed quaint to me, these miniature, heat-as-you-go producers of hot water. In my mind, I thought of them as emblematic of some British trait about thinking small. I may have been right about the latter. In terms of energy efficiency, they were way ahead of their time.
With the weekend approaching, Nick drove us to his parents' home in Welwyn Garden City, a postwar modernity experience on its own. The days were long, and this one inexplicably sunny. After dinner, which I don't recall but we must have had, Nick and I tooled about Hertfordshire. He had a remarkable capacity for speed in the country lanes, and by the time we shot out of the hedgerows and into a clearing big enough for a pub, my face was white. Nothing about the pub brought color into it. I was not used to being around groups of people, even six months out of the hospital. Something about the cheery badinage of Nick's country pub mates made me feel like a stone on the flywheel of life. I wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, standing then sitting, aware that beer would race through my body at a speed that could be measured with a stopwatch.
Aside from being physically frail, I must have been terribly depressed, dragging myself about from one British experience to the next. Eventually, I hooked up with another American friend, found myself a bed and breakfast near Kings Cross and liberated Nick. I saw him one more time, several years later, after stumbling into one of the other Berkeley downstairs graduate students at Sadler's Wells Theatre. Nick and I did not say much. We did not have much in common, after all. Still, something about him had pointed me in a new direction and given me, for my first days in Britain, a solid start.
It is sitting to the left my computer, buried under a pile of mail and pulsing as though radioactive. It's a letter. A rejection letter, in fact, signed by someone who manages a small corner of a big publishing house. My manuscript had been sitting around his office for months. I finally gave him a nudge, he gave me a letter, and now....
Was it really 35 years ago that I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in San Francisco's Sunset District, dining with fellow grad students and our revered professor? It was a good place for me to be in those days, the San Francisco State University creative writing program. Although I could not admit it at that point, my life's real work involved handling a disability, adjusting to a new life. And San Francisco State represented an incremental step toward the real world. A commuter campus with very little there except the bare bones of academia.
Which meant that after class meant off campus. Which was why a group of creative writing students was gathering miles away from the classroom. An event that was no big deal for them, but involved driving my 1968 Plymouth Valiant to another part of town, finding the restaurant, finding a parking space and, the most difficult, making my restaurant entrance on crutch. I recall nothing of the evening except one general observation of our professor, Leo: writing is all about rejection.
And 35 years later, this particular rejection comes with a highly detailed "no." There is a no to the style and an additional no to the central character, me, the latter being wholly unsympathetic. I read the publisher's rejection note quickly, late at night, taking the contents in like the concentrated bran muffin I often have at breakfast. The latter has the approximate texture of molded sawdust and, while effective, it does induce a mild gag reaction going down. Never mind. It has to be taken in. It's good for us.
One of the many unpleasantnesses of my writing style, this letter explains, is my tendency to be opaque. Okay. So, I will have a serious go at this one.
In writing the book in question, I did have the sense of blanking out some of my emotional responses. All this in the name of objectivity, a quality hard to achieve in writing about very personal matters. More to the point, the tone may reflect my own struggle with caring for myself, being sympathetic to me, loving myself. All of which may add up to opacity. Hard to say.
As for hard to like, with reference to the speaker-writer-self, well this might amount to the same thing. Just criticism? Entirely possible. Or this might be like Shostakovich versus the Soviet music critics. The composer famously said his negative reviews were just. Just too much, it seemed to everyone else. I don't know. All this has to sink in, get filtered and get me going. The last part being the most important. I'm determined to get on with it. Not get down. And even get help.
Which is why I rang a friend this morning and requested assistance with my socks. Lorna is now tied up with someone who is dying. Fortunately, my need is lesser. Still, there are the socks. I am glad that when the bad news arrived, I did not isolate myself too much. The morning putting on of socks lightens my workload and my mood. It makes it possible to even lift the junk mail from the publisher's letter and read the thing one more time.
On second reading, things get a bit worse and a bit better. It turns out that my style is also heavy-handed. Oy. What's better is the publisher's suggestion that I find an editor who can help me make a success of the project. Interestingly, I missed all this on the first reading. The fact that someone wishes me well. No cold impersonality. Someone who doesn't know me hopes for my success. Mixed in with the observation that the manuscript seems to be entirely about sadness, anger, frustration and despair. Again oy.
