January 2010 Archives

At some point, at least five and as many as 10 years ago, I bought a hat, a rain hat, the one on display on this very blog site.  Naturally, it was not a thing of stylish flair or beauty.  It kept out the rain.  It also kept out the sun, and I can be seen wearing this thing in photos of a warm afternoon in Gloucestershire where Marlou and I had our second wedding reception.  In short, it has followed me around, through thick and thin, and refuses to cease following.  This week, having seen the hat in action, I decided it had totemic powers.

It was up against a lot.  Within a couple of weeks of my return from a very pleasant stay in Britain, I began to feel cross, preoccupied and easily fatigued.  I found myself staring at the pictures of Marlou that still face me from her desk and the entrance table by the front door.  One particularly haunts me.  It is the photo of Marlou taken four months before her death, looking utterly vibrant over dinner in Stockholm with Beth, my cousin's daughter.  Missing from the photo is any sign of the courage it must have taken her to make such a trip, to bother to connect with distant family in a distant city, with her energy and time running out.  I remember Marlou falling into my arms as she emerged from the airport taxi a week later, frightened and lost.  I remember feeling the same way, with an added layer of ineffectiveness.  I remember all these things because I need to remember, because nine months is too soon to forget them.  And once I tuned back in, replanted my roots in grief, my anger and distraction diminished.

The hat was keeping an eye on me.  The San Francisco region's rainy season is short and concentrated and has been making itself felt mightily this January.  I resurrected the rain hat as the storms gathered, wound its chin cord around one of the handles of my wheelchair, and kept forgetting about the thing.  I emerged from Café Borrone one night on my way to the Menlo Park Chorus rehearsal and saw that the hat, the very one supposedly wound of the back of my chair, had been thoughtfully placed on one of the tables.  

Protecting myself from the rain became something of an issue in my early 20s.  There was no issue for me, and that was the point.  Living in London where light rain or drizzle were almost incessant, it made sense to go about with rain gear.  Friends, observers, psychoanalysts, all who noticed me, seemed to gauge my sense of self worth and quality of personal nurturing and care on the basis of what I was doing about the weather.  When things were good, I went out well jacketed, hat on head, often with a companion's umbrella...holding an umbrella being too much for available hands numbering one and grasping a crutch.

So losing a rain hat and not even knowing it was missing, then having the thing turn up, seems full of good fortune.  Cosmic intervention, if one wants to push it that far, and I do.  Especially when the damn thing happens again a few days later.  Same scenario.  Rainy weather, and I was making the shopping rounds of inner Menlo Park.  Heading back from the supermarket, damned if that canvas hat lying in the street did not look a lot like mine.  I scooped the thing up and, yes, it was mine, blown off the back of my wheelchair, but still around.  A metaphor for protection and caring, as before, but now with a street-hardened indomitability.

As for the garden, everything is healthily postnatal, miniature green seedlings sitting there in the ground, confused, dazed and seeking a purpose.  The sun should be purpose enough.  And there is more than ever, for the rains and winds sent one giant oak toppling just over the back fence.  And Tom my landlord seeing a growing crack in another oak had the tree cutters in to lop off a few more branches.  The sun now rises over my garden early in the morning and stays risen, light cascading all day long.  Nothing has responded yet, save for the Swiss chard which is practically yodeling with delight in the cold rains.  But it won't be long.  There's enough garlic planted back there to depopulate Transylvania.

Still, my moods are constant, my grip weak.  My computer gathered itself together like an evil spirit last week, kneading its own innards, until it was twisted into a digital lump of coal that would not start.  Naturally, I had not backed up the day's work.  

I had lost a day.  I had lost everything, my incompetence revealed, my stupidity obvious.  For the computer had been doing this.  I had been calling in computer service guys, available adolescents, anyone who knew more than I did about the digital world, which is to say, anyone.  So, I knew the computer had been stopping.  I knew better, that is the point.  I should have done something.  On and on it went, until a friend reminded me that sometimes one needs to not only turn a PC off, but unplug it.  Wait a few seconds.  Turn it on again.  And voilà.  I was back in digital action.

