April 2010 Archives

Gosh, haven't things been humming along this morning?  At 8 AM my apartment door burst open with the simultaneous entry of Paul, weekly volunteer on some complex interfaith alliance between Jewish Family Services and the Catholic Worker House...go figure...and Ian, my current guest in the empty apartment upstairs.  Not so empty now, of course, Ian being here briefly before his mid-May return to the UK.  And welcome on so many fronts, not the least of which includes the current one, my living room lamp....

I didn't quite notice it wasn't working.  Someone pointed this out to me, and, sure enough, there was no light from the light.  Switch, dimmer, all tested positive, but the halogen bulb was burned out.  Which I didn't know was possible with such relatively advanced technology.  Which was probably why I had written off this possibility, vaguely blaming myself for some misstep with the interior lighting.  Running my wheelchair over the cord, although very unlikely.  Not having the thing plugged in.  Possibly not quite understanding how to work the combination of dimmer, lamp switch and wall switch, all of which divert electricity from the Sierras, across my living room and into the hot glowing square that points toward the ceiling.  This Little Light of Mine.  Now burned out.  Like me.

In the wake of yesterday evening, that is.  That's why it's so good to have Ian bustling about with the lamp while Paul toasts my English muffin.  In fact, without much of a mental stretch, one can see a grandly British thread running through everything, a oneness of activities.  Paul with the English muffin, Ian, a hardy Scot and ex-RAF, dismantling my halogen lamp.  Everyone doing his thing, jointly and severally, just like Great Britain itself.

'It will all be over soon.'  This from last night, Ian's pronouncement concerning the musical missteps emanating from the bass section of the Menlo Park Chorus.  He was referring to our spring concert, Friday.  I've told Ian that, being illiterate in the music of reading department, my notes tend to aim for a general target area, an imprecision that makes the vocally gifted cringe.  Ian, currently in the midst of some domestic turbulence and halfway to the Home Counties, has a better perspective on these things.  Actually, it is I who cringe at the thought of performance.  I should have done better, musically.  I should have rehearsed and practiced more.  Now look at where all this has gotten me.

It has gotten me to a restaurant in a shopping center near the church where the Chorus is meeting for its dress rehearsal.  Located on the richer and blander side of Menlo Park, the menu runs to Kraft cheese and possibly canned beans, but never mind.  It's close, and we are here, if I can just get my van's lift and door to work as they should.  They can't.  They won't.  I stupidly set inside the van, watching the door open and close.  It's all my fault.  I was having problems with the lift as we left my apartment.  Now the problems have mushroomed.  I am stuck here.  Jane, Chorus soprano, brings me a quesadilla from the restaurant while I wait in the van.  I'm grateful for the food and attention, and slightly guilty for thinking evil thoughts about the menu.  Actually, cuisine has shrunken into the background.  I am wholly occupied with feelings of quadriplegic confinement, diminishing options, infuriating prospects and a general lack of belief in tomorrow.

Actually, a dour cloud hangs over this very evening and the critical rehearsal to ensue.  It is a corollary of Sod's law, that the worst is yet to come, things go wrong at the wrong moments, and you might as well stay home if you want to experience decline and disaster, because it's cheaper, and you can at least do some laundry while waiting for the End.  In any case, there is the rehearsal, which even without transportation failures, has long been doomed.  

Still, one cannot be absent on the field of battle.  Which Ian, after decades in the British military, knows better than I.  So once I am parked in front of the church, it takes little encouragement for Ian to get on with the business at hand.  At hand being no metaphor, for he has actually found a plastic handle, inserted it in my lift mechanism, and proceeded to hydraulically pump me up, out and down from the van.  That is, me and my wheelchair, more than 300 pounds of us, descending in crude but effective deus-ex-machina style, to the pavement.  Ian doesn't say much, and doesn't need to, nor do I.  We both know this is about battle, which like Hollywood moviemaking, involves much sitting around, occasional hard labor and glory for someone else.  I shake Ian's hand, grateful now to have my shot at destroying a large body of choral music.

Inside, I can't quite make it onto the church stage.  I park beside the bass section, behind the piano, obscured from view of half the eventual audience.  I get underway, musically fumbling and stumbling through the evening's vocal selections.  One onlooker, identity and purpose unknown, stares at me from across the pews.  On general grounds of Crip Rights and of political correctness, I probably should make some effort to demand access to the choir level, six inches above me and right beside.  Frankly, I don't care.  The railing in front of me proves to be a better music stand than the folding one I normally use.  There is a small problem with hearing my fellow basses.  So I may just ask couple of the guys help me up the single step on performance night.  I don't know.  Despite it all, this has been a good day.  

