Things

What does it mean when it takes an entire day to fumble about with life until one sits down at the keyboard and has a go at another blog?  What does it mean when despite the most advanced anti-squirrel netting money can buy, the expensive seedlings recently purchased, for reasons no one can recall, have been nibbled into miniscule stubs?  It means things are out of sorts.  It means Marlou's photos are still up and staring at me from prominent positions in the sitting room and the office.  And I remember this short Jewish guy from my senior year at Berkeley who was dating someone I knew and shared observations on this thing.

This thing.  And that thing.  It was an era of things.  I had a thing for her.  She had a thing for someone else.  Which was why we were into this thing.  What were we going to do about this thing?  Something.  The short Jewish guy and I were discussing the mirror thing.  When one took LSD and stared at one's self in the mirror this thing happened.  Whatever it was, the activity was remarkably engrossing.  That there was an image of yourself staring back at the image of the person looking at the image, and when you thought about it, which you did, it was a remarkable thing, this thing.  One thing after the next.  Yeah, the mirror thing, the Jewish guy agreed, yeah, it was quite a trip.  In retrospect, the trippiness of the mirror thing seems full of youth, and pleasantly so.  People who do not know who they are and, if lucky, want to find out, and so find themselves staring at themselves in mirrors and finding the whole experience remarkable.  Which, it is.  LSD or not.

Which brings us to the photo thing.  The shots of Marlou each reveal something different.  She was quite beautiful.  She was quite warm.  She was courageous.  She was, that is the point.  And now she is not.  And this is the sort of photo thing that billions of people have experienced, the puzzlingly vivid sense of a spirit and then of its absence.  Marlou had one portrait posed, taken after her first chemo, a scarf around her head in homage to Vermeer.  In her brutally realistic assessment this was, she thought, the last time when she would look beautiful.  The disease and its chemical combatants would take their toll, she reasoned, so it was time to get a memorial portrait done.  

It is a beautiful portrait.  But not my favorite.  Qualities of character come out in the other photos, particularly the later ones, the ones closest to her death.  She had a lot of soul, and in her last photos, and her last months this is what comes flooding out, the living essence of a person.  Struggling, despairing and hoping that the living could go on a bit longer.  Perhaps it's the human condition distilled, and framed.

The photo thing.  I am one half of the photo thing, and it's hard to say what occurs on my side of the glass.  There are changes.  Marlou's photos are no longer overwhelmingly painful to regard.  I can stand looking at them.  I can think about their qualities and even their meaning.  She is gone, and someday I will be gone.  And something of me will live in the regard of people staring at my photo.  Until no one remembers.  Because we all collapse into a great biosystemic forgetfulness, absorbed into the roots of trees, blown about the deserts, adrift in the oceans.  Until we find bits of ourselves staring at fellow pine needles, dusting a dashboard in the Grand Canyon visitor center or staring at a Japanese gill net.  Go figure.

Meanwhile, my patience remains low, but my concentration is gathering force.  I recently read a book.  Not unprecedented, but difficult in the last year or so.  Mentally sticking to things has not been easy.  As for the impatience, its source is often elusive.  But it is generally a signal that something unpleasant is going on inside me.  Something painful, which this does not stop me from self-flagellation.  I may be impatient with others, but I am positively full of denunciations for myself.  Things go wrong, don't they?  And when they do, it's my fault, isn't it?  I've tried to probe the psychological roots of this.  As a child, perhaps I needed fantasies of control.  I wasn't good enough, but I would make myself better.  Who knows?  All I really know is that Lorna, the neighbor woman who rolls in in the mornings to help me get dressed, has been holidaying at her mountain cabin.  Leaving me to dress myself.  Using whatever shortcuts I can.  One of which relies upon talcum powder, and more on this later.  Here's what every solitary quadriplegic should know.

Keep your socks on.  I am not speaking metaphorically, but offering genuine sartorial advice.  Don't take your socks off at night.  Leave them on, because putting them on one-handedly the next morning may drive you over the brink.  Just the thought of crossing one leg over the other, stretching the opening of a sock between thumb and fourth finger, and trying to loop the entire thing around your toes...it is utterly galling.  So leave your socks on.  Just overnight.  Overnight is not forever.  Well, it is sometimes, but for the time being let us put that aside.  For now, we are buying time.  One can shower later in the day when help is about.  A friend, neighbor, someone.  A sock-putter-oner, whoever that person may be.  And, yes, in dire moments, just leave the socks on for the entire day.  Which adds up to 24 hours and never did a sock or a foot any harm.

Underwear.  On bad days, it's just another encumbrance.  Especially if you aren't doing anything too physical or too public, just dispense with it.  At least this was my decision one day last week.  After all, it occurred to me, there was talcum powder.  I had awakened with my socks on, slipped into trousers, slipped into shoes without orthotics and jammed my feet on the wheelchair footrests, thoroughly prepared to roll into downtown Menlo Park for a double latte.  Final task, pour talcum powder into my open fly, thereby satisfying many of the functions of underwear with one shake of a handy container.

Before you scoff, consider that this quadriplegic has achieved at least the outer semblance of attire in approximately 1/3 the normal time.  Done and ready for caffeination.  The latter being the mourning person's drug of choice.  Thus, the little shake of talcum powder, and in two shakes, out the door.  Of course, it is morning in the a.m. sense of the word, a pensive and distracted time for me.  Which explains why in tipping the talcum powder, which happened to be Walgreens jumbo size...on sale in a two-for-one special...yours truly did not aim with the precision required of the moment.  Instead of through the fly and down around of the male equipment, the powder went spilling down the zipper and across the lap.  

Which occasioned at least five minutes of personal self denunciation.  I was stupid, a fool, a failure, an idiot.  And once I had that out of my system, there seemed a fairly simple remedy.  Roll outside and give the trousers a quick brushing.  Which would have been fine, but at precisely that moment my neighbor Buffie emerged on her way to the carport.  I tried to roll my wheelchair back inside, but I had already maneuvered myself close to the chrysanthemums, intending to give them a white dusting.  Oh, hi, she said.  Hi, I said, I spilled something.  She nodded.  Buffie has a seven-year-old, after all, and has seen worse things, many worse things.  She nodded, genuinely unimpressed by the white powder I was brushing off, and told me about her latest adventures in the world of finance.  In fact, she kept talking, while I kept cringing, until I stopped.  She simply didn't care.  

Nor should I.  Which was information that could only be discovered when a person went outside, tuned in to someone else and forgot for one long moment about the mirror thing and the photo thing and the death thing.