Out

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.