Adding Up

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.