Actually, to put things in context, the publisher has made it clear that he hasn't read the piece. He is quoting from an editor's report, passing this on to me...and saying good luck elsewhere. My impression from last night's first reading of this letter was that some disdainful and unfeeling person, superior and contemptuous, had flicked off a comment or two, and I might as well get stuffed. Which says a lot about me, my childhood with two preoccupied and emotionally infantile parents...and very little about the real world.
What next? The truth is I don't really feel like revising this manuscript. Maybe later, but not now. I don't feel like revising anything, except my worldview. I want to start something new. Then I'll deal with something old.
Was it really 35 years ago that I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in San Francisco's Sunset District, dining with fellow grad students and our revered professor? It was a good place for me to be in those days, the San Francisco State University creative writing program. Although I could not admit it at that point, my life's real work involved handling a disability, adjusting to a new life. And San Francisco State represented an incremental step toward the real world. A commuter campus with very little there except the bare bones of academia.
Which meant that after class meant off campus. Which was why a group of creative writing students was gathering miles away from the classroom. An event that was no big deal for them, but involved driving my 1968 Plymouth Valiant to another part of town, finding the restaurant, finding a parking space and, the most difficult, making my restaurant entrance on crutch. I recall nothing of the evening except one general observation of our professor, Leo: writing is all about rejection.
And 35 years later, this particular rejection comes with a highly detailed "no." There is a no to the style and an additional no to the central character, me, the latter being wholly unsympathetic. I read the publisher's rejection note quickly, late at night, taking the contents in like the concentrated bran muffin I often have at breakfast. The latter has the approximate texture of molded sawdust and, while effective, it does induce a mild gag reaction going down. Never mind. It has to be taken in. It's good for us.
One of the many unpleasantnesses of my writing style, this letter explains, is my tendency to be opaque. Okay. So, I will have a serious go at this one.
In writing the book in question, I did have the sense of blanking out some of my emotional responses. All this in the name of objectivity, a quality hard to achieve in writing about very personal matters. More to the point, the tone may reflect my own struggle with caring for myself, being sympathetic to me, loving myself. All of which may add up to opacity. Hard to say.
As for hard to like, with reference to the speaker-writer-self, well this might amount to the same thing. Just criticism? Entirely possible. Or this might be like Shostakovich versus the Soviet music critics. The composer famously said his negative reviews were just. Just too much, it seemed to everyone else. I don't know. All this has to sink in, get filtered and get me going. The last part being the most important. I'm determined to get on with it. Not get down. And even get help.
Which is why I rang a friend this morning and requested assistance with my socks. Lorna is now tied up with someone who is dying. Fortunately, my need is lesser. Still, there are the socks. I am glad that when the bad news arrived, I did not isolate myself too much. The morning putting on of socks lightens my workload and my mood. It makes it possible to even lift the junk mail from the publisher's letter and read the thing one more time.
On second reading, things get a bit worse and a bit better. It turns out that my style is also heavy-handed. Oy. What's better is the publisher's suggestion that I find an editor who can help me make a success of the project. Interestingly, I missed all this on the first reading. The fact that someone wishes me well. No cold impersonality. Someone who doesn't know me hopes for my success. Mixed in with the observation that the manuscript seems to be entirely about sadness, anger, frustration and despair. Again oy.
Actually, to put things in context, the publisher has made it clear that he hasn't read the piece. He is quoting from an editor's report, passing this on to me...and saying good luck elsewhere. My impression from last night's first reading of this letter was that some disdainful and unfeeling person, superior and contemptuous, had flicked off a comment or two, and I might as well get stuffed. Which says a lot about me, my childhood with two preoccupied and emotionally infantile parents...and very little about the real world.
What next? The truth is I don't really feel like revising this manuscript. Maybe later, but not now. I don't feel like revising anything, except my worldview. I want to start something new. Then I'll deal with something old.
The day begins, as all do, with encouragement from Cindy. 'Go, Guys,' says her e-mail title, the message announcing a special deal on Viagra. Cindy's friend Chrissy had gotten in touch only hours earlier concerning a male supplement, also heavily discounted, which promised to restore vigor to my life and a woman to my bed. The latter promise was somewhat vague. Never mind, for the e-mail punctuation was the message, a shower of asterisks and exclamation points, all having tremendous fun together. And if I hadn't gotten a similar note from Charles, only a few hours before Chrissy's, I might have dismissed the whole thing. But once I'd heard from Chuck, the pattern was clear. He was concerned about the actual size of my equipment. Whereas Chrissy and Cindy, were focused on my efficiency. As a team approach, it all made perfect sense. Size the system to the project, target performance standards and proceed.
