August 2010 Archives
Where does it come from, this gray hair? The stuff is falling in bunches of white-ish Bermuda grass, here and there sprinkled with the occasional charcoal strand as a sort of teaser. It's like the morning homeless shift that quietly sweeps through downtown Menlo Park around about 7 AM. Where do these guys come from? Meaning, where do they spend the night? They must have lodging, at least during the winter. I hope they have some room in some shelter, and there must be a way to ask, if one is serious and invests a certain amount of time. I would not like someone trailing me, poised to pop the question 'where do you live?' Ironically, I once confessed to trusted friends that I felt self-conscious about renting an apartment, home ownership being such a symbol of success, permanence, maybe even adulthood.
So it is foreign, my gray hair, only falling from my head, past my eyes and into the realm of attention every seven weeks or so when Danielle comes to my home to cut it. Like our street people, where does it go at night? Thing about the morning homeless guys on Live Oak Ave. is that they seem so purposeful. They have a job. They are out scrounging around rubbish containers in search of aluminum cans. One of them pushes a shopping cart, head up, giving an expansive and friendly wave to passersby. In terms of attitude, he could do well at Home Depot. Surely he knows as much about what he's doing as anyone at the big-box hardware store. Ask most guys at Home Depot about the merits of various fluorescent bulbs, and they will grow dim. But this itinerant man rattling a shopping cart down the road, breezily hailing the neighbors and quickly passing on, well he's a model of service attitude and efficiency. His colleague, who appears a few minutes later, has more of the hangdog about him. He leans into his shopping cart as though pushing a load of coal up a 19th-century mine, his head below the handle, grim and determined, his face invisible. Neither man worries about gray hair.
I am worried about being aimless. This gets to me now and then, although the issue becomes obscured and forgotten, like the graying-whitening of my hair. In fact, it is the small insertion of Danielle entering my home with her scissors and clippers that has thrown my routine all to hell. Otherwise, I would face the big problem of the day: blog or book, which to write? Being aimless, of course, the answer has aimed itself, aiming me at my desk with nothing much in mind. Trying as I am to blot out the mind.
Danielle must have been making idle reference to the tree outside my kitchen window, a view I actually avoid, unless it's night and one can see into the apartment of my French neighbors who live over the fence and therefore in another world. Am I certain of their nationality? Hardly. But the occasional phone conversation wafts over on warm nights. And someone was speaking French at some point in my recent history, a vague span of time, so indeterminate to have allowed for considerable turnover in the apartment over the fence. Many a tenant could have come and gone since the French one or ones. In retirement, everything has contracted, time grown vague.
In any case, Danielle pointed out that the tree was perfect for observing bird's nests. Were there any? Clip, clip, she went, awaiting my answer. I wasn't avoiding her or sidestepping the issue of birds...and where they go at night. Something Danielle had written, a short account of watching a nest of birds, their spring egg laying, incubating, hatching and launching, this little history was on my mind. It came with a photo, just a page or two, as I recall. Watching from the window of her Palo Alto retirement home, something about this vignette of nature had caught Danielle's eye, and she had produced an account. And not in her native French, of course, but in English, edited with the help of a friend. And now something strange is happening. Danielle continues to clip and cut, hair tumbles, a French woman with scissors here, one imagined or remembered, impossible to say, in the window beyond mine, the birds' story on a piece of paper, and how much the story impressed Marlou. She has a dignity about her, a quiet courage, Marlou said of Danielle. And now Danielle would say that of Marlou. And on this aimless morning, what aims at me but a lamp?
I dreamed I was a lamp, Marlou told me. She spoke in a moment I have described before. An incident I must keep rehashing. Her eyes were wide and so was her countenance. She spoke quietly, strength doubtless being limited at that point, a week or two before her death. The latter clear only in retrospect, of course. The mystery of human descent, of moving from the animate to the cold and still, and of pain, that was all one could know at the moment. I dreamed I was a lamp, she said, and my destiny was to shine through you.
With so much flooding in at such a moment, what I could absorb just then had more to do with her vulnerability, openness and clarity. Marlou guarded herself, held her private thoughts so closely, that knowing her could be difficult. But we were past that now, this being the deathbed, almost the last chance and soon the last look. A poem by Billy Collins sent to me this morning by Jane, its title something about lightning at a picnic, but really about death and how its evocation brings us to life...that may have helped bring me to this strange chain of memory, from falling hair to window to birds to Marlou.
This recollection is one of the most painful I carry. What's sad seems to have to do with the human unfulfilled. And I can trace that backwards to my mother and a child's preternatural sense of people and their plight. But it seems to me that just as the weight of death is too much with me, so is the weight of love. For Marlou was revealing something about the illuminating power of human connection. Which is way beyond us, far from anyone's control or intention. But a small miracle that can happen. And with sufficient courage and trust, it is a miracle that can be shared. Not just with a dying person. But with any of the seemingly not dying persons around me. We shine through each other, help each other shine. And the shining becomes particularly intense when it becomes conscious.
Hard to say about aimless days. You become the target, of course. Even of the past. The seeming past. Maybe you become time's lantern. And what is there to do but follow Diogenes out the door and up the street for lunch, maybe even coffee. Not that I am questing for an honest man. I am finding an honest man in myself. And they're very confusing, Marlou's words about the lantern, where the light shines from, who it shines on. And who or what illuminates.
