March 2010 Archives

Fortunately there are roads, some of them lead west, and a few make it across the coastal hills and down the canyons of rain-fed creeks and even out to the Pacific Ocean, ever laughing at its misnomer, bashing itself against rocks stupid enough to confront its waves.  And there it is, eternal and rolling, seagulls mounting impressive formations, understudying for the brown pelicans, currently recuperating offstage.  The newspapers speculate that a parasite, or turbid coastal waters, has messed things up for pelicans.  I try not to dwell on this, for that is my wont.  Obsessing on what is missing or imperfect or in need of remedy.  Today, I half believe that the pacific brown pelicans will make it, cheer them on, and let it go.  The wind won't let go and conveys the sense of too much happening to get lost on birds.

To the north, artichokes are bursting from the black earth along Half Moon Bay.  I want to stop and ask a farmer what he does about snails or slugs, the latter being both large and indigenous, giving them an advantage in mowing down the agriculture.  The bluish spiky leaves, the stalk lifting the artichoke fruit to the eye level of passing drivers, the whole scene is screaming with spring.  The latter being a vague concept in these parts, daffodils first appearing in early January, fruit trees bloomed out and shedding their petals by the end of February, artichokes roaring by March.  The mustard.  I wonder if you can actually spread it on sandwiches.  It is growing everywhere along the coastal highway, and way up a hill the mustard has filled in someone's fenced acreage.  The distant plot drapes across the slopes like a square from a quilt, a twisted fluid parallelogram of brilliant yellow.  California does not get much better than this.

In my own garden, I confront the brussels sprouts much as I did the Pakistani woman who drew blood from my veins this very morning.  The annual physical.  Bloodwork.  For some reason, I had delayed it this year.  Fearing there was something bad in my blood.  But there I was, giving of myself for the greater cause of health, the phlebotomist taking a good gallon or two.  And God only knows where it goes, this blood.  But there was nothing to do but let the clinic have its way with my veins, and so it is with the brussels sprouts.  Having had free botanical rein for more than a day, they are taking full advantage.  One of them seems to be on the verge of flowering.  I'm going to have to endure this, brussels sprouts blooming, pollinating, seeding.  Honestly, if the right consultant would simply get in touch, I would have motivational sessions.  Starting with the mission statement, that we brussels sprouts are determined to be the finest available in Menlo Park, making ourselves fructify early and often, rivaling the sweetness of those growing beneath the snows of Gloucestershire.  Barring which the only thing to do is give up.  The suckers will flower, there will be a summer, and maybe a productive autumn.  It's like the blood.  Wait and find out.

One may not have to wait for the garlic, currently blasting along way ahead of schedule.  Wise to remember that last year I lost track of the stuff.  At some point in the course of boating to Britain, the garlic's green tops faded, even decomposed, and by the time it occurred to me that the stuff was ready to eat, it was no longer locatable.  Lots of digging ensued.  Much fork insertion, earth levering and desperate searching.  They appeared, one by one, the garlic globes.  And the ones that got away reappeared in January.  Which explains why the garlic I planted this year, vying with the garlic from last, now constitute a garlic jungle, so thick with foliage that the normally assertive spinach has retreated.  In any case, the stuff is out there early, as far as I'm concerned.  The next crop in.  Tomatoes, of course.  Grown indoors from seed.  What they are, well, that is a different matter.  I just don't have any patience these days.  And it takes a modicum of patience to, say, label the small plastic cells in which the seeds have sprouted.  So that one knows that this will be a yellow cherry, that a Roma, that a beefsteak.  As it is, I haven't a clue.  They are tomatoes.  And my answer is to plant all of them, crowded tight as the Amazon rainforest.  Then, for once, just to see what happens.  That being a lesson, if there is one, in a human death.  It happens.  So try to enjoy what happens before it happens and even what happens afterward.

It has the quality of the most tiresome and repetitive tasks, unrewarding and unrelenting.  Its reappearance sparks revulsion.  And the more one tires of it, the more it asserts itself, begs to be titled or retitled and generally takes over.  If I was a movie, it would be Grief II or, perhaps, Grief III.  Or in another era, The Valley of Grief, and by this point, Beneath the Valley of Grief.  And so on and on and on and on on on.  There appears to be no off.

