July 2010 Archives

After a week in the Pacific Northwest, damned if I haven't come back to some serious improvements.  Tom, my landlord of 18 years, decided that I needed more than new washers in my leaking shower.  He instructed the plumber to install new faucets and a tap.  The result is shiny chromium and a major step backwards for quadriplegic independence.  Truth is, the old faucets had X-shaped handles, perfect for wrapping one's impaired fingers around.  The new ones are round and ribbed, much more modern and streamlined, and much less functional.  With the old handles, a little soap on my fingers meant nothing.  But the new ones slip badly beneath a sudsy grip.  And getting a grip is what it's all about.

Take my week in the Pacific Northwest.  No, just take a couple of days, the ones I spent with my cousins, my uncle and aunt, not to mention spouses and secondary and tertiary cousins and their offspring...a hyperextended family whose names come into focus, only to fade away for another two years.  Thus my biennial family reunion.  The experience is short, but intense.  And it includes a fair amount of help.

For Benny, as I am known to my family...a jokey corruption of Bendix...needs lots of assistance.  Principally lifting.  Why lifting?  Because it's summer in the state of Washington, and the sun is actually shining for hours at a time, the temperature soaring toward 70° along the base of the Olympic Range.  And in the rural and suburban environs of Puget Sound, people make recreational hay while the sun shines.  And, they will heartily confirm, it does not shine all that often.  So, anyway, it's summer time, the family reunion is cranking away, things are outdoorsy and physical, and here's Benny, a.k.a., me, badly in need of inclusion.

My cousin Larry has a surprisingly large chunk of Washington forest and meadow that he calls home, and upwards of 30 people assembled there this year in the name of family togetherness.  Many camped.  Quite a few stayed in motels.  But whatever their sleeping arrangements, the attendees used a section of Larry's forest as a picnic grounds/campsite.  For me, there was constant maneuvering up to the end of picnic tables, in and out of canvas chairs, and there was always help.

I have had 40 years of people helping me stand up from low chairs.  I've almost gotten used to it.  By now, I've got the instructions down.  I tell people what to do with something bordering on clarity, backed by quasi-assertiveness.  Have I always been afraid of being bossy?  Afraid of appearing to take people's assistance for granted?  I don't know.  In any case, over the years it has become much easier for me to request help.  Gone is the cringing sense of feebleness, of being one down in relation to my helper, any bystander, any witness.

What hasn't changed is the essential bafflement of those who help.  I tell people, for example, to grip under my right armpit, then pull me forward, not up.  To me, this seems simple enough.  But for most people, it's too much.  First, few can resist the temptation to pull on my left arm.  This is the arm that's working, actually not only working hard but well, as I push myself up to stand.  On the right, virtually nothing is happening at all.  The right arm hangs loose, neither gripping nor pushing.  It is on this side that I need force.  Still, people feel drawn to the arm that is pumping out effort.  They want to add their own.  And they do.  Which actually diminishes the effectiveness of the left arm, clamping the muscles out of action.  Worse, it actually throws me off balance.  As for the armpit, my right arm is so rarely used, so stiff and inactive, that pulling on it can tear what's left of my musculature.  Which has happened a time or two.  So, it's the armpit, and it's forward as much as upward.

Pulling forward gets me over my center of gravity.  Once I am there, the challenge is to stop the process.  Balance, or what my physiotherapist tells me is really proprioception, seems to be the real issue.  Once I'm on my legs and standing, it's a matter of adjusting the position of the feet to get something like a stable base beneath me.  To do this, I ask the person helping to let go.  This is the critical thing.  It's the hardest thing for most people to do.  They see me wavering, teetering this way and that, and the inclination is to stabilize the fucker, hold on tight, get him solid.  The problem is, standing firmly on my own two feet requires that my helper let go, while I do the opposite.  I grab the helper's wrist, preferably, lean this way and that, get my feet arranged...until it all feels sure and certain.

Of course, what constitutes solid footing on a concrete floor isn't necessarily solid on the forest floor.  There things, if not shifting, are inherently bumpy, spongy at unexpected moments, rock hard at others.  It takes a bit longer in the woodsy circumstance to get myself stable enough to grab a crutch and walk a few steps to, say, a canvas camp chair.  This makes the well intended helper all the more determined to grab and hold the swaying quadriplegic.  There is a surprising amount of dialogue involved in all this.  A surprising amount of time.  And yet in the end, we must be closer, my helpers and me.

