Old Times

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.