Time to go

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.