But still laden with inaction.  I don't know what I'm doing.  Everything seems tenuous.  The whole enterprise could fail at any moment.  At night, coming in alone from chorus rehearsal, I feel like one of those people whose car tumbles off a mountain road and lies injured and unseen for days.  What if I get mugged?  What if I get hit by a car?  What if I lose my keys?  Once inside, the perils never stop.  What if I fall in the bathroom, the wheelchair blocking the door?  I have an answer for this one.  A sort of complete scenario worked out in my feverish brain.  I would lie on the bathroom floor and, presumably having made several efforts to get up, work on ways to turn on the heater with my foot.  Or possibly the leg of the shower chair.  In short, there would be heat.  Until there was too much heat.  Then I would have to turn the heater off.  Activities like this would occupy me for the entire night until...who knows?  So what if I wasn't answering the phone?  That would not mean anyone would come breaking down my door, would it?  I could be lying on the bathroom floor for days.  With mental content like this, the news from Haiti seems superfluous.

When did I lose Marlou's trust?  Did I ever really have it?  Did I deserve it?  These resonant questions have been plaguing me for the last day.  They come like a plague, because I am in a plague-receptive phase.  I know the question, the real question is much more mundane.  I cannot locate the file, containing Marlou's trust documents.  They're just pieces of paper, I know.  The lawyer has already promised to send replacements.  I need to settle down.  I'm trying.

For those who have clinically observed me, my tendency toward self-anger must seem puzzling.  It puzzles me most of all.  But I have this way of getting angry at myself before getting angry at others, particularly many others, that is to say, my life.  I put this down to a childhood need to feel in control.  It is I who have fucked up, not mommy and daddy.  As though getting pissed at them is too scary, too threatening.  So, I have this tendency.  One that I have to watch.  And watch it, I do.

Virtually on her deathbed, Marlou made me promise not to eat dinner out of a saucepan.  This seems a splendid idea, and I do adhere to it, more or less.  It's just that Marlou never quite grasped the graspability of the smallest stainless steel pot in her arsenal.  It's a shallow, one-serving sort of pan.  Actually, it is the approximate depth of a serving bowl.  Its handle is well-balanced.  So it's a grab, heat and eat sort of pot.  Or pan.  And the multipurpose elegance of cooking, serving and eating from a single thermal-handled stainless steel container, call it what you will, is so obviously attractive and staggeringly efficient that for the quadriplegic it is impossible to resist.  

Germans even have a word for this sort of thing, the eintopf.  Okay, the word refers to a one-pot meal, some sort of complete dish cooked in a single vessel, but I maintain the concept applies to Marlou's pan.  It's a one-pan.  And I say this deadpan: I can't avoid it.  I was born to one-pan cooking, and may my deceased love forgive me.

Consider that I not only have this pan at the ready, but a more or less complete dish to heat in it and eat from it.  It's a rich Singapore stew, which makes me both happy and even a little proud to reside where I do on the Pacific rim.  A doggie bag left over from Menlo Park's finest Asian restaurant and ready to be dumped into this attractive little pan.  Heat and serve, a retailing slogan from my youth.

Any practical minded person would note the ludicrousness of my pan shelf.  Actually there are shelves, two of them, and they face the stove, which seems to me rather logical.  The only problem is that they face the stove myopically, staring a little too close at its white enamel side.  There isn't enough room.  The arrangement is not a practical one.  It's even hard to say where the pans are on the shelves.  Unless one is an expert.  

And I am.  I know my pans.  They are divided into two camps.  There are the ones I bought, cheap and serviceable, and the ones Marlou bought, balanced and elegant and stainless steel.  Rather narrows the field, doesn't it?  The pots have one kind of handle or the other.  And the one I am looking for, the Marlou-handled pan, well, it can't be far can it?  I'm certain the pan is lurking under one of my pots.  No, apparently it's over there.  No.  There's only one candidate handle visible, and it's in the far corner, the most distant corner, and the most hard to reach.  Not to worry.  I rise from my wheelchair, bend and grasp.

