Temple Parking Lot

I am swooping in from the south, banking into the turning lane and now lining up for the final approach into the driveway, my landing spot just over a dip in the hill.  The hill, or hillside, is Palo Alto's reformed Temple Beth Am.  And as facilities go, it is quite splendid, though wholeheartedly suburban.  If literature or personal experience has given you warm images of storefront shuls, Beth Am isn't for you.  The temple and surrounding classrooms is big enough to house a small airport and might, in fact, it become one if planes landed on hillsides.  Never mind.  For it's actually all about the people, isn't it?  And I keep turning up here on Thursday mornings for the grieving people, the ones who belong to the Jewish Healing Center Support Group.  We are the officially bereaved.  And I am among the unofficially aggrieved.  Today I seem to be in quite a mood.

I park my whale of a white Ford van where I always do, opposite our glassy meeting room.  As Detroit behemoths go, mine is quite satisfactory.  But it has been giving me trouble recently, this Ford, as one of the Jewish Healing Center rabbis can attest.  Only last week he wandered outside with several pieces of cellotape to provide a temporary fix.  A loudspeaker built into the van's electric sliding door had worked itself free.  Well, maybe it did not exactly work itself all that free.  I may have helped free it by prematurely closing the door with the wheelchair lift still partly extended.  Why the rush close the door and get away?  Because it's a grief group.  Someone giving you grief?  You are probably in a grief group.  And is the grief group good?  Good grief.  Of course, it is.  Why else would we be here?

'Do you want some help?'

The answer to this question should be the one I always deliver, a cheery 'no.'  It doesn't matter who asks the question, and with my gaze currently focused on my waist pouch, I can't see.  But I know that the churlish response forming in my mind is probably not the best.  The upbeat shtick, the one I usually manage, the one that reassures onlookers...it just isn't in me.  But this guy, the aspiring helper, wants an answer.  So I provide one.  I tell him help is too late.  I have a spinal cord injury.  I half regret saying this as soon as the words leap from my mouth.  But only half.

He's a youngish guy, maybe 40, and he walks with a lean executive stride.  He is heading uphill, of course, and has turned downhill to inquire as to my well-being.  I attempt to smooth over my prickly answer with some unnecessary information.  Such as my name.  I even extend my hand and ask his.  Gosh, but I am a friendly guy.

'You seemed to be fumbling,' he says.

This guy has said little to ingratiate himself.  He has confused my single-handed paralytic maneuvering of car keys into lap pouch with fumbling.  Fumbling?  I'll show this asshole some fumbling.  What I actually say is more self-deprecating.  Oh, I've been fumbling for years, even before my injury, I say.

I can tell this man is dying to get away.  He is a speedy Jewish career guy who offered to help this cripple fumbling in a parking lot, and what does he get but a life story?  I have punished this man with biographical details.  He has punished me with...what...an inept word or two and the best of intentions.  What I really want to tell this guy is that I don't like being confused with a cripple.  Which makes me a very confused person myself.  Which sums up these days.  Or at least this moment, as I roll into the meeting room to join my fellow travelers in grief.