When I get home from this morning's errands, I will invite Chrissy, Cindy, and, why not, Charles, over for consultation. My responding e-mail will be all ***** and !!!!!!!! like theirs. And once the three of them troop into my living room, I will give everyone a glass of sparkling apple juice, crank up the TiVo and replay PBS' remarkably static Das Rheingold, demonstrating both the high resolution and high volume of my home electronics. A little superglue on the sofa cushions should keep Charles-Cindy-Chrissy's buttocks in place throughout the ensuing four hours. As for me, I will be heading for Peet's as soon as James Levine raises his baton. Should any of the three audience members protest, my response could not be clearer: ****** and !!!!!!! and thanks for sharing, and pipe down about having your butts glued to the sofa or I'm going to put the Rhinemaidens' entrance on auto-replay.
When you're retired and headed up Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park's main street, it is natural to review the morning's events. In which e-mails figured prominently. Not that you don't have a purpose. There is a cash machine at one end of the street. There is a pharmacist at the other. To make the acquisition of cash and the purchase of toothpaste into a major outing, you will want to stretch things a bit. Bypass the pharmacist on the first go and head directly for the cash machine. On the second pass, eastbound, pull in at the Walgreens and rummage about the dental products.
The thing is to keep up a certain pace. You don't want to appear aimless, purposeless or shiftless. Leave that to the homeless guy with the vaguely worded cardboard sign. No, you are the man with the mission. The homeless guy is from a mission. The fact that his mission is more focused and disciplined than yours...well, don't let that confuse you. Look like you know what you're doing as you proceed up the avenue. This means, don't peer around as though curious at the nature and purpose of your fellow pedestrians. After all, the townspeople vaguely recognize you. There's no passing for a tourist, so it's useless to carry a map or guide book. It's even useless to pretend to look in the shop windows. You cannot give a credible imitation of a shopper. You do not like to shop. In particular, you do not like to shop for Persian carpets, which comprise 90% of what is on sale in downtown Menlo Park.
Why the need to fit in? In particular, why the need to appear productive? Or at least, not look indolent? Hard to say, but I'm working with this. There it is again, that 'working' bit. Why not just tell people that I'm floating, living off the fat of the suburban land? Not even grieving. Just getting up, getting dressed and getting out...for absolutely no reason. Which would find me among the old people...and one is no longer sure who they are...anyway, the old people who stand in front of the nut display at Walgreens drugstore just a little too long.
Outed. These people are guilty of not having a paycheck or a cubicle or a commuter ticket. Unfortunately, most of these people staring at the goods in Walgreens are not Jewish, so they do not feel the guilt. They stare at the peanuts, mentally comparing the equivalent at Safeway or even trying to remember what peanuts are and what it meant when goods and services were said to cost peanuts. It's stunning to consider that the value of the nuts has risen, even as the value of the metaphor has fallen. For if things are no longer priced in peanuts, or in salt, what are they worth? Are they worth their weight in silicon? And who polishes the floors at Walgreens to such a high gloss? If I came here at night would I see some person having a go with an electric buffer? And would the rotary motion of brushes upon floor raise more questions? Better continue up the street.
What would be so horrible about being classed with George, the homeless guy who sits outside of Peet's being black, casually opening the door and holding up a sign that says Thanks for Your Help? He signs the sign Gorgeous George, betraying his age. I grew up near a chicken ranch owned and operated by the then retired Gorgeous George, a forgotten wrestler. Never mind. What if it was understood that although I did not solicit public funding in quite the same way, George and I moved at approximately the same pace? In fact, by dint of door opening, many would regard George as more productive. And so what? What Puritan ethic or Calvinist belief has gotten me so paranoid?
And viewed from a more positive perspective, there is something I see in the eyes of the occasional street musician, George and a few other itinerants. An openness. They have, in the 1960s sense, dropped out and found a comfortable place in the shallows. They seem relaxed. In the present. Not forgotten. They are not out of sight...an expression that in my late adolescence signaled the ultimate or finest.
At her finest, I thought Marlou was out of sight. And then she was dying and in her most crushingly sad final days was out of sight in one eye, then the other, her brain tumors doing something ghastly to the optic nerves. And now she is gone and not out of my sight, not for long. And it all fits together, this fear of dropping out of sight, of not being seen. Which if one obsesses too mightily, distracts from seeing. Who knows what people see when they see me in my new phase of life making my wheelchair way through the town? But it's worth knowing why I care, or what I see in being seen.