Unless they're my Northwest cousins, for our closeness is taken for granted, naturally extends over the years, and is not an issue.  It is Sunday morning and Victor, son of cousin Dave, is clamoring for my attention.  Will I watch him jump off the dock?  What dock, you ask?  The dock of cousin Larry's pond, of course, recently stocked with trout and the center of kid activity throughout the weekend.  I haven't the heart to tell Victor that he is asking someone old and achey to bounce down a dirt track in a flimsy portable electric wheelchair one time too many.  I regard the distant pond, wondering how to get out of this.  Not that I really wanted to get out of many things around Larry Land.  It's a woodsy paradise, this Northwest compound of his.  In fact, just yesterday I actually held and fired cousin Tom's potato gun.  

A word about this.  The last potato gun I saw amounted to a toy pistol, the tiny end of which inserted into a potato to extract a plug...then fired under pressure of some kind...producing a mild sort of pleasure, if you happened to be a young boy.  If you happened to be a middle-aged man of the rough and ready Northwest cousin variety, by 2010 you were into considerably more when it came to potato guns.  Tom's version amounted to a potato cannon.  Constructed of large bore PVC pipes, the thing required an entire Russert potato to be stuffed down its plastic maw, propellant from a can of hairspray or deodorant squirted into one end, a seal screwed into place, then an electric ignition switch to spark a small explosion.  The latter launching one of Idaho's finest into something just short of low-earth orbit, the reentry occurring a good 200 meters downrange on Larry's distant lawn.  The thing had quite a kickback, as I discovered, having unfortunately positioned the potato cannon on my crutch.

All of which helps explain why, faced with Victor's request and another overland wheelchair pummeling, I decided to go for the all-terrain vehicle.  I think that is what is actually called.  An ATV.  Larry seems to have a fleet of these.  On this particular final morning of the family camp out, he had attached a small trailer to one of his ATVs and was busy hauling a refrigerator and freezer back into...what, but some kind of storage?  Leary has not only a supply of permanent national-park-style picnic tables, but a fair smattering of freezers and refrigerators, not to mention portable ovens and smokers.  In short, and I haven't mentioned his boat on the scale of a commercial fishing trawler, this guy is equipped not only for outdoor life, but for large events requiring mass domiciling and institutional-scale catering.

So there it was, the ATV with its trailer...which the driver straddles like a motorcycle...and soon there was I somehow aboard and bouncing across the fields, not even the dirt road, with Larry at the wheel.  How I even got on the thing eludes me.  I vaguely recall cousin Dave directing one of his sons to grab Benny here, some other secondary cousin grabbing there.  In any case, somehow I was aboard, precariously perched and flying along.  Incredibly, my electric wheelchair on the trailer behind.  All of this arriving pond-side, lifted back on the ground...just in time for me to see Victor splash into the water.  But I've done this sort of thing over many years.  Cousins have hauled me into canoes, stuffed me aboard trucks and carted me about the Northwest for more reunions than I can recall.  They help me.  Perhaps I help them in some way I can't understand.  And we get older, and we're here, mostly here.

I feel it in my legs, this latest trip of mine.  Is this what it's like to be 63?  Or quadriplegic and 63?  Whatever...this is what it's like to be home.  The trip, coming fairly close on the heels of a month in Britain, has left me more tuned into the home place than before I left.  I have things to do here.  Books to read.  Tomato plants that need propping up.  Space that needs occupying.  And the legs?  They need to forget.

And what do they remember?  A week ago, the legs held considerable fear.  They were sore in the wake of my trip to the UK.  Without the usual exercise machines, I had been walking up a storm.  Working the paralyzed leg particularly hard in such circumstances, which left a lingering soreness.  Had I done something permanently destructive?  Had I seriously buggered what was left of my right leg?  This worry had been with me steadily, following me through my days, making me fearful when I stood and felt the sore leg give way slightly.  Not to worry, said Perry, my physiotherapy assistant.  Just a little sore.  But worry I would, and fear of further leg destruction hung over me as events fell into line.  

Nathan, Marlou's nephew, flew in from Des Moines that very afternoon, the two of us set off for San Jose's Amtrak station.  And there it was, the Coast Starlight, rolling in big and steely, with me worrying about sleeping car 1432.  A long schlep from the observation and dining cars.  The last sleeper left, however.  So I thought of a variation.  Simple enough.  I asked the Amtrak ticket agent to roll the station's electric cart up to the door of 1432, let me get my wheelchair and bags aboard, then help me step off.  I would ride from my sleeping car to the car closest to the dining room.  And so it happened.  Getting me to dinner at least 15 minutes faster, minimal distance and minimal strain.  In fact, the train only began bouncing north as I slipped inside the dining car.  Trying not to slip on the floor.  That being the approximate goal for the next 24 hours.