So it is foreign, my gray hair, only falling from my head, past my eyes and into the realm of attention every seven weeks or so when Danielle comes to my home to cut it. Like our street people, where does it go at night? Thing about the morning homeless guys on Live Oak Ave. is that they seem so purposeful. They have a job. They are out scrounging around rubbish containers in search of aluminum cans. One of them pushes a shopping cart, head up, giving an expansive and friendly wave to passersby. In terms of attitude, he could do well at Home Depot. Surely he knows as much about what he's doing as anyone at the big-box hardware store. Ask most guys at Home Depot about the merits of various fluorescent bulbs, and they will grow dim. But this itinerant man rattling a shopping cart down the road, breezily hailing the neighbors and quickly passing on, well he's a model of service attitude and efficiency. His colleague, who appears a few minutes later, has more of the hangdog about him. He leans into his shopping cart as though pushing a load of coal up a 19th-century mine, his head below the handle, grim and determined, his face invisible. Neither man worries about gray hair.
I am worried about being aimless. This gets to me now and then, although the issue becomes obscured and forgotten, like the graying-whitening of my hair. In fact, it is the small insertion of Danielle entering my home with her scissors and clippers that has thrown my routine all to hell. Otherwise, I would face the big problem of the day: blog or book, which to write? Being aimless, of course, the answer has aimed itself, aiming me at my desk with nothing much in mind. Trying as I am to blot out the mind.
Danielle must have been making idle reference to the tree outside my kitchen window, a view I actually avoid, unless it's night and one can see into the apartment of my French neighbors who live over the fence and therefore in another world. Am I certain of their nationality? Hardly. But the occasional phone conversation wafts over on warm nights. And someone was speaking French at some point in my recent history, a vague span of time, so indeterminate to have allowed for considerable turnover in the apartment over the fence. Many a tenant could have come and gone since the French one or ones. In retirement, everything has contracted, time grown vague.
In any case, Danielle pointed out that the tree was perfect for observing bird's nests. Were there any? Clip, clip, she went, awaiting my answer. I wasn't avoiding her or sidestepping the issue of birds...and where they go at night. Something Danielle had written, a short account of watching a nest of birds, their spring egg laying, incubating, hatching and launching, this little history was on my mind. It came with a photo, just a page or two, as I recall. Watching from the window of her Palo Alto retirement home, something about this vignette of nature had caught Danielle's eye, and she had produced an account. And not in her native French, of course, but in English, edited with the help of a friend. And now something strange is happening. Danielle continues to clip and cut, hair tumbles, a French woman with scissors here, one imagined or remembered, impossible to say, in the window beyond mine, the birds' story on a piece of paper, and how much the story impressed Marlou. She has a dignity about her, a quiet courage, Marlou said of Danielle. And now Danielle would say that of Marlou. And on this aimless morning, what aims at me but a lamp?
I dreamed I was a lamp, Marlou told me. She spoke in a moment I have described before. An incident I must keep rehashing. Her eyes were wide and so was her countenance. She spoke quietly, strength doubtless being limited at that point, a week or two before her death. The latter clear only in retrospect, of course. The mystery of human descent, of moving from the animate to the cold and still, and of pain, that was all one could know at the moment. I dreamed I was a lamp, she said, and my destiny was to shine through you.
With so much flooding in at such a moment, what I could absorb just then had more to do with her vulnerability, openness and clarity. Marlou guarded herself, held her private thoughts so closely, that knowing her could be difficult. But we were past that now, this being the deathbed, almost the last chance and soon the last look. A poem by Billy Collins sent to me this morning by Jane, its title something about lightning at a picnic, but really about death and how its evocation brings us to life...that may have helped bring me to this strange chain of memory, from falling hair to window to birds to Marlou.
This recollection is one of the most painful I carry. What's sad seems to have to do with the human unfulfilled. And I can trace that backwards to my mother and a child's preternatural sense of people and their plight. But it seems to me that just as the weight of death is too much with me, so is the weight of love. For Marlou was revealing something about the illuminating power of human connection. Which is way beyond us, far from anyone's control or intention. But a small miracle that can happen. And with sufficient courage and trust, it is a miracle that can be shared. Not just with a dying person. But with any of the seemingly not dying persons around me. We shine through each other, help each other shine. And the shining becomes particularly intense when it becomes conscious.
Hard to say about aimless days. You become the target, of course. Even of the past. The seeming past. Maybe you become time's lantern. And what is there to do but follow Diogenes out the door and up the street for lunch, maybe even coffee. Not that I am questing for an honest man. I am finding an honest man in myself. And they're very confusing, Marlou's words about the lantern, where the light shines from, who it shines on. And who or what illuminates.
'Fear Eats the Soul,' Rainer Fassbinder brilliantly observed in 1974. And I awaken at 2 AM to find it eating mine. Only unconscious moments before, I was speeding across a moorland, on location in the UK, as so many of my runaway dream productions are. Anyway, in this dream it suddenly occurs to me that I am going too fast. My foot hits the brake just in time. The road goes into a series of tight turns, and I barely keep control, terrified at the skidding, flipping, crashing possibilities, none of which happen, but all of which terrify me. That's it. I wake up.
By the next morning fear has eaten away my confidence at standing, walking, even riding around in my wheelchair. When I get up on my feet, grab my crutch and set out with Lorna, my morning helper, somewhere around the raised beds, my head starts to spin. It spins everywhere, that is the thing. The genuine fear of falling is bad enough. But this is something different. Because I can stop. Recover my courage, and I recover my balance.
Not that my balance isn't going. It's been going and going for years. And I always fear that it's going to be gone soon, but it seems to be a strangely renewable resource. Diminishing, yes. But there are still reserves.
