Overcoat

'No, not that way.' I am leaning over the armrest of my wheelchair staring at a heavyset, in fact, jowly man who is attempting to reconnect my wheelchair cable. It is the lifeline, the electronic equivalent of an aorta, linking joystick control with wheels and motors. It is everything, all I have, it seems. And this man is fucking with it. I am about to ask if he has ever done this before. For it is clear that he hasn't. It has come to this, life and its long journey, leading me to this moment. For I have seen this sort of thing go desperately awry before. That someone attempts to jam the whisker-fine prongs of my wheelchair cable into their socket, bending them, and putting the entire mechanism of action. It's a $1000 mistake, based on a previous repair bill. And this man is making it.

'You have to align it,' I tell him feebly. For everything is feeble, drained of vigor. Which living in the self-referential world of my psyche, seems much like a cosmic condemnation, a.k.a. curse, or the general downward slope of life, and not what it is, the more or less inevitable consequence of flying eastward for 11 hours in the cramped company of 400 others and arriving out of sorts and out of time zone and out of it. The man spots the white arrows pointing at each other, snaps the leads together, and my wheelchair makes its characteristic ping and comes to life. Minutes later, the man seems surprised, genuinely, when I hand him a £5 note. Tipping has slipped out of favor in France, and is this happening here as well? Here being Britain. I am back for the third time this year.

And now I am back on the train to Central London. The Heathrow Express covers 22 miles in 15 minutes, putting it on a par with the fastest train in North America, the Washington-to-New York Acela. Except that here in the UK, everyone takes this speed for granted. Plenty of trains go this fast or faster. I find this heartening. My country seems to be slipping backwards in so many ways. And yet there is this, an ordinary train going at an ordinary train speed of 100 mph, on this, an ordinary day.

Which it isn't. This is the solstice, 21 December, the longest day of the longest year of my life. This is the fulcrum of 2009, after which the days lengthen, the sun warms, and creation begins waxing. I spend the brief train ride fiddling about with my mobile phone, attempting to send a text message, then voicemail to Jake, my cousin's son. Now the platform at Paddington Station is drifting past, and I am finally aware of the underlying emotion. Fear. Fear and vulnerability. I'm bundled up in an overcoat...button up your overcoat...take good care of yourself. But this song is not for me, the short tempered, curmudgeonly man who makes a fuss about his wheelchair cables. The Victorian railway viaduct leading into the station has small drifts of snow. I can't find Jake, and I'm about to sit on a freezing railway platform, California blood pumping through my rapidly cooling veins. And sit, I do. A 25-ish woman tells me off with my bags. They comprise a tidy pile in the middle of a busy platform, passengers rushing for the adjacent train to Penzance, others heading back to the airport. And me without Jake.

And this is why I travel, at least one of the reasons. It's simply too easy to exist within the quadriplegic comfort zone, which is narrow and routine. Jake is on his way. Mobile phones don't work in the London Underground. We have been through this before, Jake and I. He will surface in a moment. Meanwhile, various employees of RailTrack stop and ask if I am okay. I don't know how to answer. Should I move my bags up the platform? Should I move myself into the heated disabled waiting room? Having been up all night, now dealing with a 1:30 PM that feels more like its 5:30 AM California equivalent, my reserves are scant. Finally, a baggage guy from the RailTrack Disabled Office loads my bags aboard his cart, we head up the platform. And there is Jake.

With Jake in between errands, and me in between beds, I start talking about schedules and departures and ticket purchase. Enough of that, Jake says, and gives me a hug. Putting me back in the moment, and so much for fear. Ticket. Machine or human? I want to go into the ticket office, wait in the twisting queue and interact with a person. I have my reasons. When the time comes to extract my credit card I casually leave my wallet open. This reveals the UK Disabled Rail Card, expired since 2005. Oh, says the clerk, knocking £10 off the ticket price. I am enormously and personally gratified. I cannot say if this derives from my genetic heritage, or my desire to be included in British life. Either way, it was worth the trip to the ticket office. As for the Disabled Travel Office, they hustle us right back to the platform, and within moments I am waving bye to Jake and to London.

'Very blue,' I said to a friend who was helping me pack in California, crutch, laptop, bookbag and now overcoat arrayed on the back of my Menlo Park sofa. We agreed that the coat looked abnormally bright blue in the sunlight. Not to worry. I had only worn this blue overcoat, which I thought was navy blue, once or twice, or maybe not at all. The overcoat is a hand-me-down from my cousin Caroline's school kids. Meanwhile, it is keeping me quite warm in the bitter cold of the train. I order a tea from the passing attendant. In fact I order tea steaming in its plastic cup, a tuna sandwich with the required cucumber and a pack of Scottish chocolate biscuits. I am in British railway heaven.

The next day, when I don the coat for a run into Moreton in Marsh, Gloucestershire, Caroline runs her eye over the thing. It's French. And a woman's. It is, I realize, Marlou's. She had a blue overcoat, more bright blue than my blackish navy blue, and this fact has utterly escaped me. But Marlou cannot escape me, of course. And somehow it is fitting that I should turn up miles from home carrying, even wearing, her overcoat. Take good care of yourself...you belong to me. It has been quite a year. Fortunately, Alastair has an overcoat of virtually the same description as my own. This gets me around the town. It even gets me, the following day, more than half way to the Tibetan rug outlet in the middle of the snowy fields to the north of the village of Todenham. But not all the way. Which doesn't matter, because this is a pleasure outing.

And a pleasure, it is, for the snow softens everything to storybook whiteness. The thatched roof cottage across the way from Caroline's front door seems to have been ripped from a calendar page, its contours frosted. The essence of coziness. This is my second sortie into the freezing winter, and my confidence is building. The real test comes at the crest of the hill, as my wheelchair tires begin slipping in black ice. Even Caroline, hardly one for giving up, suggests I head home. What the hell. In this winter wonderland I could easily freeze to death. Which makes the experience all the more real, death being the theme of the year. I turn my wheelchair speed control to moderately fast and zigzag my way home.