What happens next is best depicted in the film version of Wizard of Oz.  The bad witch tries to grab the ruby slippers off the witch just crushed by a house, and the corpse legs retract.  They curl up in the most improbable, in fact, unimaginable way.  And yet I was totally convinced as a kid, as I am now.  Material objects do this.  That's why the Marlou-handled pan, nestled comfortably in a spaghetti-straining stainless steel pot, name unknown, purposely eludes my grasp.  I reach for it, knocking it slightly, and the handle turns.  It swivels a comfortable 180 degrees.  It was pointing up, but now it is pointing down.  It is wedged against the wall and between the stove, and is now out of reach.  

Even if I wanted to take the neuromuscular risk involved in bending to grab for the handle...and take the chance of falling and being wedged in the kitchen overnight, or, perhaps, longer...the wheelchair behind me, shelf on one side, stove on the other, wall ahead...I can imagine it all....the maneuver is impossible.  There isn't enough room to bend and grab the pot.

Stupid, I scream at myself.  You are stupid.  I am aware that this is a dangerous moment.  While my inner bad parent erupts, there is a heightened chance of things going awry.  I stare down at the pots and the only other object in view.  There is a serving tray, a wooden one, and next to it is a wooden frame.  Does the frame go with the tray?  I don't know.  It's one of those household objects that just sits there being a household object.  Doubtless Marlou would know what the thing is or was.  All I know is that it is within my line of sight, my frame of reference, and being big, is something I can grab.  

I do.  I grab it and knock the handle up.  The pan, nestling in its smooth, round strainer, swivels up, then down.  I knock it again.  Another rotation.  Again, and this time the strainer topples over on its side, the handle of the pan wedges on the shelf, and life becomes possible.  I grab the pan, put it on the stove and open the Singapore stew.  

Damn.  I had forgotten that this stuff contains crab legs.  The friend I was dining with must have cracked them for me.  Nothing more quadriplegic-unfriendly than crustacean food packaging.  Still, there it is.  I haven't fallen.  I haven't defeated myself.  There is a one-pot meal in its pan.  And it is heating.  Outside the rain is falling, and California isn't going to descend into a dust bowl anytime soon.  Things have turned a corner.  And with a little Tabasco sauce, the world will continue for at least another day.

And so by the fourth night, things British and distant and escapist having seeped sufficiently out of my system, the insomnia and emotional turbulence that had preceded my trip, returned. My psyche punched in for the grief shift. And things were as they were. And how did I expect things to be? Perhaps a little more peaceful and untroubled and less burdened by anxiety, as they had been for my last cold and pleasant days in London. Which is, of course, ridiculous, and not even desirable. This is where I live, on Roble Ave., Menlo Park, and here and only here can life's battles be fought and its deeper knowledge found. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Which is extremely boring, by the way.

What disturbs my sleep? If I knew, it wouldn't be disturbed, would it? But there I was, staring into the shadows cast by the nightlight on my ceiling, listening to the 5:30 AM sounds of Caltrain and mentally going over its weekday rush-hour schedule. Which insured about 20 minutes of silence. Then at 5:55 AM the start of a train crescendo, whistles blowing and bells clanging and engines rumbling north and south with mounting frequency. And with commuting reaching its fever pitch around 6:30 AM and the mind sadly stuck in its own track, what was there to do but sadly swing my legs over the bed, fling the torso up and down a few times until it clicked into the sitting position, and admit defeat? I considered the day ahead, vacant and needing to be filled. And not enough sleep.

I managed to read a book on the flight home, signaling the return of my powers of concentration. A false signal, it seems, for the novel I had intended to read for the Israeli book club, meeting tonight, has proven too much. Oddly, it has also proven enjoyable. But I'm back to distracted, mental turbulent mode, and here we are.