Things went wrong, but people were around, including Jane, bringer of quesadilla and booster of spirits...more about her soon.  And, of course, the redoubtable Ian, stalwart Scot, and one of those people who has a natural way of calming troubled waters and inspiring general confidence.  I have people in my life.  I'm doing what needs to be done.  Not the least of which occurred this very afternoon.  

Marlou's ashes need to be scattered.  They need to be scattered at a very specific point on Monterey Bay near Pacific Grove...and given the sensitivities of my in-laws...legally and in accordance with California ash-scattering regulations, whatever these may be.  And a cruise about the web reveals that the rusty hulks for hire at the Monterey Marina are ripoff tourist operations.  So, what the hell, I make an executive decision and go for Moss Landing, 20 miles north and on the midpoint of the grand arc of Monterey Bay.  It will do.  As the wife of the boat owner in Moss Landing points out, the currents will take care of the rest.  I even find a motel for me, Marlou's parents, and her nephews.  Things go wrong.  Cripples have less control than most people.  But maybe not this one.  Everything that has gone on today involved others, and being connected makes all the difference.

If grieving seems to drag on and on, what precisely is dragging?  If the thing were to complete itself efficiently, what could one expect of the end product?  Questions like this are bouncing about my brain.  On good days.  On bad days the bounce goes out of everything.  Strange that so many bad days should reappear a year after the fact, but there we have it.  And who is 'we' and what do we have?  Impossible to say.  But these questions have become more durable.  They confront me more often.  As though something is under way, a working out of the death of Marlou.  More likely, a full absorption.

My tongue feels slightly sore.  A look in the mirror reveals a black spot.  A terminal sign, if there ever was one.  Tongue cancer.  The long awaited, long dreaded dissolution of my own body.  The black spot moves, slips sideways as I probe it, being more a fragment of red lettuce than of red death.  I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, portrait of a man worrying, a man worrying about his own demise, the foolishness and uselessness of which could not be more obvious.  But this is part of acceptance, the knowledge that you can take a customarily fatal bullet in the spinal cord, survive for more than four decades, and still end up fearing your own death.  This portrait of the man who is no longer sticking out his tongue, but looking worried and old, this is not the highest attainment of the human spirit.  This is more of the Costco parking lot level of experience, with an added layer of fear.

For sheer mundanity, there is little to rival parking lots.  That is why my life seems particularly attuned to them these days.  This very afternoon I had emerged from a film, which I should point out, got underway at about 1:30 PM.  I don't know whether to celebrate or cringe at this unemployed decadence, but there we were, me, my friend David, four or five matinee attendees and Roman Polanski.  His current thriller 'The Ghost Writer' hurtles along for a breathtaking two hours that feel like 45 minutes with a conspiracy plot that seems utterly plausible...but not to digress.  I had been to an afternoon film and was returning to the disabled parking space in front of South Palo Alto's new Chipotle fast foodery.  No, the parking authorities have not given me a ticket.  Surely I had overstayed my statutory welcome, but never mind, nothing to fear there.  But something to fear always.  

I sighed, pressed my disabled lift controls into mechanical action, lazily watching the van door slide open.  And only a few inches before it jammed.  Stopped dead.  I carefully slid the door closed, opened it again.  Another jam.  Certain scenes unfolded.  For I had heard a pop, the sound of the drive chain snapping.  Which explained why the thing wasn't moving.  I tried it again, got another jam, and the scene unfolding in my mind had to do with abandoning the van for the night, and then the choice of the local bus or nearby train station, northward to my apartment, five miles or so away.  And then the repair...that would be the next thing to arrange.  A man eating a burrito on the Chipotle terrace watched my progress, opening the door, closing it, opening it again.  My eyes drifted toward him, for he would be the one I might ask for help, just in case the van door could be opened by hand.  

With another go, the van opened like a tin of sardines, smoothly and completely and as predicted.  I rolled on the lift and headed home.

My reasoning powers are not fully available these days.  With a truly broken chain, the van's door would neither open nor close.  The chain would dangle.  None of these symptoms appeared, and this was a crisis that wasn't.  It is entirely possible that my hand slipped on the control.  And did so several times.  Anxiety can play such tricks.  And anxiety about what?  I have owned this van for 13 years.  It has had some problems.  But mostly, for 1 1/3 decades, it has gotten me places.  That there will be failures.  Things will go wrong.  The moral is: always bring a book.