A Sunday morning, shapeless with possibilities.  What to do?  Nothing, for I am being done, even done in, by a heavy, sad anger.  I sit pinned in my armchair, trying to remember not so much what I had planned for the day, but why.  I am aware of the weekly farmers market currently underway two blocks to the north.  There is no reason to go there, certainly nothing I need, and diversion is not to be trusted.  I stare at the wall.  A friend has introduced me to Richard Hugo, famed poet of the Northwest, and as much as I can read anything I read him.  But not now.  It's wall staring time.

The more I hate the Miss Haversham qualities of my front room, particularly the New Yorkers unread for months, the more I fuel the fires.  Things have stopped.  I have stopped.  I have even stopped worrying about the stoppage.  There's enough inertia in this front room, and angry inertia at that, to fuel some yet-to-be-discovered power source.  No doubt about the energy storage.  Absolutely nothing is happening, but everything is heating.  And there are things I have to do.

Trouble is, much of the time, I think of my current condition in that most American of ways, productivity.  I have things to do that I haven't gotten done.  How vile of me.  Another day wasted.  I am wasted in the sense an alcoholic gets wasted.  The workday opportunity is wasted.  Yes, Sunday is not a workday, but that hardly matters, for things need to get done.  And I need to get done with this endless replay of Marlou's life getting done, an experience or reexperience, currently in the air.  Literally.  Spring bursting in the outdoor beds, my wife bursting in her indoor one, cancer gone mad, filling her body and squeezing the life out.  All on the same day, at the same moment.  Spring, young man's fancy, thoughts of love.

Paul, still volunteering on loan through Catholic charities' reciprocal agreement with Jewish ones, arrives to help out.  The getting on of socks being an enormous help.  Not only of labor but of attendant stress.  What else?  We wander out to the garden and Paul helps pull buds from the brussels sprouts.  The reason for this has escaped me.  The brussels sprouts have escaped me.  I thought they would march up and down the stem like an ad for Birdseye.  But they are not marching or even forming, and my obsession with picking off the blooms appears to be ill-founded.  For every bloom I pick, another three form.  Removing them is not only impossible, but has utterly failed to stimulate the formation of edible brussels sprouts.  Give up.  Let the plant have its way.  It will do what it wants.  Life and death are equally beyond control.  Paul goes, and I stare at the afternoon.

Naturally, a retired person has to keep active, and journeying to Peet's passes for activity, just barely, so off I go.  Hollow and repetitive, though such a journey feels.  Yet, there it is, Caffeination Central, things looking pretty much the same, although there is an oddity.  A large white pipe is slinking its way out the door.  I see it and do not see it.  Half oblivious to this and any other anomaly, I barge in through the doorway, while a patron rushes to help me.  He's not quite sure what to do, this big floppy white thing half blocking my way.  Eventually, he lifts it, I roll under and head for the barista action.  A quiet moment, spring heat felt through the smoked glass.  Apparently the air-conditioning is not functioning today, thus the silly white exhaust pipe.  In snatches of overheard conversation I learn that Martha said the same thing as Julie.  No?  Yes.

I am out the door in 20 minutes and the Martha has triggered something.  A film Marlou liked.  Mostly Martha, about a high-strung, introverted chef at a haute restaurant in Hamburg.  Actually, Marlou loved it.  The film spoke to her.  She mentioned it often as some sort of guide or explanation for her personality and her life.  Martha, the cinematic chef, pursues cooking as an art form, yet is curiously artless.  She does not possess an insincere bone in her body.  And has trouble dealing with the world.  And was this Marlou?  She thought so, and this must have at least resonated with the inner person.

And as I'm bouncing home, none of this really matters, except that Marlou was struggling to understand herself.  Like any conscious person.  And this was as far as she got.  It stopped.  The road stopped.  They all do, and I know this on some level.  But seemingly the wrong level.  And so they come, bits and pieces, remembrances of life and of death, and I'm trying, really trying, to get comfortable with all of it.