We. I think of Marlou all the time. In one form or another. Surely we would have found a way to discuss the current health-care debacle. Or would we? Where would we be now in counseling? Working on the ability to handle opposing views? Dialogue improvement? And maybe because I have so recently traveled and recall the idyllic 10 days we spent in a Tuscan country hotel, the other thing comes back to me. How frightened Marlou was. How her fear was my constant concern. And my own fear...well, maybe I'm catching up. Maybe it's my turn.

All the books I haven't read. The languages I haven't learned. The music I can't read. It seems too late to worry about any of these things. But what do I know? Life is a lottery ticket, and you simply wait until your number is called. Things to do. Finish writing my own book, for example. And some, even all, of this may get done. Or not. And I'm not sure I will feel better one way or the other. Good thing there's lunch.

Judy in the alto section of the Menlo Park Chorus has been talking about having lunch for the longest time. Months. So last night at rehearsal's end, I said tomorrow. She said maybe. I said definitely. And so at 12:30 there she was with her husband, and up ahead there was Ruth, another alto, and soon we were sitting upstairs in Draeger's supermarket staring at bowls of soup.

We were talking about Menlo Park's new civic theatre, debating the merits of its acoustics, and wondering about its future. I got myself coupled into the Civic Theater Train just as the thing was leaving the station, and there's no letting go. The place isn't being properly managed. I am convinced of this, and the fact endlessly annoys me. Something must be done. But I'm not going to do it. Things are on hold for me, grief being the only constant. I can't commit, as they say, to any civic projects. Meetings. Letters. Follow-through. Don't look at me for any of this. Still, I can't resist holding forth. I know what needs to be done. I just can't do it. I can't even get a night's sleep. It seems a major achievement that I have finished my soup.

Still, emerging into the grey California winter skies, I feel at least twice as good as I did before lunch. Nothing like a stirring civic issue or two to get the blood going. Yes, I also feel the utter ineffectiveness of my lunch hour chitchat, whither the community theater and what shall we do? Let's do nothing. Straight out of Chekhov. So I'm heading straight for Peet's. I order my usual latte, and damned if the barista doesn't wave me away. It's on us, he says. What have I done to deserve this, I say. But only to myself. I thank the guy, consume the coffee and consider next steps. What to do in this grey and empty day, while I do not like being alone with myself or feeling the last weeks of my wife, her dying agony still hovering about the apartment?

Will Something extravagant is building within me. It happened during lunch. Joe, Judy's husband, is a wine guy. Actually, and no pun intended, this Joe works for Trader Joe's. He has told me about the wine bargains, how there is really nothing like them. I listen attentively. This Joe seems much more committed to wine than to the chain of stores. I'm trying to remember his recommendations. Because, what the hell, time waits for no man, and no wine shall go undrunk. Which makes absolutely no sense, except that I am clinging to my last human interaction and its fruits. Which happen to be fermented ones. So, yes, feeling at loose ends, if that is the word, I am headed for Trader Joe's. In fact, I have even mapped out a mission. Two bottles of each of the three recommendations.

　

The store is empty. Joe the wine guy says Trader Joe's is expanding too quickly. Fine with me. I am trying to remember if it's Blackstone or Bogle I am supposed to buy in the Merlot aisle, and which year? Hi. Strangest thing. One of the trustees of the civic theatre wanders out of the Rioja aisle and says hello. I want to say olé. Instead, we chat about, what else, the theater and its management. It occurs to me that I know this guy. I know what to do. He knows whom to talk to. If I just had two non-depressed brain cells to rub together, a sort of plan would emerge, and both of us would have a little chat with the city manager. And we would get something done. It's all too much.