Problem was the next 24 minutes.  Somewhere around Fremont, the dining car lurched, throwing my week torso the wrong way, scaring me badly.  Another whomp from the Union Pacific would knock me off the seat and into the aisle...or so it seemed.  I sat there staring at my salmon and wondering about the meaning of it all.  I was too old for this.  With Nathan seated opposite, 23 years of age, what should I say?  Nothing, pretending to be the impervious adult?  Somehow, this didn't make sense, not with me leaning on Nathan's arm as I made my way almost anywhere in the train.  So I made some half serious, half lighthearted remark about getting thrown around.  Which relieved me and included him.  And by the time dinner was over and we were fighting our way through 3 1/2 Amtrak cars, the tide had turned.  The trip had begun, I was recovering my train legs and my train confidence.  In short, we had a spectacular trip into the Northwest.  Proving that I wasn't too old.  

But that whatever could be done to ease the physical strain was well worth the effort.  And since moving about the train to pee takes considerable effort, I had wisely reverted to an external catheter and leg bag, a system unchanged since my hospitalization more than four decades ago.  There was a small hitch.  The leg bag valve proved to be open, and with my poor sensation, it took a while to realize that I was peeing into my shoe.  Not to worry.  At some point in southern Oregon, Nathan closed the valve, the shoe began to dry up, and for several scenic hours I almost forgot about my body and its odd demands.

Now in the past were the 3 1/2 car lengths we had negotiated early in the morning.  I had awakened in Redding, a Northern California outpost that marks the end of the state's great inland valley and the beginning of the mountainous and watery Northwest.  For a while I stared into the darkness, hoping for more rest.  But this was not to be.  An hour later, Nathan and I were moving through the cars.  At the end of the day, after all dome-car views seemed to have been exhausted, we stuck it out for one final half-hour with the tracks running right along Puget Sound.  The setting sun cast the waters shimmering.  The islands darkened and acquired mass.  The distant Olympic Range loomed.  And then, with announcements for Tacoma, we made our way through the bouncing cars.  'We are getting the hang of this,' I told Nathan.  It was true.  On a lurching train, it is difficult to tell people how to help me.  I don't know myself.  The rails jerk and sway with no apparent pattern.  There's nothing to do but have a go.  And after 24 hours, things were going quite well.  

And there is this possibility inherent in the disabled state.  Something about exchanging help, the physical proximity of people, that creates a bond.  Hard to say what Mt. Rainier creates, the sunset-pink cone of it rearing massive and surreal up the Puyallup Valley minutes out of Tacoma.  Memories, I hope.  For both of us.

That night at my brother's house, I joked about the feeling of getting off the train, how the floors feel like they're moving for an hour or so.  The drunken sailor effect.  Both my nephews got the joke, having made the train ride with me at various points in our lives.  There was no joking about my nephew's bed, though.  He had surrendered it for the evening, for which I was most grateful.  But he's a tall kid.  With a tall bed.  I can barely get into the thing, let alone out of it.  Jane was not due for another day, so for this night I was on my own.  The bed was too high.  Everything too difficult.  And I was too tired to care.  I had survived an ordeal, self-imposed and self-created.  This sort of thing that keeps me going, it seems.

I really don't mind facing backwards on the southbound train from San Francisco.  In fact, I barely notice.  Seeing what has passed, watching it pass and evaluating its passage, somehow this is my thing.  How to explain that I check my watch when finally sliding up to the computer screen and note that an entire hour has passed since Caltrain deposited me at the Menlo Park platform.  Okay, so I purchased a bottle of Calms Forte at the local Walgreens.  Naturally, in pursuit of caffeination, I hurtled up to Peet's.  Having got my order wrong, the iced drink arrived steaming hot...so I decided to drink it there in air-conditioned comfort.  Before bouncing my wheelchair way home, with a minor detour into the back garden to watch the tomato die.

A sad thing, tomato death.  This particular one seems foredoomed.  Like all garden stories it is richly metaphorical, mythopoeic and laced with portent and inevitability.  My neighbor somehow installed a hydroponic vegetable garden.  Why a person would do this eludes explanation.  California is blessed with soil, sun and water from one source or another.  More to the point, hydroponic vegetables grow in a liquid suspension that unpleasantly smacks of science fiction.  Like some pathetic race of humans who live in orbiting spacecraft and do not develop hard bones, hydroponic vegetables do not develop hard roots.  They throw out a feeble, undersized and extremely tender set of tendrils that lazily absorb liquid nutrients like a sponge.  Splendid until you decide to buzz off to Europe for a month or two, as my neighbor did, suggesting as she departed that I might just want to have a go at the hydroponic tomato plant on her garden terrace.  She had turned the requisite pumps off.  The plant had already began to turn itself off by the time I intervened.  Not that there was any real intervention possible.  Paul, my volunteer morning helper, dug a hole and rather skillfully inserted the pathetic roots into the one of my raised beds.  Jane soaked the thing with a garden hose.  Within a few hours of exposure, the California sun had set the plant on a terminal path.  Still, I keep trying to water it.  Throwing good irrigation after bad.  Surely, Jane says, the plant will remember that it has to grow roots, get its botanical act together, survive.  This raises profound questions about resilience, life's efficient culling of the unfit and the time required to rebound.  I don't hold out much hope.