Not to mention battery power. This morning I have enough of that to make one too many turns in my office, wheelchairs offering an effortless way to wander about without effort. And not only idle about but idyll about, slipping from the practical to the preoccupied, the aimless to the dreamy...without any discernible drop in battery charge. And it is in such a moment that I hear something drop, soft and not unfamiliar. No need to look. My back wheels have grabbed at the curtain that hangs over the closet in my office. Pulling it down, of course, along with the curtain rod. Fear having displaced other forms of neuroticism these days, I don't even look at the damage, let alone curse myself. Curtain down. Let the stagehands deal with it.
One may well ask how a curtain rod can can so easily crash to the ground. Fact is, the whole arrangement is a temporary one. It has temporarily remained in place for years. The original idea was to transfer my clothes from the bedroom closet to the one in the office, allowing me to dress in the mornings without disturbing my ailing wife. The wisdom of this being quickly borne out, as the bedroom became a sick room, fully staffed and frequently visited. So, spring-mounted curtain rod straight across its front, cheap fabric dangling, my office closet.
How the temporary became the permanent, well that is the interesting story. Unfortunately, I don't really know how it goes. Or how it went. I wasn't watching. Wasn't paying attention. Things just drift, it seems. My landlord Tom, a 75-year-old bachelor, borderline hermit, who keeps his mother's apartment full of her belongings and unrented a decade after her death, seems to pursue a similar course. Hedges grown a foot and a half over the sidewalk. Unless the hedge is dead, which one is. Tom's property line being defined by fences so rotten that they rattle in the breeze. Perhaps most egregious is the fence next to my wheelchair ramp, the one with my apartment number on it. This thing has so eroded that its function, in fact its form, is no longer discernible. The main fence post now has the approximate dimensions of a shard from the Petrified Forest.
Here, it's worthwhile noting that Marlou brooked none of this. A little bit of crumbling fence she seems to have ignored, probably mentally filing it for future attention. But shortly after moving in she made it clear, that is to say, told me to make it clear to Tom, that the splintering boards above our terrace were due for replacement, painting and general sprucing up. The building crew turned up in less than a week. For Tom not only likes hanging onto the past, but also to tenants. I am his last remaining one. He wants me to, like everything else, stay put.
Am I coming down with a brain tumor, like my father, who was either dying or dead at my age, I cannot quite recall? Or am I just aging, losing my balance gradually, and feeling very anxious? Since I have been asking this question on off for the last few years, this seems to be an uncertainty that I have to live with. The other uncertainty, the deterioration of my spinal cord injury, well I don't want to think about that.
Marlou had it right. She had an industrial-style program of Continuous Improvement under way in this apartment right up until her death. Not just the carpet. The electric tilt chair that I now rely upon for both reading and napping. Kitchen counter lighting. And given enough time, bathroom upgrading...time having run out just short of this project. Which doesn't mean I cannot take up the banner myself. Have a chat with Tom, see if we cannot knock out a closet or something. Before I knock myself out falling against the porcelain. As for the rotten fence by the wheelchair ramp. That's going too, I have decided. Maybe it wasn't Marlou's priority, but it is mine. No apologies. Change what you want to, that is the point. But change.
For change is in the air. Jane is in my life. And our lives are moving forward, together. Which itself is unnerving. For loss has been a stable companion. Always there in the morning. Immune to argument, requiring no negotiation, steady as the day.
At this juncture, I take some comfort from my cousin Sandy. I knew he had occupied the same North London house for years before moving closer to the center of town with his partner...only two weeks ago. Thing is, I had lost track of the years. Not to mention the decades. He had been in the old house for 30 years, Sandy told me. Of course, now there was every reason to move. His relationship with Chris. His grown son's budding career.
Yet to me, Sandy's house with three decades of life...a relationship, then a marriage, then a family, then a dying wife, then single parenthood, and finally a new relationship...the whole saga went on in one location. Hard to say goodbye to. No matter how sad much of it was.
I don't like getting older. The future is so uncertain. Yet, barring reports to the contrary...I have one.
By the next morning fear has eaten away my confidence at standing, walking, even riding around in my wheelchair. When I get up on my feet, grab my crutch and set out with Lorna, my morning helper, somewhere around the raised beds, my head starts to spin. It spins everywhere, that is the thing. The genuine fear of falling is bad enough. But this is something different. Because I can stop. Recover my courage, and I recover my balance.
Not that my balance isn't going. It's been going and going for years. And I always fear that it's going to be gone soon, but it seems to be a strangely renewable resource. Diminishing, yes. But there are still reserves.
Not to mention battery power. This morning I have enough of that to make one too many turns in my office, wheelchairs offering an effortless way to wander about without effort. And not only idle about but idyll about, slipping from the practical to the preoccupied, the aimless to the dreamy...without any discernible drop in battery charge. And it is in such a moment that I hear something drop, soft and not unfamiliar. No need to look. My back wheels have grabbed at the curtain that hangs over the closet in my office. Pulling it down, of course, along with the curtain rod. Fear having displaced other forms of neuroticism these days, I don't even look at the damage, let alone curse myself. Curtain down. Let the stagehands deal with it.
One may well ask how a curtain rod can can so easily crash to the ground. Fact is, the whole arrangement is a temporary one. It has temporarily remained in place for years. The original idea was to transfer my clothes from the bedroom closet to the one in the office, allowing me to dress in the mornings without disturbing my ailing wife. The wisdom of this being quickly borne out, as the bedroom became a sick room, fully staffed and frequently visited. So, spring-mounted curtain rod straight across its front, cheap fabric dangling, my office closet.