But my mind, my feeble mind, cannot absorb the simple fact of life's unreliability and randomness.  Not to mention its finitude.  The beginning and the end.  Just like Mr. Polanski's film.  And the trick is to make a life as successful as a good film, engaging, moving along so fully that the experience seems to end too soon.  And to do this, a year of grief has been telling me, you have to accept mortal defeat, give up, and expect to die Thursday afternoon.  Just not this Thursday.

I went hurtling from my apartment, knocking the screen door out of the way, wheelchair ramp inclining earthward, when something snagged.  I could feel it and knew instantly what was happening.  I kept going, that is the significant thing.  I could feel the rubber mat bunching beneath me and did not care.  More precisely, I cared that the thing bunch and fold itself into an intractable mass.  Which by the time I had reached the sidewalk at the bottom of the wheelchair ramp, it was.  So much mat had twisted and entwined itself in the wheels and metal protrusions beneath me, that wheelchair progress halted.  A friend had to extricate me, advising to move forward, move backward, let's straighten out this part, then that.  Sorry, she said, but I am afraid this mat has had it.  I looked at the thing.  But only briefly.  Trash it, I said, rolling off to wherever I was going.  Oddly, I cannot recall my destination, only my encounter with the mat.  I was down to the mat myself, the last days before one could call it a year.

The mat came into being in March, 2009.  The Marlou Memorial Carpet had been freshly installed, and there was some issue with wheelchair tires tracking in mud.  The solution was to retain a bit of the old carpet, cut it in wheelchair-ramp-sized squares with pieces of the old padding underneath them.  The idea came from my friend Andrea, and its very elegance and efficiency heartened me.  My wife was dying, but there was this, carpet from my old home that still had a use.  Quite effective, it proved, me rolling my muddy, sandy wheels over the weave outside, carpet protected inside. Right up until 2010 when my wheelchair snagged the mat and kneaded it into the past tense.

The bolt that locks the 200-pound wheelchair into place while I drive my van hangs an inch above the ground.  It easily grabs small protuberances, such as roots, leaves or sidewalk trash.  And now it had snagged my mat.  I kept going because I didn't care.  Something angry told me to kick ass, grind the mat problem out of the way as a garbage disposal grinds orange peel.  

I like the idea of Keddem Congregation's rented space in a former high-tech office building in South Palo Alto.  The boxy, carpeted rooms are actually sublet from the occupant, a Jewish high school.  In short, we have no right to be there, only the most tenuous renter's grasp on the premises, and the whole show could pack up and move out of town at the drop of a hat.  And so many hats have dropped for so many Jews for so many millennia that this arrangement seems proper in tone and substance.  It brought the yahrzeit experience to life in a particular way.  In a space unadorned, comfortably neutral, made alive only by the people in it.  And there were plenty there to remember Marlou.  30 or so.  I read my story, others told theirs.  And half of the time I was sad, and the other half I was heartened.  And the cosmic beat went on, and the next day I was on a plane for Arizona.

And three days later I was on a plane from Arizona, staring as we taxied away from the gate at Phoenix' Sky Harbor Airport, feeling downright sad about departing the Southwest, earthtones cool and muted in the spring air.  Baked flatness, dry life forever beached and salted, yet persisting.  For days I had asked my sister and my visiting brother about the trees.  What was that one?  A Palo Verde tree of minimalist leaves, waxy and hard, with green bark doing photosynthetic double duty.  And that one?  An Ocotillo, not a tree but a branching cactus.  And those were Smoke Trees.  And those were Mesquites.  Bougainvilleas, my brother and sister both told me, lived out remarkable lives in the furnace summers of Phoenix, actually flagging when given too much water, blooming into crimson brilliance when parched.  Life in the desert.  And now I was pulling away from it, leaving it, leaving everything, it seemed.  I was always going away, always saying goodbye.

None of which is true but grips me hard.  This emotional cast to things must deprive from childhood experience, secretly traumatic, of being yanked away from warmly imagined family.  The home.  The family routine.  The place of constancy, if not true security or even safety.  Saying goodbye without letting go.  Such is the illusion that I am always going.  A sense of things both reinforced and challenged by Marlou's going.  Goodbye, Phoenix.