Although rebounding is much on my mind.  Rolling out of Peet's, I could not help noticing.  The wedding ring.  It is still there, unnoticed and unremarked for months at a time.  I have sought advice in this matter.  What is the normal thing?  What does a person do?  Take it off or change fingers or what?  Either no one knows or no one is telling.  More telling is that the thing stays on my finger.  I am letting this ring have a life of its own.  It will decide.  It will tell me.  There are reasons why I live in California.

This seems one of those moments when one cannot look to the outer world for answers.  I get to decide.  And what am I deciding?  When enough respect has been given to the dead?  When a marriage is truly over?  When a person and a relationship have become more memory than reality?  How does one choose?  What happens if one chooses wrongly?

This is one of the good things about being an intuitive type.  You know.  The day comes, and you know.  Until then, all you know is you don't know.  So you wait.  Unfortunately, one can get too good at waiting, this is the downside.  Also, the world is deficient in role models.  The vaunted American man of action stands all around you getting rich.  You, the American man of inaction, slides.  If not toward poverty, something unimaginably worse.  Time passes.  What to do?  Let more time pass, of course.

It is a supremely delicate matter for me, this question of Marlou's aftermath.  I keep scanning the faces of others, principally Jane's, for signs of disapproval.  I do not find them.  It's okay, it seems.  Back from a month abroad, sleeping again in the marital bed, a.k.a., death chamber, strange feelings arise.  And no one is telling me they shouldn't arise.  No one but me.  If I think about it, and I am, this is one of the great gifts of my life.  The people who are closest to me are not pushing.  Or prescribing.  Or proselytizing.  They're making way.  And for what?  For me to be moody, that is the simplest description.  My dark and somber outlook is the subject of a certain amount of humor among friends.  For me it is a matter of much uncertainty.  The one certain thing being: it will end.

While Lorna is working in the bathroom, I am seated in my wheelchair outside in the hallway peeling a label off a portable telephone.  I can't help feeling useless, but a moment's reflection convinces me to the contrary.  We are both at work.  Lorna's task on this Sunday morning is to empty out bathroom shelves and drawers long idled by Marlou's illness.  They are full of her things, years of things, and for some reason none of this stuff has been touched.  Now it's time, and what makes this time, the time, presents an intriguing mystery.  And viewed from the opposite perspective, the barrier to this cleaning out and winnowing and condensing that has held things in place for 15 months, that is unclear too.  I am singularly oblivious to objects around me, that is true, but even this trait does not account for the label I am currently peeling off the telephone.  It lists all numbers for Pathways Hospice and urges a call 24 hours a day.  The thing has been on there so long that it strips off reluctantly, shredding, elastic backing having chemically decomposed into gummy.  While Lorna works.

If I recall correctly, she has been in this country for more than 10 years, perhaps 15.  Some of her knowledge and responses seem utterly American, some don't.  She has just extracted a large number of skin fresheners from Marlou's bathroom cupboard and is talking about her husband's classic car.  No, she has told him, they are not driving his 1955 Ford convertible to Yosemite.  They can drive about the Bay Area, waving at well-wishers from Fremont to Sausalito, but the long hot drive across California's Central Valley in an old, poorly air-conditioned, badly shocked-absorbed car...its worth reckoned at $60,000 or so...no, this isn't going to happen.  In this regard, she seems American, an assertive woman, no Southeast Asian subservience about her.  On the other hand, in chatting about my recent trip, she is surprised to learn that London is in England.  I do not mention that many in London share her view.  Never mind, for we are on to other matters, particularly the matter of lotions.  Marlou had a fair amount of clear lotions, many green tinged, and this baffles Lorna utterly.  Lotions, she tells me, are white, maybe white-yellow.  But this green, clear stuff?  She keeps shaking the bottles, staring at the contents.  What is this stuff?

I am asking the same question every moment.  What is it, where did it come from, and why didn't I know about it?  Well, I have lived in this apartment for longer than I care to admit, long enough to have purchased a series of plastic urinals, none of which have been used.  I must have envisioned them as backup, then they drifted into the realm of the forgotten, which is to say, the back of the lower cabinet.  Now there are out, and everything is out, and the presence of these relics of mine and of the mysteries of Marlou's toiletries works to soften the blow.