How the temporary became the permanent, well that is the interesting story. Unfortunately, I don't really know how it goes. Or how it went. I wasn't watching. Wasn't paying attention. Things just drift, it seems. My landlord Tom, a 75-year-old bachelor, borderline hermit, who keeps his mother's apartment full of her belongings and unrented a decade after her death, seems to pursue a similar course. Hedges grown a foot and a half over the sidewalk. Unless the hedge is dead, which one is. Tom's property line being defined by fences so rotten that they rattle in the breeze. Perhaps most egregious is the fence next to my wheelchair ramp, the one with my apartment number on it. This thing has so eroded that its function, in fact its form, is no longer discernible. The main fence post now has the approximate dimensions of a shard from the Petrified Forest.
Here, it's worthwhile noting that Marlou brooked none of this. A little bit of crumbling fence she seems to have ignored, probably mentally filing it for future attention. But shortly after moving in she made it clear, that is to say, told me to make it clear to Tom, that the splintering boards above our terrace were due for replacement, painting and general sprucing up. The building crew turned up in less than a week. For Tom not only likes hanging onto the past, but also to tenants. I am his last remaining one. He wants me to, like everything else, stay put.
Am I coming down with a brain tumor, like my father, who was either dying or dead at my age, I cannot quite recall? Or am I just aging, losing my balance gradually, and feeling very anxious? Since I have been asking this question on off for the last few years, this seems to be an uncertainty that I have to live with. The other uncertainty, the deterioration of my spinal cord injury, well I don't want to think about that.
Marlou had it right. She had an industrial-style program of Continuous Improvement under way in this apartment right up until her death. Not just the carpet. The electric tilt chair that I now rely upon for both reading and napping. Kitchen counter lighting. And given enough time, bathroom upgrading...time having run out just short of this project. Which doesn't mean I cannot take up the banner myself. Have a chat with Tom, see if we cannot knock out a closet or something. Before I knock myself out falling against the porcelain. As for the rotten fence by the wheelchair ramp. That's going too, I have decided. Maybe it wasn't Marlou's priority, but it is mine. No apologies. Change what you want to, that is the point. But change.
For change is in the air. Jane is in my life. And our lives are moving forward, together. Which itself is unnerving. For loss has been a stable companion. Always there in the morning. Immune to argument, requiring no negotiation, steady as the day.
At this juncture, I take some comfort from my cousin Sandy. I knew he had occupied the same North London house for years before moving closer to the center of town with his partner...only two weeks ago. Thing is, I had lost track of the years. Not to mention the decades. He had been in the old house for 30 years, Sandy told me. Of course, now there was every reason to move. His relationship with Chris. His grown son's budding career.
Yet to me, Sandy's house with three decades of life...a relationship, then a marriage, then a family, then a dying wife, then single parenthood, and finally a new relationship...the whole saga went on in one location. Hard to say goodbye to. No matter how sad much of it was.
I don't like getting older. The future is so uncertain. Yet, barring reports to the contrary...I have one.
'System Is Fair,' says the red pop-up screen of System Mechanic 7, a PC utility, better known as a thingy, that I run at regular intervals. All it takes is a mouse click to activate forces that optimize memory, reduce clutter and update your archive. Every bit of this is splendid, largely because I do not know what it means. Not to worry, what it really means is things are looking up. Something has been improved. Optimized. Being an American, I know that my day is headed the right way, progressing, becoming ever more efficient. This is goodness, which as everyone knows is adjacent to godliness. And it's only 10:30 AM.
Are there other portents? Damn straight. I knocked my waist pack off its table (having decided to avoid British ridicule by not calling it a 'fanny pack,' nor confuse Americans with 'bum bag'). As it toppled, I quite spontaneously lamented 'why?' Instead of denouncing myself for being stupid. Good signs both on-screen and off.
What is to be done today? Chekhov's characters spend all three acts mulling this over. But I'm going to get on with it, accomplish the job in...well, I don't know. Fast. As fast as my Swedish wheelchair can carry me to Peet's. That's where the action is. Or the inaction. And I'm not sure which is better. On the way, I experience the introvert's dilemma. I hope I will run into someone I know, while fearing I will run into someone I know. Which is it? It is both. No wonder I am going in search of coffee. But is it even coffee? What do I expect to find in caffeine? I am more than adequately rested. I have just pounded the cardiovascular shit out of my exercycle. All things physiological are optimal. All cylinders are pounding, not to mention all ventricles. So why Peet's?
Because of that moment of roadway abandon, not here and not there, just moving. Not progressing either. Just on the move, loosening up the system. Having already had the blessing of System Mechanic 7.
I can deal with the world and its decline much better now that I am no longer receiving any newspapers. Still, my guilt is tangible. The general reporting staff of the New York Times is essentially the last one remaining in America. But there are larger forces at work. It's a tradeoff. Over my cappuccino, I read Naomi Klein's account of the oil spill. Man über nature being the real culprit. Yes, she is right. I am about to hear the same thing at the Minnesota Men's Conference for five days. And don't know what to do but make my own garden grow, not to mention compost. And who will grow what when I am gone?