It is, of course, the most wondrous and appalling of places.  My brother had found an attractive suite in a South Phoenix golf resort on sale, via the Internet, at less than $60 per night.  This says little for the national economy, of course, and even less for the state of economic affairs in Arizona.  What a view from my brother's resort pool.  Straight across an undulating golf course, rising to meet the desert mountains south of town.  This is an unintended triumph of landscape architecture, the way the golf greens and desert preserve slopes blur into one, oasis foreground, wilderness background.  It's a sort of ha-ha, the large ditch at the edge of an arcadian English garden, William Bridgeman's 1738 invention.  This dip in the distant ground confuses the eye, and makes landscapes blend together.  Which in the case of South Phoenix is a particularly good idea.

My brother-in-law and I had taken a desert drive only the previous day.  Up South Mountain Park, along the base of the hills, the very zone elided by the resort's landscape guys.  What's there?  A very mixed bag.  In what should be choice property, building sites strung along the base of a large desert preserve, there's an awful lot of dereliction.  Houses abandoned.  Half completed.  Some half occupied, it seems.  Others well tended, but cruelly designed.  Italianate statuary here.  French provincial there.  Not an architectural hint of things lower Sonoran.

In short, it's a hint for me.  This is what happens when you're living in one place and dreaming of another.  This is what happens when you forget the earth around you, believe it to be infinite, dispose of it lightly.  This is what happens when you don't really believe in the future.  And this, what is this, a two-story mustard yellow building with a large parking lot and ornate public doors, the whole thing boarded up in anticipation of some future institutional occupancy?  A church?  No, probably too boxy.  But what do I know of Phoenix?  A lodge meeting hall, perhaps.  Whatever it is, some community structure, now abandoned, just as this community looks abandoned.  At the edge of a city, up a slope where night views show millions of urban lights, parkland behind.  Choice lots.  Build now.

It's hard to say what is happening to me or to America.  But at least I get out now and then.  Life comes and goes, but for now there's this.  And this, hours after my return, turns out to be a rehearsal with the Menlo Park Chorus.  The choral director runs things at a fever pitch, our April concert date looming.  One song, she tells us, will be a permanent part of the repertoire in honor of Marlou.  I do not respond, continue singing with everyone.  One of my eyes goes wonky.  This, the ophthalmologist has explained to me, is an optical migraine.  An arc of jagged lights, rainbow colored canine teeth, wanders about one eye.  And then gives up.  Grief never gives up.  This is the reality I'm trying to accept.  I had the belief, secret but fervent, that Marlou's yahrzeit might free me in some fundamental way.  It hasn't, at least for the time being.  It's where I live.  It's where I have to live.  And trying to abandon this reality would be like sloughing off one of those South Phoenix homes.  You can't move.  You can't stay.  And somehow you get up in the morning.

'Hi, this is Frank Morvitz.  I am a volunteer with Jewish Family Services.'

 

I did not hang up on him.  And it is a terrible admission, that I wanted to.  For in the year since Marlou died my life has unfurled like the list of personal evils we recite on Yom Kippur.  I have been selfish.  I have been thoughtless toward others.  I have been dismissive.  I have been grossly impatient.  I have been excessively ironic.  Especially the latter.  And now that Frank Morvitz is on the line, and I know why he is calling, I'm trying very hard to avoid all of these nastinesses.

 

He tells me why he is calling, Frank does.  He wants to drop off a Passover gift pack.  Did I know that Passover is Monday?  While he talks, I am scrambling hard, trying to get mental traction.  There is nothing about this that is hard to deal with, not really.  But something about it throws me, having thrown me three times since Marlou died.

 

First, there was the Rosh Hashanah gift pack.  Then there was the Hanukkah gift pack.  Now Passover.  I must make it very clear that the staff of Jewish Family Services have taken extraordinarily good care of me over the last year.  I still meet with one of their rabbis.  Another ran a bereavement group in this area, and I met there regularly.  The social worker was quite helpful, even sending someone over to help deal with insurance and other paperwork.  Now and then a volunteer comes by to help around the house.

 

It's just that I appear to be on their list of shut-ins, which pushes buttons around my disability.  And I largely don't get it.  For example, last December the Hanukkah gift pack contained, among other things, a package of saltine crackers.  I admit to being weak on Judaica.  But I've never encountered the ritual saltines.  Now I have.  But not Frank, the volunteer.  I've kept trying to dodge these people, always insisting that I am out, implying that I am always out, and still they keep coming, dropping these gift bags off, hanging them off my front door knob.