When I get home from this morning's errands, I will invite Chrissy, Cindy, and, why not, Charles, over for consultation. My responding e-mail will be all ***** and !!!!!!!! like theirs. And once the three of them troop into my living room, I will give everyone a glass of sparkling apple juice, crank up the TiVo and replay PBS' remarkably static Das Rheingold, demonstrating both the high resolution and high volume of my home electronics. A little superglue on the sofa cushions should keep Charles-Cindy-Chrissy's buttocks in place throughout the ensuing four hours. As for me, I will be heading for Peet's as soon as James Levine raises his baton. Should any of the three audience members protest, my response could not be clearer: ****** and !!!!!!! and thanks for sharing, and pipe down about having your butts glued to the sofa or I'm going to put the Rhinemaidens' entrance on auto-replay.
When you're retired and headed up Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park's main street, it is natural to review the morning's events. In which e-mails figured prominently. Not that you don't have a purpose. There is a cash machine at one end of the street. There is a pharmacist at the other. To make the acquisition of cash and the purchase of toothpaste into a major outing, you will want to stretch things a bit. Bypass the pharmacist on the first go and head directly for the cash machine. On the second pass, eastbound, pull in at the Walgreens and rummage about the dental products.
The thing is to keep up a certain pace. You don't want to appear aimless, purposeless or shiftless. Leave that to the homeless guy with the vaguely worded cardboard sign. No, you are the man with the mission. The homeless guy is from a mission. The fact that his mission is more focused and disciplined than yours...well, don't let that confuse you. Look like you know what you're doing as you proceed up the avenue. This means, don't peer around as though curious at the nature and purpose of your fellow pedestrians. After all, the townspeople vaguely recognize you. There's no passing for a tourist, so it's useless to carry a map or guide book. It's even useless to pretend to look in the shop windows. You cannot give a credible imitation of a shopper. You do not like to shop. In particular, you do not like to shop for Persian carpets, which comprise 90% of what is on sale in downtown Menlo Park.
Why the need to fit in? In particular, why the need to appear productive? Or at least, not look indolent? Hard to say, but I'm working with this. There it is again, that 'working' bit. Why not just tell people that I'm floating, living off the fat of the suburban land? Not even grieving. Just getting up, getting dressed and getting out...for absolutely no reason. Which would find me among the old people...and one is no longer sure who they are...anyway, the old people who stand in front of the nut display at Walgreens drugstore just a little too long.
Outed. These people are guilty of not having a paycheck or a cubicle or a commuter ticket. Unfortunately, most of these people staring at the goods in Walgreens are not Jewish, so they do not feel the guilt. They stare at the peanuts, mentally comparing the equivalent at Safeway or even trying to remember what peanuts are and what it meant when goods and services were said to cost peanuts. It's stunning to consider that the value of the nuts has risen, even as the value of the metaphor has fallen. For if things are no longer priced in peanuts, or in salt, what are they worth? Are they worth their weight in silicon? And who polishes the floors at Walgreens to such a high gloss? If I came here at night would I see some person having a go with an electric buffer? And would the rotary motion of brushes upon floor raise more questions? Better continue up the street.
What would be so horrible about being classed with George, the homeless guy who sits outside of Peet's being black, casually opening the door and holding up a sign that says Thanks for Your Help? He signs the sign Gorgeous George, betraying his age. I grew up near a chicken ranch owned and operated by the then retired Gorgeous George, a forgotten wrestler. Never mind. What if it was understood that although I did not solicit public funding in quite the same way, George and I moved at approximately the same pace? In fact, by dint of door opening, many would regard George as more productive. And so what? What Puritan ethic or Calvinist belief has gotten me so paranoid?
And viewed from a more positive perspective, there is something I see in the eyes of the occasional street musician, George and a few other itinerants. An openness. They have, in the 1960s sense, dropped out and found a comfortable place in the shallows. They seem relaxed. In the present. Not forgotten. They are not out of sight...an expression that in my late adolescence signaled the ultimate or finest.
At her finest, I thought Marlou was out of sight. And then she was dying and in her most crushingly sad final days was out of sight in one eye, then the other, her brain tumors doing something ghastly to the optic nerves. And now she is gone and not out of my sight, not for long. And it all fits together, this fear of dropping out of sight, of not being seen. Which if one obsesses too mightily, distracts from seeing. Who knows what people see when they see me in my new phase of life making my wheelchair way through the town? But it's worth knowing why I care, or what I see in being seen.