　

Certainly, it's too much wine. I bounce home with six bottles. One of the clerks almost talked me into buying a case of the French wine Joe recommended. But half a case will do. After all, there are bound to be parties. There are bound to be dinners, at the very least. People to see and talk to and spend time with and drink wine with. It isn't over. Maybe it isn't even ending. But you do have to be careful, for there is traffic and bottles of wine are clinking together in the bag on my lap, and it's the glasses you want to clink. And they're at home.

At one point, there I was standing at the back of the Lyttleton playhouse more or less high on the National Theatre's production of 'The Power of Yes,' David Hare's highly edifying, even mine-expanding look at the global financial crisis...and so what? Well, as a friend pointed out, in relating this epiphanic moment I casually mentioned that I was standing, which is not my normal body posture. And, yes, I had briefly risen from my wheelchair to stretch my lower back, but in the selectiveness of storytelling, standing up has some significance.

I was up, feeling up, and while standing, began conversing with theatergoers in the row just ahead. We were arguing about the play. Is it a play, the woman asked. Aren't these events too recent to be the stuff of theater? We carried on in this vein, making our way to the lobby. And all the time I was pounding with a certain joy. How could I tell these people that it didn't matter to me whether this was theater or theater/journalism or a giant rutabaga? What mattered was that the English middle class had gathered together, live and in person, to grapple with the issues of the day. And I was briefly part of that process. And now I was going home. This isn't home. It just isn't. Or is it? I was glad to be heading home to California, sorry to be leaving home in Britain. And I am one confused dude.

After the theater, I met for drinks with friends and relatives at the Langham Hotel, Mayfair. It's quite a swank place. The wheelchair lift is surrounded by marble, and if the thing worked a little better, one would be impressed. Instead, the most impressive thing about the Langham Hotel was its midwinter flexibility. The hotel's main lounge was shutting down, and the bar had loud jazz in the background, and middle-aged people who want to talk to each other don't fare well in such circumstances. At least, I don't. But the Langham was quite happy to seat us by the fire, and when that felt too cramped, to serve us drinks in another part of the lobby. Pretty cool, I thought. And probably not the sort of experience one gets in the touristy summer.

But early January in London is a dead zone. With snow choking off much of the country, the death was even deadlier. Which is a good thing to remember, it seems to me, for cabs were plentiful. I kept imagining awkward moments in the cold, desperately trying to flag down a taxi. But there were legions of them, swarming about with their yellow lights on, and rarely making excuses about carrying a wheelchair. And yet there was a message. It came with the drinks tab. London is a place where it is easily possible to spend almost $40 on three cocktails.

Time to go home.

At Heathrow Airport, it's a long overland journey from the waiting room of Terminal 1 to the United Airlines flight for San Francisco. In fact, the schlep to gate 48 has a sort of way station, a small desk midpoint where a man stands asking passengers where they are bound and offering the encouraging words that it's only another five minutes or 10 minutes or 15. On the way you get your only look at Air Croatia. Not to mention Czech Air. You also wander in and out of several climate zones. Like all major airports, Heathrow seems to be forever under construction, so the circulatory system of corridors includes a few bypasses, places where a section of temporary hallway has been built to shunt people around something or other. They are unheated, these bypass walkways. They are a reminder of something else. It's winter. That's why there is so much white stuff covering the airport's aprons and taxiways. Snow being a novelty to a Californian, then an annoyance, and now something I would like to see later, from the windows of a train, say. Or next year. Time to go home.

Seated in Tourist Class and contemplating my chicken, I puzzled at the mixture of fortunes. That I had been seated in the bulkhead row and was able to brace my easily swollen right leg on the opposite wall, elevating the foot in the most wondrous of ways, well, this is not to be taken for granted. That I can't seem to get myself published, that I am 63 years old and a literary failure, this was enough to make me shove lunch aside and head for the toilet. After all, this was a British crew running this flight, and one could still use the word 'toilet' instead of the American euphemism. And with all this burbling about my mind, maybe it was no wonder that once on my feet, I took a distracted step there instead of here and quietly toppled. Airplanes move after all, ever so slightly all the time, transatlantic ones in particular. So there I was, not so much falling and sliding down the bulkhead. To the carpeted floor. Fortunately, the passengers around me were occupied with lunch just enough to keep them in their seats. A tall and rather beautiful Indian woman flight attendant levered me back into verticality with remarkable ease. And I continued on my way, aware that peeing is my constant activity, falling is my constant fear, and I was getting a constant message. Time to go home.