And what really goes on inside a compost tumbler? Yes, rotten contents are stirred and aerated. But they are also turned upside down. Like fortune itself. One moment the Angel of Death drives your wife from the kitchen. Next thing you know, Jane is there demonstrating how to make tomato sauce. While at the same time the next downcycle is under way, in the form of age, if nothing else. And just about the time you hit the bottom of life's garbage bag, damned if closer inspection doesn't reveal the thing to be lined with silver. So relax, that's what I'm thinking this morning. Give up and relax.
Really hard to relax with the Tea Partiers carrying on in the nation's capital. But easier if you only read weeklies like The Nation, for that leaves a whole six days to worry about something else. Like the fact that some mistakes are irrevocable, cannot be undone or even comprehended. Take my decision to not grow Roma tomatoes. The consequences are currently boiling away on my stove. Quite amazing how many tomatoes it takes to produce sauce. But even more amazing if one has foolishly...perhaps foolishly, this point not being yet determined...not grown Romas. The latter are known for their pulp, of course, delivering more tomato bang for buck than their counterparts, be they beefsteak or cherry.
The thing is, Romas simply are not as profuse. So what? Fewer tomatoes might still equal more tomato content, their essence boiling down to more sauce. But who knows? Don't go hunting around the Internet for some tomato density trade-off algorithm. You'll be disappointed, trust me. So trust what? Fate? That's what I did in the spring when I planted Renée's heirloom tomato seeds. Couldn't be bothered to sort them, putting each variety in a labeled seed starting tray. Oh no, not me, being all casual in this rejoice-'tis-spring moment of agronomic abandon. And where has it gotten me? Staring into the slowly bubbling tomato cauldron on my stove half regretting, but mostly puzzling, over the decisions that led to this moment.
And relieved to know the entire matter is moot. For shortly Jane will arrive. I can't recall what she's been up to this morning, but something ecclesiastical and energetic. And she will soon direct her energies toward me and the bubbling tomatoes. Someone defined the Good Mother as one who truly wants what's best for you. And what have I been searching for in my life if not this? No one embodies this better than Jane. Even if the very definition provides troubling fodder for the introspective and introverted mind. Such as defining what's good for you.
Good this afternoon? Good a decade from now? Does the Good Mother play the long game? How could she, no one knowing how long the game will be? And if no one knows, who knows what's good?
Tomato skins come off naturally, if you give them a chance. That is the only sure conclusion I may have reached in my entire life. I have tried many approaches. At one point, dating from my first marriage, I was even the owner of an authentic Italian tomato press, a hand crank device that mashed tomatoes, forced them through a sieve, juice and pulp flowing out one side, seeds and skins out the other. It was wondrous to behold, this thing. And I could still behold it, if I wanted to. But I don't. I prefer to do what I do now. Boil the tomatoes, pull out the skins with tongs, fuck the seeds.
And rest assured that the seeds will fuck you. The skins too. Trust me, even after they have been boiled for hours, subjected to high and prolonged temperatures, tomato byproducts remain indestructible. The hours-long cooked seeds may find their way into my compost...only to sprout next year. I keep digging up curling dried skins of tomatoes I must have grown in 2005.
So Jane and I will shortly determine an afternoon course of action, vis-à-vis tomatoes. There is talk of cioppino. Jane brings with her the patented knowledge that the latter contains anise, better known for its starring role in licorice. Who would have known? Wonderful to be able to cook together, more or less. Admittedly I star in the shopping role. But he also serves who only rolls and buys.
After all, rolling was more or less how I began my day. I wonder if when one faces death, all other life issues get put on hold. Something about the dairy section at Trader Joe's naturally sparks this speculation. I will be there later this afternoon. Shopping to do for the tomato sauce, milk running low. Did Marlou have unfinished business in life? Or did I have unfinished business with Marlou? Or was our business finished? And hers? Why did she go all the way to Sweden with her grandmother's ring in the last months of her life? An arduous journey to bring her closer to what? To that moment when she touched the ring to the ground, was that it? Did Marlou feel some sense of completion? Or did she just bow before the mystery? And is the latter the best that anyone can do?
I bow before the bubbling tomatoes, having little postural choice in the matter, the stove being where it is. The skins come off as though leaping into another dimension. They know themselves to be immortal. Boiling, composting, time itself, being as nothing to them. Jane has phoned, her arrival delayed, but I have her shopping list. And I feel I am coming out of something like a long sleep. Death has laid siege to my home. And departed. Leaving me behind with the tomatoes. Which boil and boil, and reduce and reduce, until there is surprisingly little. But there's plenty for cioppino, if you're lucky enough to have someone around who knows about the anise.
Are there other portents? Damn straight. I knocked my waist pack off its table (having decided to avoid British ridicule by not calling it a 'fanny pack,' nor confuse Americans with 'bum bag'). As it toppled, I quite spontaneously lamented 'why?' Instead of denouncing myself for being stupid. Good signs both on-screen and off.
What is to be done today? Chekhov's characters spend all three acts mulling this over. But I'm going to get on with it, accomplish the job in...well, I don't know. Fast. As fast as my Swedish wheelchair can carry me to Peet's. That's where the action is. Or the inaction. And I'm not sure which is better. On the way, I experience the introvert's dilemma. I hope I will run into someone I know, while fearing I will run into someone I know. Which is it? It is both. No wonder I am going in search of coffee. But is it even coffee? What do I expect to find in caffeine? I am more than adequately rested. I have just pounded the cardiovascular shit out of my exercycle. All things physiological are optimal. All cylinders are pounding, not to mention all ventricles. So why Peet's?
Because of that moment of roadway abandon, not here and not there, just moving. Not progressing either. Just on the move, loosening up the system. Having already had the blessing of System Mechanic 7.