What is supposed to happen next? The air is full of this question, signaling the next stage of things, post-drash. I'm about to start a grief group, purpose and effectiveness unknown. My days still begin with a note of the heavy and sad. But increasingly, they veer toward impatience. I want to accomplish something, and more than one thing, each day.
I have had a go at understanding bonds. My financial advisor, a.k.a. Bill, a West Texan, tells me I need some. There's a hole in my portfolio, a.k.a. cash, that is just screaming for bonds. There was Barry Bonds, of course, and he figured prominently in local baseball attendance for a time. And I know more about Barry Bonds than I do about the corporate or municipal investment-grade variety. At least Barry could be counted on for drug abuse and courtroom drama. The sort of thing they sell at Fidelity Funds can only be counted on to push you over the edge of madness or, even worse, drive you into terminal boredom.
Still, I give myself high marks. The "buy bonds" item has been on my To Do list for weeks. I have even had a look at websites that explain coupons, rates and the difference. Maturity, too. Actually, I thought I had a fair amount of that this one. As for yield, I have yielded far too much over the years. But to face the matter soberly, I really have tried to understand how and why I should buy one of the 10,000 corporate bonds, say, available online. A fixed income guy at Fidelity has talked me through it. More exactly, he has talked me down. Because bonds, in fact, almost anything numerical, get me so exasperated so quickly that these days I lose patience and civility.
The Fidelity guy guided me through the retirement website quite effectively. The problem is, once I had a sketchy idea of what bonds were, I had no further interest in the matter. This is a function of what is politely termed attention span. Or, more provincially, bandwidth.
The width of my band remains narrow. Okay, so even when the channels were wide open and I could bounce such matters off the ever-grounded Marlou, the idea of bonds would still have left me dizzy. Still, the two of us would have hit upon an acceptable solution, such as handing the entire matter over to an acknowledged professional. Yes, West Texan Bill fits this category, but he is for want of better words, a little too American. He urges me to take responsibility here. Buy my own bonds not have some money-grubbing trader do it for me in a bond fund. Marlou would have scoped out this overall picture, scented either delay or disaster, and pushed me in the general direction of professional help. She would have known that if I didn't get professional bond buying help soon, one or both of us would need the psychiatric variety. That's how much bonds dent my psyche.
Which I don't like laughing off entirely. After all, learning new things keeps us young. It's just that when the learning curve gets impossibly steep and the available gray cells impossibly few, one has to give up. Better to make a move, even a conservative one, then to leave investments uninvested. Right?
Oh, who knows? Some higher power may be guiding me away from impending market disaster. By dithering, I may be making the shrewdest move possible. Or maybe the opposite. For now, there is the sense of trying to not leave things alone, and facing too much that is not getting done. So I'm trying to push the Sisyphean rock a little faster these days. If I can't quite pull in the bond helper yet, by the time I do I will have fought my way through a certain body of bond knowledge and be better off. Maybe.
Bond Street, that's where I'll be. Along with Barry, the guy from Fidelity and the recent jewel thieves. And with a little luck, I won't be taking any more trips on the Queen Mary 2. I'll buy the sucker with my bond bonus. And staff the thing with 2,500 of my closest friends, then set sail. Probably with a passenger load of approximately six. Everyone gets his own deck. Introvert City. We might meet in one of the dining rooms, by accident, every week or so. The odds are not very high when there are twice as many restaurants as patrons. But you've got options, don't you? And options are what bonds are all about. That and coupons. So you clip your options, stuff your coupons somewhere, and head for dinner. All aboard, visitors ashore, gangway up, ahoy.
No, the real point has to do with the reacquisition of effort, discipline and, yes, even patience. This may not help me with my essential life, but it could help with my mood. There is some sad knowledge that I drag around. I'm not sure if it really dampens my mood as much as it tempers my actions. Whatever it is, there's not much to be done. But the mood, well that's different. And that's the real problem with bonds. Because the battle is ultimately a hopeless one, fighting too long will only make my mood deteriorate. The trick is to fight it long enough to get into combat shape. More training than military action. What I actually need is something winnable, like my voice. I was once a bass, but I am now a sort of crow. What emerges from my vocal cords these days in rehearsals with the Menlo Park Chorus certainly sounds more avian than human. And the range has shrunk to approximately five notes. Which is why God designed scales. I'm starting to do them, even going to the chorus website now and then to have a shot at the music. Effort. It's all uphill, but even in grief, one can take some steps, regain some control.