Who knows what it's like in Switzerland, on a sparkling day of winter snow and cloudless skies? I certainly don't, having never crossed the Swiss border. But I can imagine the general feel of Alpine days here in London, staying in the penthouse of the Swissotel, modern rooms flowing about the top floor, one containing my bed, the other a more or less living room/office with a floor-to-ceiling plate glass view of the Thames where, even in midwinter, tourist boats zip along and freight barges steam ahead. I sit at the desk, laptop humming, proud that I have learned to work the extremely simple espresso machine...which mystified me at first only because of its extraordinary ease. The room is loaded with everything. The room is not a room, but several rooms, a suite, a penthouse suite, and what's really sweet about the espresso machine is that the thing works just like the barista version that hisses in Peet's back in Menlo Park, except that the job of loading the little stainless steel holders with ground coffee and tamping them down is already done. The ground coffee holders are packed, tamped and ready to load. I am loaded too, not only on a series of espressos, but chocolate. Remember, this place is Swiss. On the center of the dining table, and, yes, there is a dining table, some member of the suite staff has placed the sweet stuff of Switzerland, a tiered silver tray of chocolates. I know it's not a healthy breakfast, but I'm not in a healthy environment. I am in this fancy West End hotel, high on the river view, chocolate and the escapism that comes of avoiding the awful moment when I have to shower alone.

A friend has written to ask how this can be possible, how in the fabled metropolis one can operate a slick hotel without a single wheelchair-accessible room. Wilhelm, a long departed German Jewish relative and keen observer of everything European, would have had a simple answer. The Swiss. A nation of venal charmers, anti-Semites and cuckoo clock makers. They are not to be trusted. And in all honesty, I believe that if the Swiss belonged to the EU, this hotel would operate differently. But they don't, and it doesn't, and speculations of this sort are only stalling the inevitable. I avoided a shower yesterday, staring fearfully at the stainless-steel-and-glass modernity of the bathroom and deciding to sponge off instead. But not two days in a row.

Better tackle the easy part first. Yes, the toilet is a little low, but at least it's manageable. Once I'm done using it, it's a simple matter of shifting around on the toilet seat to get enough of an angle to...what? Yesterday, didn't I slide my hand onto the marble shelf behind the toilet and work myself up to a standing position? And am I not doing the same thing today, having moved my functioning leg under me? And why isn't it happening? Why am I not rising? Okay, a little shifting around on the toilet seat and, damned if I don't scoot my knee against the heated towel rack.

Yes, it's a wonderful thing, the British habit of electric bars next to the shower. In this chronically damp and cold climate, there's no other way to get a towel dried. And this is a particularly exquisite stainless steel rack, washcloths, bath and face terrycloths, all dry and warming nicely. But I have this little problem with skin sensation, and I can't tell when something is burning me until it's too late. So I am leery of this heated towel rack, otherwise I would grab its steel bars and hoist myself to standing. I'm stalling. I am stalling, because I am slightly panicking. I am not sure I can get off this toilet. How did I do this yesterday? I scoot my butt just high enough on the toilet seat to facilitate use of the arm extended on the marble and the functioning quadricep of my left leg to get myself up and vertical...and now wedged in the space between the wall and the hot pipes of the electric towel rack.