Fess Parker died.  And if you can't remember Fess Parker, fess up.  You're either too young to know who played Davy Crockett in the 1950s movies and TV series.  Or you're too old to remember anything.  Either way, you're probably not worried.  You don't believe in the Curse of Fess Parker.

Davy Crockett came at me on the big screen of the Fox Theatre in downtown Banning, California.  And it was, no doubt about it, the downtown, relatively speaking, to someone who lived in no town at all.  There was much to be said for residing in the scenic desert beyond the town, if you were an adult, but for a kid the experience was as raw as the desert winds that regularly blew down our TV antenna, which worked poorly anyway, and made the glowing screen of the Fox Theatre all the more impressive, not to mention, essential.  

And also made the intersection of Ramsay Street and San Gorgonio Ave. seem to a seven-year-old something along the lines of Times Square.  Where those streets crossed, Banning reached its urban intensity.  At some point in the late 1950s, the town even installed a traffic signal.  It was the only stoplight in a good 40 mile stretch of Riverside County, and its arrival marked a sort watershed moment.  The lights went from green to amber to red, and did so 24 hours a day, devoid of human intervention, right in the center of town, causing cars to stop and even to wait.  It was something to behold.

So was Fess Parker.  As Davy Crockett, he went at injuns, outlaws and other nogoodniks with a fervor and a success rate that one could only envy.  He wrestled wolves to defeat.  He grabbed two attackers at once, handily defeating both, never losing his cool or his coonskin hat.  The latter became a national rage, a must-have for any kid who was anyone, which I wasn't, being a doctor's son, holed up at the edge of town, and looking for love in all the wrong places.  Or maybe looking for life.  And shifting uneasily as Fess Parker went about his daring do.

I couldn't quite get into it.  Though Davy Crockett, on big screen or little, was a howling, foot-stamping, popcorn-throwing success.  Something about the films bothered me.  I liked the antics.  But it all seemed too fast.  Events crowded, one upon another, and although I never lost the plot, I lost the enjoyment.  Lost in the dark, I shrank into my seat, feeling foolish in the grandeur of the Banning Fox, all red velvet curtains and recessed lighting.  Even worse was a sort of sequel in the genre, 'Old Yeller,' another fast-paced adventure flick about a frontier dog.  Its breathless plot left me in the dust, confused and prematurely detached for an eight-year-old.  I had no words for such experiences.  With home life falling apart and everything sad and scary, movie plots were the least of my problems.  

At least, following her divorce, my mother did move to the beach.  The mornings materialized out of the fog in Santa Barbara.  From my mother's backyard, whales spouted en route to or from Mexico, their watery spurts as routine as the small boats that harvested kelp just beyond them.  On summer visits, I was far from the desert, far from small-town life and in a sort of cultural mecca.  Films and concerts and plays, not to mention almost daily trips to the beach.  Sometimes with my brother.  Sometimes alone.  I surfed with an inflatable raft, had a hamburger in the snack bar and stared at the occasional stingray flapping beneath me through the waves.  I was not alone, but lonely.  So my mother suggested Joe.

Somehow he got there.  Joe hailed from the same desert town but had miraculously escaped to Los Angeles.  Somehow he got himself to Santa Barbara.  Here the broken link in my chain of memory leaves a blank space.  Did he take the bus?  Did his sister drive him on her way to a pre-Europe meeting at the nearby university?  Whatever.  He was there.  He and I were going to the beach, flopping in the surf, reading and facing the future side by side.  In retrospect, we must have instinctively sensed a similarity of worldview, naturally ironic, incurably urban and Jewish.  But this is an adult insight.  At the time, we were what we were, hanging out on the beach, restless in our different ways.

Having been to summer camp, I had acquired barely enough outdoor lore to go adventuring.  The problem was where.  Santa Barbara was a town.  I was a kid.  But at Arroyo Burro State Beach, my eyes kept gazing up the coast.  I had a plan.  No, not really.  I had a dreamy plan, absent any real knowledge.  I was determined.  Time spent in the home of my distant, turbulent mother, saddened and disturbed me.  Besides, Joe was around.  We could tackle my plan together.  I explained my idea, my mother nodded and agreed.  I would call her at the other end, and she would meet me.  Meet us.  Joe and me.  No way I would do this thing alone.  No need, either.  Joe was game.  And one afternoon, we were off.