I have had a go at understanding bonds. My financial advisor, a.k.a. Bill, a West Texan, tells me I need some. There's a hole in my portfolio, a.k.a. cash, that is just screaming for bonds. There was Barry Bonds, of course, and he figured prominently in local baseball attendance for a time. And I know more about Barry Bonds than I do about the corporate or municipal investment-grade variety. At least Barry could be counted on for drug abuse and courtroom drama. The sort of thing they sell at Fidelity Funds can only be counted on to push you over the edge of madness or, even worse, drive you into terminal boredom.
Still, I give myself high marks. The "buy bonds" item has been on my To Do list for weeks. I have even had a look at websites that explain coupons, rates and the difference. Maturity, too. Actually, I thought I had a fair amount of that this one. As for yield, I have yielded far too much over the years. But to face the matter soberly, I really have tried to understand how and why I should buy one of the 10,000 corporate bonds, say, available online. A fixed income guy at Fidelity has talked me through it. More exactly, he has talked me down. Because bonds, in fact, almost anything numerical, get me so exasperated so quickly that these days I lose patience and civility.
The Fidelity guy guided me through the retirement website quite effectively. The problem is, once I had a sketchy idea of what bonds were, I had no further interest in the matter. This is a function of what is politely termed attention span. Or, more provincially, bandwidth.
The width of my band remains narrow. Okay, so even when the channels were wide open and I could bounce such matters off the ever-grounded Marlou, the idea of bonds would still have left me dizzy. Still, the two of us would have hit upon an acceptable solution, such as handing the entire matter over to an acknowledged professional. Yes, West Texan Bill fits this category, but he is for want of better words, a little too American. He urges me to take responsibility here. Buy my own bonds not have some money-grubbing trader do it for me in a bond fund. Marlou would have scoped out this overall picture, scented either delay or disaster, and pushed me in the general direction of professional help. She would have known that if I didn't get professional bond buying help soon, one or both of us would need the psychiatric variety. That's how much bonds dent my psyche.
Which I don't like laughing off entirely. After all, learning new things keeps us young. It's just that when the learning curve gets impossibly steep and the available gray cells impossibly few, one has to give up. Better to make a move, even a conservative one, then to leave investments uninvested. Right?
Oh, who knows? Some higher power may be guiding me away from impending market disaster. By dithering, I may be making the shrewdest move possible. Or maybe the opposite. For now, there is the sense of trying to not leave things alone, and facing too much that is not getting done. So I'm trying to push the Sisyphean rock a little faster these days. If I can't quite pull in the bond helper yet, by the time I do I will have fought my way through a certain body of bond knowledge and be better off. Maybe.
Bond Street, that's where I'll be. Along with Barry, the guy from Fidelity and the recent jewel thieves. And with a little luck, I won't be taking any more trips on the Queen Mary 2. I'll buy the sucker with my bond bonus. And staff the thing with 2,500 of my closest friends, then set sail. Probably with a passenger load of approximately six. Everyone gets his own deck. Introvert City. We might meet in one of the dining rooms, by accident, every week or so. The odds are not very high when there are twice as many restaurants as patrons. But you've got options, don't you? And options are what bonds are all about. That and coupons. So you clip your options, stuff your coupons somewhere, and head for dinner. All aboard, visitors ashore, gangway up, ahoy.
No, the real point has to do with the reacquisition of effort, discipline and, yes, even patience. This may not help me with my essential life, but it could help with my mood. There is some sad knowledge that I drag around. I'm not sure if it really dampens my mood as much as it tempers my actions. Whatever it is, there's not much to be done. But the mood, well that's different. And that's the real problem with bonds. Because the battle is ultimately a hopeless one, fighting too long will only make my mood deteriorate. The trick is to fight it long enough to get into combat shape. More training than military action. What I actually need is something winnable, like my voice. I was once a bass, but I am now a sort of crow. What emerges from my vocal cords these days in rehearsals with the Menlo Park Chorus certainly sounds more avian than human. And the range has shrunk to approximately five notes. Which is why God designed scales. I'm starting to do them, even going to the chorus website now and then to have a shot at the music. Effort. It's all uphill, but even in grief, one can take some steps, regain some control.