I try, but no, I cannot shift my paralyzed leg out of this corner without hitting the heated steel. I try, and I feel my leg spasm in response. Yes, I could sit down again and get stuck one more time on the toilet, or I could work my way past the pipes, heat be damned, but there's this other neurological factor, the spastic effect of things that are unexpectedly hot or cold. I am trapped in this wedge area, and if I think much more about this situation, how it is a metaphor for life, my energy will drop to the point where I will drop to the toilet...remaining here until the maid finally decides to clean the penthouse. Which is too ugly to consider. So I go for it, twisting past the hot pipes, getting the leg around the toilet and to a point of relative safety. I still haven't showered.

This calls for another espresso, doesn't it? I insert the pre-packed metal thing in the machine, but I'm so nervous that it springs out. Cursing, regretting my existence, I scramble around for the smooth coffee puck. It has camouflaged itself beside the sofa leg. I don't know why I am doing this. There are many more of these espresso pucks, for this is a suite, doubtless the scene of many corporate dos or high-end romances, all of which require more than a cast of one.... Which explains why, looking at the clock and realizing that the London daylight is shifting, and not in my favor, I finally align my wheelchair's front casters with the low metal lip of the shower.  

Okay, the glass door doesn't open in the right way and there is no effective railing inside, but I am going for it.  After all, there is at least a rubber shower mat, and isn't it perfectly arranged, slanting across the tile shower floor to provide maximum traction?  So what's to worry?  Look at the way I am now dropping my paralyzed right leg onto the rubber mat, gingerly lifting my moving leg up and over the metal lip, and damned if I'm not inside the stall and shower-ready.  

The scene is glistening with Swiss hardware.  This is a high-tech, high-design Swiss shower, don't you know?  Too bad these Europeans can't use a sensible, unambiguous knob to turn the damn thing on.  I twist and...too much happens too quickly, spraying and clouding, my limbs shaking with spastic overstimulation.  Quick, think, deduce, analyze, make sense of this.  Those little metal protrusions are not decorations.  Four shower heads are erupting, two spraying up, two down.  Miraculously, I am standing.  The quadriplegic body doesn't like surprise, especially the 63-year-old quadriplegic body.  It cannot bend or twist the way it once did.  Balance is critical.  Yet once I get used to it, having all these shower heads spraying up and down at bodily crevices is quite convenient.  It's the lack of railings that makes this such a marginal experience.  At least I don't drop the soap.  I get myself lathered and rinsed and successfully drop back into the wheelchair without a fall.

After all, it's only time isn't it?  I've been up for four hours.  It is now noon.  My trip to the London Transport Museum will be a short one.  My actual trips on London Transport in the 1970s were long.  One pays a price for life experience, all of it.  I don't understand the cost/benefit ratio here.  And, yes, it's 12:45 PM by the time I have my socks on, shoes on, money pouch cinched into place.  All this to look at the story of tubes and buses.  Nevermind.  It's my story, and it's taken so long to get here...but out the door is out the door.  Which is better, much better, then on the floor, the floor of the shower, and in my small neuromuscularly defined world, sometimes verticality is everything.

In moments, say, rolling out of the San Francisco Opera House and seeing people waiting for the bus, I feel something akin to gratitude, reverence and awe for the great human invention, the city. Why? Hard to say, except that I grew up at the edge of a small and remote desert town and from an early age wanted to be somewhere else. Cities were places one visited, saw from the outside, and so I was able to will observe and evaluate, pick and choose regarding cities in what was so way cool about them. In the end, I come back to this: a real city is a place where people go to the opera on the bus.

London being at the top of the list. No question about the peace and pastoral beauty of Gloucestershire. But as soon as I boarded the London-bound train, things began to shift in a more energetic direction. Traveling with my cousin's offspring, Jacob and Alexandra, added another level of security and ease, not to mention humor. One has to be around young people. Maybe one has to be around young people in a city. The siblings argued about London and where they were, Jake being a resident, Alexandra an occasional visitor. But they worked as a seamless team getting me in and out of the cab, normally a draining experience with at least one terrifying moment in which I am asked to go backwards down the folding ramp now built into most London taxis. I usually go through a rather exhausting discussion with the cab driver to make sure he knows what he's doing. But not this time. Jake was already there, grabbing my wheelchair handles, talking me down like John Wayne in The High and Mighty.