I can deal with the world and its decline much better now that I am no longer receiving any newspapers. Still, my guilt is tangible. The general reporting staff of the New York Times is essentially the last one remaining in America. But there are larger forces at work. It's a tradeoff. Over my cappuccino, I read Naomi Klein's account of the oil spill. Man über nature being the real culprit. Yes, she is right. I am about to hear the same thing at the Minnesota Men's Conference for five days. And don't know what to do but make my own garden grow, not to mention compost. And who will grow what when I am gone?
And what really goes on inside a compost tumbler? Yes, rotten contents are stirred and aerated. But they are also turned upside down. Like fortune itself. One moment the Angel of Death drives your wife from the kitchen. Next thing you know, Jane is there demonstrating how to make tomato sauce. While at the same time the next downcycle is under way, in the form of age, if nothing else. And just about the time you hit the bottom of life's garbage bag, damned if closer inspection doesn't reveal the thing to be lined with silver. So relax, that's what I'm thinking this morning. Give up and relax.
Really hard to relax with the Tea Partiers carrying on in the nation's capital. But easier if you only read weeklies like The Nation, for that leaves a whole six days to worry about something else. Like the fact that some mistakes are irrevocable, cannot be undone or even comprehended. Take my decision to not grow Roma tomatoes. The consequences are currently boiling away on my stove. Quite amazing how many tomatoes it takes to produce sauce. But even more amazing if one has foolishly...perhaps foolishly, this point not being yet determined...not grown Romas. The latter are known for their pulp, of course, delivering more tomato bang for buck than their counterparts, be they beefsteak or cherry.
The thing is, Romas simply are not as profuse. So what? Fewer tomatoes might still equal more tomato content, their essence boiling down to more sauce. But who knows? Don't go hunting around the Internet for some tomato density trade-off algorithm. You'll be disappointed, trust me. So trust what? Fate? That's what I did in the spring when I planted Renée's heirloom tomato seeds. Couldn't be bothered to sort them, putting each variety in a labeled seed starting tray. Oh no, not me, being all casual in this rejoice-'tis-spring moment of agronomic abandon. And where has it gotten me? Staring into the slowly bubbling tomato cauldron on my stove half regretting, but mostly puzzling, over the decisions that led to this moment.
And relieved to know the entire matter is moot. For shortly Jane will arrive. I can't recall what she's been up to this morning, but something ecclesiastical and energetic. And she will soon direct her energies toward me and the bubbling tomatoes. Someone defined the Good Mother as one who truly wants what's best for you. And what have I been searching for in my life if not this? No one embodies this better than Jane. Even if the very definition provides troubling fodder for the introspective and introverted mind. Such as defining what's good for you.
Good this afternoon? Good a decade from now? Does the Good Mother play the long game? How could she, no one knowing how long the game will be? And if no one knows, who knows what's good?
Tomato skins come off naturally, if you give them a chance. That is the only sure conclusion I may have reached in my entire life. I have tried many approaches. At one point, dating from my first marriage, I was even the owner of an authentic Italian tomato press, a hand crank device that mashed tomatoes, forced them through a sieve, juice and pulp flowing out one side, seeds and skins out the other. It was wondrous to behold, this thing. And I could still behold it, if I wanted to. But I don't. I prefer to do what I do now. Boil the tomatoes, pull out the skins with tongs, fuck the seeds.
And rest assured that the seeds will fuck you. The skins too. Trust me, even after they have been boiled for hours, subjected to high and prolonged temperatures, tomato byproducts remain indestructible. The hours-long cooked seeds may find their way into my compost...only to sprout next year. I keep digging up curling dried skins of tomatoes I must have grown in 2005.
So Jane and I will shortly determine an afternoon course of action, vis-à-vis tomatoes. There is talk of cioppino. Jane brings with her the patented knowledge that the latter contains anise, better known for its starring role in licorice. Who would have known? Wonderful to be able to cook together, more or less. Admittedly I star in the shopping role. But he also serves who only rolls and buys.
After all, rolling was more or less how I began my day. I wonder if when one faces death, all other life issues get put on hold. Something about the dairy section at Trader Joe's naturally sparks this speculation. I will be there later this afternoon. Shopping to do for the tomato sauce, milk running low. Did Marlou have unfinished business in life? Or did I have unfinished business with Marlou? Or was our business finished? And hers? Why did she go all the way to Sweden with her grandmother's ring in the last months of her life? An arduous journey to bring her closer to what? To that moment when she touched the ring to the ground, was that it? Did Marlou feel some sense of completion? Or did she just bow before the mystery? And is the latter the best that anyone can do?
I bow before the bubbling tomatoes, having little postural choice in the matter, the stove being where it is. The skins come off as though leaping into another dimension. They know themselves to be immortal. Boiling, composting, time itself, being as nothing to them. Jane has phoned, her arrival delayed, but I have her shopping list. And I feel I am coming out of something like a long sleep. Death has laid siege to my home. And departed. Leaving me behind with the tomatoes. Which boil and boil, and reduce and reduce, until there is surprisingly little. But there's plenty for cioppino, if you're lucky enough to have someone around who knows about the anise.
I just had to see the next one in the violent series, knowing already that the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had, shown in flashback scenes, Played with Fire, and vaguely wondering why. Only vaguely. The films are satisfactorily angry, gratifyingly violent, with the underdog and much misunderstood heroine triumphing despite all odds. The latest, most extreme adversity involving personal burial, the redoubtable Lisbeth clawing her way through the dirt of her own grave to not only survival, but familial and personal revenge. In short, my kind of story.