For in terms of possessions, I know this represents the final stretch, these small items of personal use.  Hair brushes, perfumes, blow dryer, sunscreen, each connected with a human body well remembered.  And now they are here without the human, the transformation startling and sad.  Fortunately, Lorna is either oblivious to this or moving briskly as she does with everything.  I watch the perfumes go into a small box.  What to do with these?  I know they are valuable.  I tell Lorna I am not sure.  What I am really not sure about, as we turn to another bag, is the lure of these tiny bottles.  Opening that will remind me in the most physical and intimate of ways of someone who seems barely dead.  So the thought never quite reaches consciousness.  After all, the perfumes been there for a long time.  They are going.  I tell Lorna to take anything she wants.

There are a surprising number of sick room supplies, of course.  No-rinse soaps.  Antibacterial gels.  No-rinse shampoo.  Even gauze and tape from Marlou's liver surgery wound.  And there are many baffling items, odd skin treatments, hot weather freshening lotion.  Did Marlou ever use a hair curler?  Why a lifetime supply of bath gel?  Did she ever throw anything away?  That is the real question.  Some of these products, such as the after-rinse hair re-newer, may even represent museum pieces.  Was Marlou holding onto tampons in fond remembrance of her life before menopause?  Every single over-the-counter medication was a year or more out of date before her cancer diagnosis.  These are small idiosyncrasies, the sort of things that emerge after death.  People will discover at least as many oddities as they dispose of my things.  And that is at least half the point of this exercise, to remember that soon enough people will be doing the same for me, half impersonal, half perplexed, having sent me to the crematorium, the rest to the landfill.  And if there is any hope for human progress, my prescription drugs will not head for burial as these are.  The local pharmacies allege that the Menlo Park Police will happily incinerate drugs brought to their office, but I am not convinced.  At the very least, there will be forms to complete.  Whatever.  I admit that I can't be bothered.

Just as I couldn't be bothered to clean out this bathroom, to get rid of the past, and free up space I could use myself.  Which is one of the themes here.  Claiming space for myself.  Claiming a fair amount of anger at having to deal with so much loss.  It took time to get around to the emptying out of Marlou's body potions, aids and drugs and curios.  It took time to put this in the past.  And put me in the present.  Now angry, still somewhat shellshocked, but present.  It's good having Lorna around.  She met Marlou in her final weeks.  On the first night Lorna slept on the sofa, standby, on-call...fate was particularly unkind.  That was the night of Marlou's Mad Scene.  Actually, she had two.  Marlou had brain tumors, that is the simple answer.  And she was more than I could handle, much more.  I sent Lorna running up the stairs to summon Marlou's parents in the apartment above.  In short, she only remembers Marlou remotely, as a very sick person.

An Amtrak toiletries kit, little bottles of shampoo, hair conditioner lotion and soap, all packed into a small wicker basket with a washcloth.  I seize the latter.  One can always use a washcloth, and the saving of this particular box of unneeded bottles is all my doing.  I am the one who treasures the Amtrak trek to Seattle.  But Marlou was the one who was the good sport.  She made the most of it.  She also made the most of complaining about the absence of washcloths in several British households.  She was not above being judgmental, even superior, Marlou was.  And this wash cloth reminds me of both extremes.  I am at the stage now of remembering her as she was, good and bad, smooth and rough edges.  Which may be why I took advantage of Lorna's puttering about in the kitchen several mornings ago to do some of my own puttering at Marlou's desk.  I folded four of the five portraits sitting there, placed them in a desk drawer.  And shoved the remaining photo toward the back of the desk.  I chose Marlou in her pre-cancer bloom, robust and smiling.  Her energy in the photo is infectious.  And that is, and was, enough.

I am reading Jane Smiley's famous novella 'The Age of Grief' and noting its lessons.  Hard to say at this point, 75% through the piece, how the plot will resolve.  But it doesn't matter.  I can already see the psychological progression, and as a man I can only applaud the author.  She's not politically correct, Jane Smiley, just humanly astute.  Her hero, the speaker in the narrative, has had a lot of marriage.  Domesticity has permeated him in the most pleasant of ways, and one cannot find fault with him or his family for his dedication as a husband and a parent -- except that he has lost his sting.  In a sense, he has become too nice.  Certainly too pleasing.  In short, he is a model suburban husband, and that is his problem.  And is this mine?

Oh, hardly.  But this lesson has arrived at the most wondrous of times.  For this is the most wondrous of times.  That is to say, a relationship has blossomed in my life, just when I expected to see leaves falling, branches withering.  Instead, Jane is wittering.  This is her self-description, a British usage meaning chatting or complaining unnecessarily, and I virtually never agree with her account of things.  It is the word that has entered my life, the 'wittering' and several hundred others.  For she has entered my life.  It has happened, the effect somehow strengthened and solidified on our trip.