Moving straight up the coast.  Like Cortez.  Or Magellan.  Sir Francis Drake.  Explorer guys, Joe and I, walking straight up the coast, all the way from our familiar beach at Arroyo Burro, along the ocean and its cliffs, five miles, maybe ten.  To where the bluffs stopped and a coastal valley would open its arms to us, as well as the town's university, airport and budding northern subdivisions.

Quite splendid marching along the ocean, passing the high bluffs.  The beaches stretched on and on, wide expanses of empty sand.  The carcass of a rotting seal captured our attentions.  But only briefly, the haze of flies and the stench moving us on, not to mention the disturbing sense of death.  Why worry with so much ahead?  The sands widened, narrowed, widened again.  The bluffs rose.  I kept staring at the top, wondering if those were homes.  There was definitely something up there.  The neighborhood of Hope Ranch, known for its upscale inhabitants, big homes, trees and winding streets without signs.  From the beach, there was almost nothing to see, except for the occasional cabana erected at the cliffs' base, canvas flapping its stripes in the afternoon breeze.  A mile further, someone's private funicular railway inclined up the bluff.  People clearly came down to the beach, and did so in style, just not today.  Joe and I trudged on.

We rounded another bend where the cliffs moved down to meet us.  They created a narrow passage, a slim strip of beach so tight that the surf broke just meters away.  With the sands retreating to a sort of isthmus, Joe and I found ourselves climbing up and over the coastal rocks.  Increasingly wet rocks, it turned out, waves and spray battering to our left, westward in the general direction of, say, Honolulu or Yokohama.  This feeling of vastness, the oceanic feeling described by Freud, was gradually encroaching upon us.  There was more and more of it, wet, rolling and spraying.  It was the most obvious thing, the thing that separates the seafarer from the landlubber, the thing from which hundreds of California motels, restaurants and bars derive their names: the tides.  They were moving in.

Joe and I were moving up, scrambling along the base of the cliffs.  Hard to say about the tide.  How much did it move in and how fast and what was ahead of us?  Naturally, I had no map.  Mobile phones hadn't been invented.  No landmarks.  No sense of how much further we were going or whether the ocean would swamp us before we got there.  No sense in panicking, or, more exactly, displaying a sense of panic.  Which was rising like the tides.  No end, I could see no end to this, Joe and I moving north, the Pacific Ocean moving east, the latter being considerably larger, more indifferent and unpredictable than us, if one was to believe sea shanties.

I kept telling Joe to hurry.  Not that I could hurry any faster than he could.  But it seemed like the thing to do.  Hurry.  Outrun the tide.  Our progress kept slowing, saltwater advancing, we picking our way along rocks and slanting slopes, the sun descending in its leisurely summer way.  On and on.  Come on, Joe, hurry.  I tripped over a chaparral branch.  Hurry.  Another corner, and the sands widened, the cliffs opened and we came upon university kids sunning themselves across an estuary.  A Convair started up its piston engines at the airport.  Joe and I, giddy with survival, walked up the road to the terminal.  A man in a tie behind the United Airlines booth, and it was little more than that, gave me change so I could call my mother.  I told him about our hike.  Joe told him about getting stuck in the tides.  Oh, the man said, counting out his dimes, that's the Fess Parker estate.

We waited for my mom in the parking lot.  Fess Parker had tried to drown us, I was convinced.  I kept these thoughts to myself.  Fess Parker kept to himself, that was clear enough.  Although over the years, he put his name on several Santa Barbara hotels and his signature on countless land deals.  He was briefly an actor, perennially a businessman.  And what was I?  What I was on that day and every day since.  A survivor.

When the phone rings, I pick up and an odd pause ensues, there is every sensible reason to hang up.  It's clear what's happening.  Some pitchman is working the phones, seated in some cubicle in some boiler room operation somewhere, and my number has just been hit by a computerized auto-dialer.  And I am about to be hit also.  Although, hope springing eternal, something in me cannot quite give up believing that it's actually a friend calling, someone having dialed the number and gotten lost in a sneeze, a crying child, a heart attack.  And so I answer, and so it goes, something like this.