My kind of story in what is not my kind of weather. I could do with some good Scandinavian overcast at the least, perhaps snow at the best. There's none of the latter in The Girl Who Played with Fire, but we see plenty of northern forest, drizzle, the dark promise of winter always gathering overhead, even in mid-summer. One right guy gets murdered. Two wrong guys. Plus there is a invigorating and appropriate motorcycle theft, a measured shooting of someone's foot, plus a well-deserved axe wound or two. A northern survivor is our Lisbeth. My kind of gal.
I tell myself that as a victim of violence, this is a harmless pastime. A bit of consciousness doesn't hurt, of course. Vengeance, wily self-defense, and not being the victim, all worthwhile elements in the summer ritual of potboiler films like these. It doesn't matter. The deed is done. I wasted two hours watching this silly Swedish escapism, and worse as I say goodbye to my friend David and roll up Hamilton Street in Palo Alto, there goes my train. Not another for an hour. I had more or less decided this might happen and planned to spend the interval pleasantly over a macchiato and the latest copy of The Nation. But time waits for no man. And while I do not believe that time can necessarily be wasted, nor do I believe it can be killed. Yes, it's high time I read Naomi Klein, but later. At home.
Thing about Palo Alto is that it's not all that far. Taking the train there always borders on the silly. One can stand at the platform in Menlo Park, look southward and almost see the platform in Palo Alto. Actually, if there wasn't a slight bend in the track, one could probably look all the way, even flash mirror signals at passengers waiting at the other station. It's about a mile. And having a full battery charge, why not? I began rolling north, an inter-city journey via wheelchair.
I must say that a certain tension exists here, between the apparent travel experience and the actual. Also between the politically-correct intention and the overland reality.
Palo Alto marks the spot where several forces converge. A region-long thoroughfare, sometimes called an expressway, and near its northern end Alma Street, gradually slows, narrows and peters out, losing itself ultimately in El Camino Real. The latter is a boulevard, northwest by southeast main drag up and down the San Francisco Peninsula. Actually, it has a state highway designation, route 82, I think. So it has some real importance in terms of traffic flow and a very American effort at an historical name, the royal highway.
Even at its most regal height, the thing was a footpath used by the 18th-century Spanish who had the most tenuous of colonial footholds in California. A series of mud churches staffed by aboriginal slaves, each supposedly a day's walk apart. And being suckers for royalty, particularly that wielded by a safely departed pretender to power, well-past-its-golden-age Spain, damned if it's not El Camino Real. The Spanish soldiers assigned to defend this donkey cart path must have felt as hopeless as modern troops in Afghanistan. They must have sensed that it was royal in name only. They must have read, at least some of them, Don Quixote. Surely they understood irony. Alas, my countrymen do not.
All of which converges as Alma Street rattles over the train tracks, El Camino just behind. I pick my angle in crossing the rails. I can see sections of rubber and additional steel that smooth the perilous gaps between track and pavement. This is where I roll. Knowing this is Where the Sidewalk Ends, the footpath visibly petering out as one drives along in a car. Ahead the traffic roars fierce and formidable, the suburban rushhour beginning on the royal highway. An intensification of cars mixed with the lightening of authority. For this is the grenzland, the border zone. The counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara mark their boundary here. Boundaries being artificial, things begin to break down. Important things.
Which side of El Camino Real shall I choose for the balance of the journey home? I opt for the west side, the ocean side. There is a crosswalk. And there is a button to push to activate the crosswalk signal. Here, the button is essential. Two streets merge here, one angling into the other. No cars actually head from Alma Street west, crossing El Camino Real, as I intend. Without the button, there is no light to stop traffic for pedestrians. And effectively there is no button. The button is placed on a lamp pole in the middle of a concrete traffic island, way out of reach to anyone in a wheelchair, save an orangutan. Still, I give it a go, leaning hard to my left. It's hopeless. Never mind, I am fresh from the northern survivor experience, still inspired by Lisbeth, bold thoughts of risk and adventure humming in my mind. I know what I will do. When oncoming traffic begins turning left, I will lurch west through the crosswalk. The drivers looks startled. I make it to the other side.
Turning more or less north, I bounce on the asphalt footpath over the boundary creek between the counties. On the San Mateo County side, the path descends in something between a cliff and a ramp. Some person has made a nominal effort at a tarry incline. I eyeball the thing, realizing this is not the safest maneuver I could make. What-the-fuck energies drive me over the edge and down to the next ragtag asphalt section. Ahead the concrete sidewalk resumes. Unfortunately, cars from the motel there have parked, completely blocking it. Angry and unstoppable, I swerve into the royal highway. I actually bounce along facing oncoming traffic for a good hundred meters or so, doubtless frightening drivers. Pretending I am not frightened myself. The dangers gradually give way to inconvenience. Streetlight poles are mounted right in the center of the sidewalk, squeezing wheelchairs into narrow passages. Sections of sidewalk are cracked into the past tense. I am making progress. I am thinking that at least in Los Angeles they make no pretense about pedestrian access in most parts of the city, let alone wheelchair access. And yet when they do, they probably do it better than this.
A quick cappuccino in the neighborhood's new branch of Peet's. But a relief to know that I have not only made this heroic journey, but will have gotten home before the next train would have delivered me. In fact, I'll pick up a little soup at Safeway. 'Will you help me to reach something' I ask a young woman in a logo-branded apron? What, she says? I ask this again. Yes, she tells me, I will help you reach something. I can't tell if she is being ironic or doing a very convincing imitation of an automaton. As for the checkout guy, this young kid looks positively frightened. I just know someone is beating him in the stockroom and hope he will slip me a note. The have-a-nice-day crap doesn't fool me. I hustle home.