The feminine effect is so soothing and pervasive that only the strongest can resist.  And why resist at all?  That's where Jane Smiley's story comes in.  Our hero does begin to resist his domestication.  At first, it's all a matter of pushback, blind resistance and contrariness.  But I can already see that he is on to something.  A balance, this is what I predict as the story unfolds.  And more than the unfolding, the clairvoyant gift of fiction...that is what is happening for me.  

There is a reason why I go off to the annual Minnesota Men's Conference.  Though after almost a decade and a half of this retreat, I have grown used to the bemused reactions of outsiders.  Even the most alert and well read of my friends ask if the men's gig has something to do with drumming.  Some of the superficially less insightful, mostly male, roll their eyes at the prospect of getting all interpersonal, touchy-feeley and introspective.  Actually, these are the very guys who would probably get the most out of the week in the woods.  For they are aware, without knowing it.  In much day-to-day life, women in our society take initiative in, and responsibility for, interpersonal relations.  Keeping up with acquaintances, maintaining family ties, strengthening community...isn't this what women do best?  The Minnesota experience reminds me quite pleasantly that men have their own ways of associating, of forging ties, of supporting each other.  And if I didn't need and benefit from this annual reminder, I wouldn't hit the airline road each September for Minneapolis.  

Which brings me back to Menlo Park.  And why the day began so slowly.  I couldn't quite get into the writing.  Instead, I found that most marvelous and advanced of writing-delaying tactics, computer maintenance.  You never know when your hard drive might have some errors, do you?  Better set the Windows disk maintenance tool running for an hour or so, just to make sure.  Which really makes sure that your entire PC will be given over to its own operating system for two hours.

Just long enough to write a bit before Jane arrives.  Just enough time to reconnect with myself -- and even see what I have learned in life.  I keep telling Jane that she is a gift, that it seems miraculous to be comfortably in a relationship so soon after my loss.  But maybe it isn't so miraculous.  And maybe the comfort represents some knowledge of life, something hard learned and deserving of gratitude.

I readily see loss in human experience.  A childhood that wasn't.  A body that isn't...complete, at least.  And although this has a certain amount of truth and appeal, we men need something more.  We need action.  By which I do not mean physical movement, but risk.  We need to shake things up, shake ourselves up.  I can feel it, how much I love having routine but fear being routine.  Security versus uncertainty.  Freshly back from travel, I could use a few days of predictable structure.  Back in the arms of a woman, much of me wants to stay there full-time.  Fortunately I have also learned the opposite.  In long stretches of what felt entirely like loss, there was gain.  I have learned something from being on my own.

I am currently learning something from death.  It seems to be there a lot, staring me in the face.  Moments of panic late at night.  Even moments during the day.  It's all going to end, I can feel it.  And it could end soon.  Things have never felt more fragile and arbitrary.  The theoretical virtues of living one day at a time have become tangible.  And so there is no retreating from danger, even the mild variety.  There is only retreating from Redwood City, but more on this in a moment.

It's 4 July, and I am all for independence.  Energy independence in particular intrigues me these days.  That's why I regularly put fuel in my wheelchair van, as recently as last April.  I have a way of ironically bragging about this, how gasoline goes into my tank on a quarterly basis.  Yet, this is more or less true.  The major reason has to do with the fatigue involved.  Hunched over the steering wheel, which I turn one-handed, bracing for menace in the lanes ahead, driving can become fatiguing.  So I frequently take the train, patting myself on the liberal back for burning so little fuel.  Which is utter nonsense when one considers the three ozone-depleting and carbon-spewing trips I made to Europe last year.  An argument in favor of ships...that and the fact that one must go down to the sea again...which would be fine if one didn't also go down to the buffet again.  Never mind.

So, the Menlo Park Farmer's Market is honoring this Fourth of July by selling absolutely no seedlings.  I count on a man from Santa Cruz to regularly sell me six packs of lettuce plants, small plastic pots of peppers, innocent looking zucchini in paper cups.  He isn't here, curse him.  But I am on a roll.  It's the sort of slightly hysterical, aimless roll that I get on and privately dismiss as neurotic, but wisely follow.  I must drive.  I have not driven my van in six weeks, and it is time now.  Yes, I have been in Britain.  But not now.  Now I am in California, automobile capital of the world, supposedly.  And I need lettuce.  My garden needs lettuce.  And after a friend has started my van, just as a precaution, the hydraulic deus ex machina lifts me, drops me, and the mighty Ford and I head north.  Not too far, of course.  First stop is the local petrol station.  A.k.a. gas station, filling station.  Fuel.