"Hello, this is Margaret from Nuance Software, producer of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  How are you today?  I hope Dragon is working well for you."

What Margaret does not know is that I am actually listening.  I am not only attentive to the data stream emanating from her mouth, but to the nuance, the subtle tonality for which her company is named.  Which makes it impossible to avoid the fact that she has left no conversational space for me to explain how I am today, nor has the absence of this information fazed her in the least.  Which makes me hurtle on to her last utterance, to which I respond instantly and in detail.

"I am getting repeated error messages from Dragon."

Oh, Margaret says.  That is the sum total of her response from the value-adding position she holds within the firm producing the software that is producing the error messages.  Oh.  I ignore this also, asking if I should get a screenshot of the error message and send it to her.  Oh.  She gives me, instead, the number (not toll-free) of the Nuance Software technical support line, which if I was foolish enough to dial it, would provide entrée to another set of charges, hourly ones, for help in solving my "problem," which by any sane standard is not my problem, but theirs.  It is only 9:30 AM, and I'm 63 years old and thinking that if Margaret persists, I may hit 73 by noon.

I observe that the number of Technical Support is available on the Nuance website.  I pause.  A telephonic silence reverberates across the nation, Nuance being in Massachusetts, me in California.  Actually, this pause may even extend longer and farther, considering that Margaret may not work for Nuance, let alone be in Massachusetts.  Good money says that at home Margaret answers to Chaya, frequently downs a vindaloo curry and reads the online Times of India, while I am fast asleep.  But never mind.  For now, there is a silence, an uncomfortable one for any person attentive to nuance which, despite her employer's namesake, Margaret isn't.

"We have some wonderful deals on scanning and character recognition, up to 80% off," Margaret says.

"So this is a sales call," I say, doing my best to sound surprised.

"No, it's not a sales call.  I'm just telling you about some opportunities.  You might want to know."

"Oh," I say.  Another silence ensues, opening a long staticy space on the phone line.  I can't recall if Margaret actually hung up on me, or muttered goodbye first.  It doesn't matter.  What matters is that I got my curmudgeonly rocks off, as it were.  I am not in the best of moods.

With the anniversary of Marlou's death looming, anger dominates my days.  For me, it's not the prettiest of emotions to feel about someone's passing, but it's there.  Authentically there.  Perhaps a response to critical mass, me schlepping about a half-dead body while forced to watch my wife turn into a complete one.  Too much to feel at the time, perhaps.  Something that had to get put on hold.  And remains too wildly contradictory to grasp.

I am irritated, not only with Margaret, but with much of what goes on around me.  This is now a chronic condition, one that has spanned the entire year since Marlou's passing, lets up only occasionally and must be accepted.  Why?  What is it?  In its better dimension, an insistence on the genuine, the substantive.  At its worst, it's just plain anger and irritability.  In this and in other ways, proximity to death transforms us, I am convinced.

And who wants to be transformed?  I am having enough trouble with my wheelchair.  The new one, Swedish, with front wheel drive.  I'm too old for this.  When wheels drive a vehicle from the front, each turn makes the rear wheels swing out.  No wonder I can barely get through a doorway with this thing.  Most doorways lead into a room.  And rooms are not infinite in their dimensions.  Upon entering a room, most rooms that are not Westminster Abbey, one turns.  And with this wheelchair you'd better start turning as you're entering, because otherwise the rear of your wheelchair will get jammed against the doorway.  It's maddening, and since I tend to blame myself for every maddening thing that happens, the whole Swedish wheelchair switch has become emotionally exhausting.  Which is why I jump in the Swedish model to visit Clint.

It's distracting.  I need something else to worry about on the way to visiting Clint in his afternoon chemotherapy salon, which happens to be that of my deceased wife, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.  So I set off in the Swedish vehicle, heading straight down Live Oak Avenue, ever lifeless and oakless, my wheelchair fishtailing merrily along.  And I even get to the Caltrain station on time.  The train is on time.  Everything is on time.  Except that everything is not as it should be, there being two wheelchairs waiting for two wheelchair spaces on the train, one already occupied.  Requiring a game of musical wheelchairs, were it not for the conductor, who has the decency and imagination to handcrank my chair aboard the bicycle car.  