And within moments we were in the tight-arse lobby of the Swissotel, formerly the Hotel Howard, now 90% staffed by, you guessed it, Swiss. My room wasn't ready. We rolled into the Covent Garden area in search of lunch. The latter consisted of English pies, steak and kidney for Jake, cheese and chicken for Alexandra.  Lentils and carrots for me, the Gloucestershire Jewish Christmas having taken its caloric toll.

It was dark by the time we got back to the hotel. After all, it was 4:30 and in the London winter the day was done. The bellman led us up to the room. It is a simple fact of Jake's life that he easily strikes up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. The bellman's name was Sebastian, we learned halfway up in the lift. Very likely this name was not a state secret, and the man probably had a name tag, but I'm simply oblivious to these things. And I have learned from travel this year that Jake's utility as a Rapport Builder is not to be underestimated. And here was the room, the result of several conversations with the Swiss folk at Hotel Howard regarding wheelchairs and their requirements. Resulting in this, a free upgrade to a spacious suite, designed with all the most modern of amenities straight out of some sparkling design center in Zürich or Genève, doubtless. With one single drawback, that I could not move my wheelchair around the designer wall into the bedroom or toilet.

Not to worry, because I had come equipped with Jake, who had already chatted up Sebastian the bellman, who was already ringing the desk to discuss What Might Be Done. The answer: another room. A quick glance inside the next suite, and another set of problems. A shower with a high step. Wouldn't do, Alexandra told me. Back to the front desk, Jake, Alexandra and Sebastian in tow. These guys may be Swiss, but they know how to pull out the Jewish joke about 'never mind the quality, feel the width.' There was lots of 'we hope you appreciate the room, sir, it is our largest, and its upgrade complementary.' Not to worry, we had Sebastian as our witness.

　

He was neither Swiss nor English-rumpled in the local bellman tradition. In fact, he was one of those observant introverts one wants to have around on any trip. At this very moment he was behind closed doors, in the manager's office. We waited. Being a Saturday, we would have to wait a long time, like until Monday. The assistant manager breezed out, beaming and chatting up a Swiss storm. More of 'wasn't the room big,' but quickly followed by a promise to go for the ultimate upgrade, a massive suite on the top floor with a balcony overlooking the Thames. In fact, close enough to the river to fish, if one doesn't mind fly casting across The Embankment. The hyper-luxury suite. With the National Theatre just across the water, its electronic sign proclaiming a wondrous season of plays, two of which I will see this week. None of which has anything to do with wheelchair access, although it does shift the equation, one has to admit. There was now enough incentive to devise a workaround. And take a chance or two. Or three.

　

One of the best things about having Jake and Alexandra about was their street cred. I had two well spoken English people with me to run around the rooms pronouncing wheelchair inadequacies, which freed me to remain affable, positive and praise the Swiss rooms at every opportunity while sadly lamenting their remoteness to the wheelchair-riding public. Not only was there little to explain, there was little to worry about. What stance to adopt regarding all this? Would I have to roll down to the front desk with a dour expression and make sure that, in one way or another, the squeak of my wheel was heard? No. Jake and Alex would do that for me, just by being present. No need to squeak.

Which explains why I spent this morning and even the early afternoon staring out at the sparkling Thames, then the black of the night Thames, then in my dreams the idea of the Thames. The penthouse suite has these beautiful views from the desk in the living room, which barely takes notice of the vast bathroom or the bedroom. Quite enjoyable, though one pays a price. I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to get myself up from the toilet this morning. As for the shower, I took a look, took another look, then backed out. I would shower another day. I take enough chances getting into bed. The wheelchair must be parked by the end of the bed, and I have to sidle sideways between closet and box spring to get into position. Not exactly ideal. And all this could be avoided with such a modest investment. A higher toilet. A couple of bars in the shower. One less minibar would not be noticed.