Being both a national holiday and a weekly Sunday, there's not much action.  Mine is the only car.  I stop in the area reserved for personal service, suggesting that I want to pay a considerably higher price for the fueling privilege.  I don't, but there seems no way to get the attention of the man in the office.  He comes outside, realizes what's happening and grumbles about the position of my van.  I should be parked over there, he tells me, not here.  I am so thin-skinned, or have been most of my life, that at a very recent point such grouchiness would have upset me.  I am quite capable of getting mildly imperious, with a soupçon of contemptuousness, with such people.  But not now.  Instead, we agree that it is hot.  At 80°F, I am inwardly grateful to be in the Bay Area, thinking of my sister in Phoenix, Arizona.  And still chatting.  About fireworks.  Oh, they have been canceled, the man tells me, in Redwood City.  I tell him I can't believe it.  Stanford, too, he says, while observing that Stanford can hardly be broke.  I like this.  The guy has some class consciousness.  I thank him and speed off for lettuce at the local garden center.  Which is shut.  It is the Fourth of July, after all.  Of course all one has to do is head for the suburban sprawl in Redwood City, the next major suburb north.  But there are limits.  I have already tested mine, and there's no sense in going overboard.

It is the longest day, and it begins the way it ends.  Is this London, or even Britain?  Concrete flatness, lateral square structures that seem prefabricated, in between a massive jumble of shipping containers, forklifts, and assorted airfreight detritus...with Terminal 2 gaping with rebar as a demolition crew takes it down.  Heathrow...then the usual thundering ascent into the smog to which our 777 makes its own contribution.  While from the center seat far from windows, the whole thing is witnessed abstractly on a tiny screen.  Our progress on the pixels of a video map.  More or less north, over Sheffield, then Carlisle, Inverness, then the Hebrides, then forget it and give up.  Real places have been reduced to points on a cartoon map, and so have I...reduced to something that can fit into row 20...the day itself reduced in significance as it expands in scope, steadily pushed westward and westward, while I stare through a gauze curtain at the next cabin.  

Beyond, a woman stares at me.  I envy her, and I wonder if she can see me envying her, for it is an oddity of this reconfigured plane that seats in business class are mounted back-to-back, some passengers facing forward others seated in reverse...which finds me staring at a backward facing woman who occasionally stares at me.  Only 12 feet away, she has hot cashews in a small ceramic dish, a footrest that extends as in a recliner chair and a plastic cocoon that encases her back and shoulders.  With so much to lull her into a pleasant transatlantic torpor, I wonder that she has any energy left to stare at me.  Do I make her uncomfortable, or does she make me uncomfortable?  What I really want to know is who switched planes or seating designs, for the last time the travel agent looked, Jane and I had seats against the bulkhead...the latter providing not only additional space, but a flat surface to brace my paralyzed right foot which swells on long flights.  Speaking of swells, I have a mind to pluck the business class lady from her seat and give her a word or two of personal advice.  Like sit here and get a dose of reality, or let me sit there.

It is a miracle that human beings can take a seat and less than 12 hours later stand up, having placed one third of the planet behind them.  Louis XVI could never have attained the decadence to cavil about about legroom while riding a giant aluminum cannon shell across continents.  I don't care.  Jane believes that it pays to stick to one airline if one is traveling consistently, as she does to visit her father in southwest Britain.  Take sufficient trips, the wisdom goes, and the airline will reward you with sufficient mileage for future trips, some extra legroom, free baggage.  Perhaps.  Actually, it doesn't matter.  I am feeling petulant.  Another airline once flew me to San Francisco with the best of the Cannes Film Festival on display in the eighth-inch screen before me, and I think this airline should do the same.  Actually, I secretly believe that all airlines are owned by a James Bond villain who lives on a secret Caribbean island.  The same murky figure is also supervising the expansion of Heathrow Airport.  The latter being an obvious impossibility.  Just look at the place, hemmed in on two sides by reservoirs, Slough and Hounslow pounding from the others.  The British Airport Authority can only expand the place in the same way I expand a deck of cards.  Which is why the world's airfreight stands exposed and strewn across the Heathrow tarmac.  And why just the opposite effect prevails at San Francisco, everything tidy, the airport's endless reconstruction concealed behind the walls of terminals.  I am pretty terminal myself by the time Jane and I emerge from customs.  It is 2 AM in London.  No wonder when I wake in the subsequent nights, I can't understand why I am not there.  Whose bedside table is this?  It takes several seconds of hard cerebration to recognize the bedroom as my own.