Things are fierce inside the bike carriage.  Everyone is standing up, holding their bicycles for immediate evacuation at the next stop, Palo Alto, less than one mile away.  And, yes, this is a rather silly trip to be taking by train, but as I said, distraction is good, and I relish another trip to the chemotherapy department as much as I do to the neighborhood mortuary.

Never mind, for within minutes, the bicyclists have hurtled off at Palo Alto station, with me right behind, and I am rolling toward Clint.  He's more or less where I had expected, but it seemed a preposterous fantasy to actually find him in the same chemotherapy chair Marlou occupied only 18 months ago.  Yet there he is, beaming and simultaneously phoning and laptop computing.  Overhearing his conversation with Phyllis, I learn that the chemotherapy has been working, noticeable improvement on several bodily fronts.  What the hell.  What's not improving is my recollection of Marlou being here, the passage of one year, but also, what the hell.  A few midday tears, some jokes with Clint, my general admiration for his spirit and courage, and I am off to lunch.  The day is only half over, and I am exhausted.

But things are moving, moving as they should.  There's going to be a one-year observance of Marlou's death, Friday, 2 April, at Keddem Congregation, Palo Alto.  And how I'm going to get out word via e-mail, such address lists long forgotten and out of date anyway...well, it's anyone's guess.  But how I've gotten through the last year is anyone's guess too...unless one considers the obvious.  I have had a lot of help.  And I am grateful.

In one of the three, sometimes four, photographs arrayed on the Marlou Memorial Desk in my front room, there is an expression or quality that grabs my attention.  It is my departed wife in a moment of delight.  She's laughing at something, or smiling deeply, gazing downward, utterly given over to whatever momentary joy she was feeling.  Did someone make her laugh as the photo was taken?  Someone like my brother, who for decades has been subtly flipping people the bird as he flips the shutter.  I can't remember.  Anyway, there she is, Marlou, utterly radiant, laughing or smiling hard, right down to the pain.  And this perplexes me.  Was Marlou really someone for whom joy scraped away an underlying pain?  Or was that solely me?  I honestly can't tell.  Moreover, I cannot tell what I am working out in this conundrum.  It is better to revert to what is known, that my pained inner state lightened and brightened in her arms.  And now there is the picture, and me working on reality.

The latter changes hour by hour.  This is one of the strangest and most enduring of grief's attributes.  That one can sense a change, or strongly feel an impulse, only to have the urge slip away within minutes.  Quickly replaced by a different, and sometimes opposite, mood.  Wild fluctuations in real time, assuming you believe time is real.  Because it isn't, it seems, not in the sense usually and commonly understood in the American Productivity State.  Which is both an outgrowth, and an antidote, to the impatience that flares into being throughout my day.

This very morning I donned my driving shoes, headed for the van and made tracks for the Palo Alto-Mountain View borderland.  Appropriately, it has become a Jewish frontier, this area.  Specifically, it is home to the congregation I once occasionally attended, host to an excellent Sunday morning lecture series.  The latter is so good, in fact, that even the malfunction of my van does not deter me.  I could let it, as the mechanical door fails to open properly again and again.  The tide is rising.  Stay home.  It's safer here.  No sense in knocking oneself out to get out.  Plenty of stuff at home.  I shut and open the van's door repeatedly, rejecting the siren song of stasis, until finally things mechanical align themselves, the wheelchair lift descends as it should, and I ascend as I should.  Soon it's southbound on the 101 motorway, familiar road signs and hotels and IKEA flying by, until I'm there.

Hard to say what the fascination is about the morning topic, whether or not to demolish the Hetch Hetchy reservoir dam and let Yosemite's second most beautiful valley return to its natural state.  There's a video, Harrison Ford having volunteered to stand on the O'Shaughnessy Dam and muse upon the potential.  I am with him 100%.  What is underneath all that water?  I want to know.  After all, I began building dams in the fields near my house at eight years old, maybe earlier.  They all got washed away.  Why not this one?  

