To Lunch

It is an equivocal time, spring, especially if one is inclined to see the darker aspects of all seasons.  Things are sprouting madly.  'Things' include not only garlic and Swiss chard, but snails and aphids.  There is a biological race underway in my garden, and the sheer concentration of those on the flora team makes for vulnerability.  Plant defenses are much like my own.  In the absence of mobility, there is prickliness, thick skin and toxins.  Root for the home team.  They stand and fight.  

However.  Given that I am relatively mobile compared to a head of red lettuce, why not seize the advantage and launch various chemical agents against the attackers?  Organic chemicals, of course.  Harmless to humans, and not quite harmful enough to pests.  But worth a biochemical try.  I have a European friend who disapproves of snail killing.  Illustrating an interesting and essential difference in the experiences of the New and Old Worlds.  Explaining that snails are an invasive species, that they wreak ecological havoc on the fragile California native plant population, none of this pulls much weight.  The European experience, of lands civilized and domesticated so long ago that wilderness is utterly remote, makes a living creature a living creature.  As they say, we are coming from different places.

I am coming from the shoe guy.  He is Chinese and replaces the last of the Caucasian generation of cobblers.  Which means little in the long run, for there will not be a new generation of Asian shoe guys.  Our chats have revealed this, rambling exchanges and stumblings around the second-language barrier, a sense of conversational gaps as large and empty as much of his premises.  Someone has been working on shoes in this mercantile location since 1902, according to a sign over the door.  Inside sits a dusty and clearly disused Singer sewing machine, a treadle model.  A wall of unclaimed shoes.  Dangling leather belts.  Shoelaces, shoe sole inserts, shoe powder, shoe arch supports, shoe polish, shoehorns and, probably back in a corner, shoo flies.  Don't bother me.  

He doesn't at all, actually, and in fact I find enormous comfort in the inefficiencies of his operation.  He never writes down my phone number, issues no claim check to customers and seems to have a sliding rate scale whose movements upward and downward reflect his own internal barometer.  More important, he has agreed to work on my shoes.  My old shoes are so old that they are no longer manufactured.  Anywhere by anyone.  They have certain quadriplegic-friendly characteristics, particularly their size which allows for my plastic leg brace and a tongue sewn into the shoe in such a way that no amount of one-handed leg maneuvering can drive inwards toward the toe.  So he happily repairs them without commenting on their internal skeletal failure.  The leather is separating, and disintegrating, but the guy has a sewing machine and glue, and something about this process has great appeal for me.  I am held together by similar forces.  And the soul likes old things.  In Menlo Park this is as old as things get.

I am old and my experience of this town is old and getting older.  I'm rocketing my wheelchair up Santa Cruz Ave. to get to Amici's Pizza before Alan does.  We are going to have a Jewish middle-aged guys lunch.  This will begin by a ritual acknowledgment of the pizza and its calories.  In this moment, although we are not quite davening, we are atoning for the fat-carbohydrate enormity of what we are doing, showing that we are conscious, nobody's fools and accept the guilty perils ahead.  To show we are savvy, there's also a broccoli salad.  No calories there, Alan says.  Except for the olive oil, I point out.  He pokes a fork in the liquid accumulation on the bottom of the salad plate, pointing out that it is a suspension, with the shiny floating globules in the minority.  Water is thicker than blood, I want to say but don't.

But all that lies ahead.  For the moment, I am high on the main street, the main guy on the high street.  My wheelchair is at full bore.  Nothing, not even the cracks in the footpath, can stop me.  Ahead I see a blond toddler atop her tall young dad.  She is a good 7 feet above me, but I wave anyway.  Neither respond.  He is talking to her.  Where is Taylor?  Can she see Taylor?  I want to tell them both that I can't see naming anyone Taylor.  It used to be a surname.  But I used to be a toddler myself, and so many things have changed.

I do try to keep up.  Friends insisted that 'Avatar' was part of the zeitgeist.  One had to see it, for it would be talked about for a long time.  Oddly, this may be true.  The film does solidly establish 3-D.  It is worth seeing for that alone.  I have never seen Al Jolson portray 'The Jazz Singer,' but it did up the ante in terms of sensory input and was, in contemporary parlance, a game changer.  The game is changing much faster these days, of course, but at least briefly 'Avatar' does break new ground.  Most gratifying, it portrays a sort of war between the forces of, for want of better words, sustainability and the rape-and-plunder corporate state.  Yes, it is ponderous, heavy-handed and middlebrow, but as these things go, quite endurable.  The thing cost half a billion dollars.  Plenty of bang for buck, but hardly that much imagination for buck, but you might as well go see it.  I now qualify for the senior matinee.  They make you give back the 3-D glasses.  Check it out.