 

And a year has gone by.  I tell Frank what I wish I had told the others.  I tell him thank you.  I tell him that it's the thought that counts.  And it is.  I tell him that on Monday, I will go to my cousin's house in Oakland for Passover Seder.  Nice to have a cousin in the Bay Area, I add.  Nice to have family around.  It seems to me that I have built my case for connectedness here, layering detail upon detail in a way that should deter Frank from his mission.  Oh, Frank says, how do you get to Oakland?  Well, I say, I usually take 880 north....  You drive, asks Frank?  Yes, I say, a car.

 

And although it has been a difficult year, I can tell that I am making headway, at least with Frank.  He tells me that it sounds like I am well prepared for the holiday.  Have a good Passover, he says.  Have a good Pesach, I say. 

 

Things are getting better.  And I would rather be on the wrong list for holiday remembrance rather than no list at all.  And remembrance is painful, especially remembering people we love, people we love who depart life before we do.  And remembrance is frightening.  It is frightening to consider that everyone is forgotten in the end.  Which is why I take solace, secret solace, in being on the local list of Jewish shut-ins.  Which is why forgetting Marlou, letting her drift out of my memory, feels like another kind of death.

 

Some wise person wrote that we really can't remember someone who has died until we move past grief.  Until then, the memories are clouded, disturbed and too colored with pain.  That is why I have asked other people to speak tonight.  To help me remember.

 

For now, I am too preoccupied with trying to add things up.  What did it amount to, our life together?  There were only so many years, and did it amount to all that much?

 

I remember Marlou packing my van, shoving a shower chair in the back and the two of us setting off for a vacation stay in Inverness, by Point Reyes.  On the way, we had a violent political argument.  The futility of which had become apparent by Burlingame.  After which we had a silent drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, resumed conversation in Mill Valley and actually got out and had a perfectly enjoyable coffee by the time we reached Point Reyes Station.

 

We had rented a house sight unseen, and it was a sight to see, the way the hillside, a.k.a. cliff, dropped from the road to the front door.  I am somewhat delusional about my wheelchair, believing it to be an all-terrain vehicle, so naturally I had a go at the slope.  Roots kept hanging me up, nearly tipping me over.  Some passing gardeners, and Inverness is full of passing gardeners, directed their leaf blowers at the pathway, which helped a lot.  Once I had stashed the wheelchair back in the van, it was possible to crutch down the hillside, holding Marlou's arm, and at least seeing where I might fall.  One could say something similar for the house itself, the front door being atop a flight of stairs.  I hobbled into the front room, collapsed into an armchair, and Marlou opened some wine.  Which I promptly spilled.  I don't know why.  But I was tired, disillusioned with the house and feeling a fool for having rented the place for two weeks.

 

Marlou handed me a paper towel, poured some more wine, got dinner under way.  And the evening got under way, passing from late afternoon by means of fog.  Deer appeared beneath the balcony.  The last boat buzzed on Tomales Bay, shining through the laurels.  Marlou had a way with serving dinner.  Wherever we were, whatever we had, she pulled off some measure of elegance, always of coziness. 

 

At night, Inverness shifted from slow to stop.  Stars blew holes in the fog.  The fog was always back in the morning, a good time to be on the other deck at the opposite end of the house.  Thus the rhythm of things.  A morning deck.  An afternoon deck.  Once day, although not every day, a physical therapy session in hillclimbing, then a drive into metropolitan Point Reyes Station.  Or the beach.  Or the lighthouse.  More physical therapy down the hill.  My restless soul quieting, the two of us cozying.

 

We had invited friends from Petaluma to join us for dinner one night.  At the last minute, they canceled.  We stared at four salmon steaks.  It occurred to me to invite a couple we had just met a concert in the Point Reyes Dance Palace.  A ridiculous idea, half insulting to the last-minute invitees, I thought.  No problem, said Marlou.  She called them up.

 

I had never known this, that my introverted wife, so retiring, could be so bold when it came to social arrangements.  I would never have called these people.  But there we were, the four of us, having a wondrous evening with our decks and our sliding glass bay views and wine and stories and fish.

 

We could surprise each other, Marlou and I.  We kept surprising each other.  We could fight and forget it by Burlingame.  We could not only make the most of a preposterously inhospitable rental, but could come to love it.  As we had come to love each other.  As we had come distances in our lives to be there, in that moment, for as long as it lasted.

 

Such a jolt to pack up, drive home and return to suburban life, routines and responsibilities and errands.  Like driving Marlou to the local clinic the next day for a colonoscopy.

 

And so we had our time.  And we made the most of our time.  And our time made the most of us.