Getting Back

Many forces conspire to defeat the retired person and his day.  The first is early awakening.  My bedside clock says 5:20 AM, and though the alarm is set for 6:30, I give up and get up.  With my legs dropped over the edge of the bed, I commence a mildly harrowing series of quadriplegic lunges, featuring my abdominal muscles, which eventually get me into a sedentary posture, although an unbalanced one.  I need to get my neck up and straight before the room feels properly aligned.  I hit the switch on the bedside table, the lamp comes on, and the day is coming on too early.  This sets expectations excessively high.  Particularly in view of what is to follow.

Lorna, bursting in fresh as the day at 7:30, is surprised to see me up, talcum powdered and blue-jeaned.  I assure her that I have things to do, places to go.  Trains to catch.  I do take advantage of her presence to seize my crutch, rise from the wheelchair and hobble about the apartment.  According to my physiotherapist, this will make me a true mensch.  By 8:20, breakfasted and mild exercised, I speed toward the train.  

At the back of my consciousness resides a fear of wheelchair electronics.  It began in August, in Edinburgh, when Jake and Elliot, my twentysomething traveling companions, parked my wheelchair outside a comedy club.  My idea, a foolish one, was to disconnect the cable to the joystick controller.  This means unplugging, then plugging back in, wires as fine as hairs.  Why an all-terrain wheelchair, bashable by design, should require a surgeon's hands to unplug a key component...well, God only knows.  The chair began some telltale flashing, sign of a short circuit, as soon as the thing was reconnected.  A quick tug on the cable and the flashing stopped.  Of course, that was in August.  No more electronic flashing until last week...and another cable tug stopped the problem.  So, any statistician would tell you that this problem is an intermittent one, surfacing every few months.  But I am not a statistic, and what's surfacing in me on the way to Caltrain is the image of my wheelchair flashing its short-circuit message, and coming to a total halt, right on the train tracks.  Naturally, this doesn't happen.  It's not my time.  But I didn't think it was Marlou's either, so what is one to make of all this?  The train is a fast one, and I make it to my dentist in Noe Valley, more or less the epicenter of San Francisco, right on time.

I like my dentist.  She is just back from two weeks in Italy and experienced the usual travel horrors.  She lost her wallet.  She, and virtually all of her tour party, succumbed to food poisoning.  But in recounting these events, I can tell she feels neither victimized nor disturbed.  She think she left her wallet in a Rome cab.  Everyone got sick on pasta carbonara, so maybe it was the semi-raw egg.  She had a good time.  My teeth are fine.  Linda, who has been coming to work there as long as I have been coming for dentistry there, helps me down the stairs.  I have forgotten my crutch.  Which, these days, is really not so bad, if one believes the general wisdom concerning grieving persons.

Leo and I meet for lunch.  We have sushi.  We have the same table in the front each time we dine here.  Neither of us smiles much.  Maybe we are sad guys.  I don't know.  Leo is more than 20 years my senior, and as my former writing instructor and unofficial mentor, I have to tell him about getting turned down by a local publisher.  Oh, that guy, Leo says.  The same editor has just turned down Leo, author of several stunning books and winner of the O'Henry Award.  This puts things in a certain perspective.  I order lots of sushi.

I even try to be on my way at an efficient hour.  After all, at the heart of the day, the business end, one might say, is half an hour of dental hygiene followed by one hour of lunch.  The rush-hour train to San Francisco was an express, but the midday schedule is all about hard times, frequency cut to hourly, duration longer, fares higher.  See you, I tell Leo.  He heads for his bank.  I nip into the bus shelter where a digital display tells me that the #48 Qintara will next arrive in 26 minutes.  Splendid.  I turn my wheelchair speed control up to high and nip toward the tram stop on Church Street.  On the way, a #48 drifts past me.  I stare at it in disbelief, for the bus is full of passengers, not a trainee Muni driver and instructor.  A real one, passing right by me...which means the day is passing by me too.  For I had all connections worked out, zipping down to the BART station, boarding an underground train for Milbrae, smoothly connecting with Caltrain.  But I have blown it.  Worse, I have demonstrated what my British cousin Caroline assures me is a boundless gullibility concerning trains and transit.  The next-bus-in-26-minutes sign containing as much truth as a North Korean press release.

I have a succession of long transit waits.  It is after 3:30 when I finally roll in my door.  Tomorrow I will turn up for the grief group.  Do I give them a lot of grief?  Or they me?  Maybe I need to stop pretending that I have a job.  Leo pointed out a pie shop on 24th St., a place where wise San Franciscans purchase take away dinners, composed of pies, small ones, savory or sweet.  I was in a big hurry.  I had to get back to...my supposed schedule.  Back to normal.  Something tells me, it's never going to happen.