After the video, a Stanford professor talks about the trade-offs.  The whole exercise presents one essential challenge.  Time.  Even if the dam got demolished tomorrow, it would take years and years before the Hetch Hetchy Valley recovered, got its trees back, its native grasses, its deer and bobcats and bears.  This thing we are talking about, all of us, this thing that means about $50 million a year less for San Francisco in terms of power to run its schools and Municipal Railway, this will all occur after I am gone.  After almost everyone in the meeting room is gone.  This is about the future, future generations, future mammals, future wilderness.  As Americans, the wilderness part easily gets into our blood.  It's the future part that stops us in our youthful tracks.  Life and death and future.  A good Sunday morning talk.

Later, outside, it occurs to me that I am outside, not only outside of my home, but al fresco.  What the hell.  Just across the street is the new Palo Alto Jewish Community Center.  After years of fundraising, much architectural ballyhoo, and all but fireworks, the place is open.  In fact, it has been open for...well, I don't really know.  Six months?  An entire year?  And I am out, for the first time in a year, it seems, so why not check the place out?  It's only a couple of hundred meters and some battery life.  So I roll over there.

It's all quite new, quite big, quite impressive and quite Orwellian concrete.  I eyeball the swimming pools.  Honestly, the Menlo Park Recreation Center has something more quadriplegic-friendly.  Actually, it's more middle-aged-quadriplegic-friendly, at least while the schools are in session.  The Jewish Community Center swimming pool is alive with splashing kids, the indoor air heavily chlorinated...but, at least, I have seen it.  And the day is young, even if I'm not, so why not do the next sunny thing?  

In a burst of automotive efficiency, I drive the motorway, having determined this is the best route, and it is...to my neighborhood garden center.  Spring is in the air.  People are buying stuff.  Pots and plants and expensive garden gear, and I am rolling my wheelchair about the gravel paths and trying to remember why I came.  To buy stuff.  To buy garden stuff.

Unfortunately, like all spontaneous plans, this one has neither beginning nor end.  It just seemed like the thing to do, and for a year very few things have seemed worth doing.  So the astonishing truth is that I am looking at lettuce seedlings and marigold plants and actually asking one of the staff about luring beneficial insects.  I'm feeling stunningly ecological.  I am the eco-gardener-guy, maybe in a Jewish sort of way, because I really don't want to deal with any of the activity.  Even after I have bought $45 worth of stuff, I really don't want to take it out of my van.  I want to go inside and just be.  I am good at this.  

Musing, brooding, call it what you will, just don't call me while I am doing it.  The problem is that as soon as I begin this introspection, I take in the reality of my apartment.  Miss Haversham.  Far too frozen in time.  Netflix videos that I have not seen for months, though I keep paying the rent on them.  The already discussed newspapers and magazines that build up like geological strata.  The heat.  The clocks moved forward last night, and progress moved backward.  Marlou was the one who understood how to reset the timer on the thermostat.  I must have one known myself, but over the last year this skill seems to have evaporated.  Or has it?

At least I did remember to advance the clocks one hour.  In fact, I rolled about the apartment facing the mechanical or electronic challenge, one clock at a time.  Naturally, no two work the same.  My bedside clock radio has its procedure.  The clock radio in the bathroom has another.  The microwave works entirely differently.  The clock on the kitchen wall has the simplest of knobs on its back, but I can barely feel the thing, and I have to watch the clock face while it turns or doesn't turn, and the entire procedure throws me into a fit of neuromuscular pique.  And the oven.  I couldn't do the oven.  The controls are too weird, and I am too old.  Yet I knew this was not true.  I had risen to all the clock challenges about the apartment, and I would rise to the next on the morrow.

Which left all this garden stuff in my van.  And that is the strange thing about this year.  The stuff can stay in the van.  I will see to it when I see to it or when I intuit that I'll get into it.  Otherwise I get into a certain anger, a sense of being overstretched, overtaxed, overburdened.  It's getting better, this quality, but it's in control.  My challenge is to not only go with the flow, but know there is one.