There can be no doubt I am really home when, a couple of mornings later, my landlord starts up his 1967 Dodge Charger and lets it run and run.  Tom also owns a new Ford Mustang.  He never drives either car anywhere, except to a Safeway two blocks away or the Veterans Administration hospital across town.  Otherwise, he is into car care.  The Charger needs to get its pistons going now and then, he will tell me, and so the thing is currently idling just outside my office window.  What comes out of its 43-year-old tailpipe comes pretty close to what's flaring from the damaged Gulf of Mexico oil rig, and now seeping through the cracks in my apartment windows.  While on the other side of the windows I stare at the wreckage of a trip.  I believe that things have a place and want them put there.  What I really believe is that things have an ever shrinking place in my mind, and easily get forgotten unless the place in the office roughly corresponds to the place in the cortex.  And right now it's all a mess, everything jumbled and unpleasantly on display.  Except for the plastic bag of British coins once sitting on a bookshelf, now efficiently dispersed.  Surely this is progress.

Surely I am not really this disabled.  It seems maddening and beyond doing to stuff the computer gear back into its case.  To find a home for all these books now read, the magazines unread.  What about opening all this mail?  There is no end to it.  Why can't the bills just separate and float to the top?  Why do I keep dropping things?  Why does The New Yorker have to torture me with all these subscription cards, which float from its pages like autumn leaves, only year-round?  And why do I care?  Because I don't like surprises.  The stupid card is going to fall from the magazine eventually, and I'm going to have to pick it up at some point, so that point might as well be now.  Which explains why a couple of days after my return I have actually devoted time, a portion of my life, to shaking magazines free of their card content.  This is home.  Home is where I am permanently disabled.  Home is where I am aging, as well.  The temporary circumstance of a bedroom up a flight of railingless stairs or a hotel bed that blocks a wheelchair, this is all forgotten.  Now, it's for keeps.  It's running into Marlou's antique desk in the middle of the night, blasting a delicate turn-of-the-century furniture leg with a very unsubtle wheelchair tire...while I first curse myself for stupidity, then reconsider if I'm not secretly angry at the desk's previous owner...middle-of-the-night psychoanalysis mixing poorly with jetlag.  And the current night's particular exhaustion is both a product and a demonstration of my utter dependence on people and mechanisms.  My housekeeper in her frenzy of vacuuming had knocked loose the electrical plug from my power reclining armchair, making it much more difficult to stretch out for the nap I had longed for throughout the afternoon....

Surely I will get on top of these things, all of them.  No, I probably won't, but there seems a chance to get on top of myself...to know it doesn't matter.  In the late afternoon of my first day home, unable to get really comfortable without my recliner chair in operation and surprisingly, feeling too weak to actually get in bed...the hours churn like rancid butter.  Thank God my wheelchair reclines.  And this is what I do, tilting back in my new Swedish model, staring at the ceiling of my apartment.  Damn handy having a wheelchair that can do this.  I assumed this posture, tilting supine in Salisbury Cathedral only a couple of weeks ago.  I can't recall if I did the same in Exeter Cathedral, but I certainly tilted into nap position on the train back to London.  Glorious to be flying across southwest England at well over 100 mph, getting a pleasant rest, even more restful to consider that there are trains like these that are nothing special, not bullet trains or TGV's...and now I'm here in Menlo Park.  And what to do?  There's still plenty of day left, and there's plenty of garden too.

There is a surreal quality to brussels sprouts gone to seed.  The plant goes through astonishing stages, perhaps prehistoric, lurid yellow flowers at one moment, an enormous crop of seeds at the next.  My brother ripped out most of these past-their-prime plants, but there is one left.  The remaining one has enough brussels sprouts seeds for a small truck farm.  It is stupefying, this thing.  My brother also harvested a single cabbage while I was away.  Its enormity, its purple little-shop-of-horrors hue...well, it was hard to look at the thing in my refrigerator.  It's even harder to consider its source, this wreckage in one of my raised beds.  Dead and dying cabbage leaves are spread over a large impact zone, and at the other end of the bed another cabbage of similar vastness is murmuring 'feed me, feed me.'  I know what I must do.  I begin ripping cabbage leaves, one by one, from the dying stalk.  They snap in a gratifying way.  I rip, I rip, and eventually I even stuff the things into my compost tumbler.  

Natural processes.  Mostly out of control, if one is honest.  Agriculture seems more of a temporary armistice than a victory.  And once all the available cabbage leaves are stuffed into their compost future, can I rip out the stalk?  This seems unlikely, the vast cabbage once supported here requiring a mass of roots clinging to my raised bed for what is left of life.  What the hell.  I grab the stalk, pull with all my quadriplegic strength, but, no.  The root ball must be huge.  I turn my wheelchair, grabbing the stalk from a slightly different angle and now lean with my torso.  Something rips, I hope not in my upper arm.  Look, a circle of earth is rising, the root mass leveraging, ripping free.  And before I know it, there it is, the roots of a cabbage tree.  Surely this is all too woody and massive to compost.  Who cares?  I stuff the whole thing in the compost tumbler, grateful that I am not yet compost myself.