It is only here, on Roble Ave., that the day's journey acquires form. Yesterday's heat, and even today's milder echo, sucks something from the quadriplegic soul. Things go neurologically haywire. My body's temperature regulator doesn't work. I don't sweat normally. Sympathetic nerve damage, they say. Whatever the physical cause, I feel old and helpless. Long after the actual weather has cooled off, and most denizens of Earth are no longer talking about the heat, we quadriplegics keep kvetching. We can't get cool. It takes all night to get the body back in balance. But the mind? This morning I woke up feeling despairing, defeated for no particular reason. Jane reminded me that yesterday had been a challenging one. And today? Well, in spirit I kicked neuromuscular butt. Traffic butt. Wheelchair butt. Nothing as dramatic as Lisbeth's exploits, but it would do. It definitely would do.
My kind of story in what is not my kind of weather. I could do with some good Scandinavian overcast at the least, perhaps snow at the best. There's none of the latter in The Girl Who Played with Fire, but we see plenty of northern forest, drizzle, the dark promise of winter always gathering overhead, even in mid-summer. One right guy gets murdered. Two wrong guys. Plus there is a invigorating and appropriate motorcycle theft, a measured shooting of someone's foot, plus a well-deserved axe wound or two. A northern survivor is our Lisbeth. My kind of gal.
I tell myself that as a victim of violence, this is a harmless pastime. A bit of consciousness doesn't hurt, of course. Vengeance, wily self-defense, and not being the victim, all worthwhile elements in the summer ritual of potboiler films like these. It doesn't matter. The deed is done. I wasted two hours watching this silly Swedish escapism, and worse as I say goodbye to my friend David and roll up Hamilton Street in Palo Alto, there goes my train. Not another for an hour. I had more or less decided this might happen and planned to spend the interval pleasantly over a macchiato and the latest copy of The Nation. But time waits for no man. And while I do not believe that time can necessarily be wasted, nor do I believe it can be killed. Yes, it's high time I read Naomi Klein, but later. At home.
Thing about Palo Alto is that it's not all that far. Taking the train there always borders on the silly. One can stand at the platform in Menlo Park, look southward and almost see the platform in Palo Alto. Actually, if there wasn't a slight bend in the track, one could probably look all the way, even flash mirror signals at passengers waiting at the other station. It's about a mile. And having a full battery charge, why not? I began rolling north, an inter-city journey via wheelchair.
I must say that a certain tension exists here, between the apparent travel experience and the actual. Also between the politically-correct intention and the overland reality.
Palo Alto marks the spot where several forces converge. A region-long thoroughfare, sometimes called an expressway, and near its northern end Alma Street, gradually slows, narrows and peters out, losing itself ultimately in El Camino Real. The latter is a boulevard, northwest by southeast main drag up and down the San Francisco Peninsula. Actually, it has a state highway designation, route 82, I think. So it has some real importance in terms of traffic flow and a very American effort at an historical name, the royal highway.
Even at its most regal height, the thing was a footpath used by the 18th-century Spanish who had the most tenuous of colonial footholds in California. A series of mud churches staffed by aboriginal slaves, each supposedly a day's walk apart. And being suckers for royalty, particularly that wielded by a safely departed pretender to power, well-past-its-golden-age Spain, damned if it's not El Camino Real. The Spanish soldiers assigned to defend this donkey cart path must have felt as hopeless as modern troops in Afghanistan. They must have sensed that it was royal in name only. They must have read, at least some of them, Don Quixote. Surely they understood irony. Alas, my countrymen do not.
All of which converges as Alma Street rattles over the train tracks, El Camino just behind. I pick my angle in crossing the rails. I can see sections of rubber and additional steel that smooth the perilous gaps between track and pavement. This is where I roll. Knowing this is Where the Sidewalk Ends, the footpath visibly petering out as one drives along in a car. Ahead the traffic roars fierce and formidable, the suburban rushhour beginning on the royal highway. An intensification of cars mixed with the lightening of authority. For this is the grenzland, the border zone. The counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara mark their boundary here. Boundaries being artificial, things begin to break down. Important things.
Which side of El Camino Real shall I choose for the balance of the journey home? I opt for the west side, the ocean side. There is a crosswalk. And there is a button to push to activate the crosswalk signal. Here, the button is essential. Two streets merge here, one angling into the other. No cars actually head from Alma Street west, crossing El Camino Real, as I intend. Without the button, there is no light to stop traffic for pedestrians. And effectively there is no button. The button is placed on a lamp pole in the middle of a concrete traffic island, way out of reach to anyone in a wheelchair, save an orangutan. Still, I give it a go, leaning hard to my left. It's hopeless. Never mind, I am fresh from the northern survivor experience, still inspired by Lisbeth, bold thoughts of risk and adventure humming in my mind. I know what I will do. When oncoming traffic begins turning left, I will lurch west through the crosswalk. The drivers looks startled. I make it to the other side.
Turning more or less north, I bounce on the asphalt footpath over the boundary creek between the counties. On the San Mateo County side, the path descends in something between a cliff and a ramp. Some person has made a nominal effort at a tarry incline. I eyeball the thing, realizing this is not the safest maneuver I could make. What-the-fuck energies drive me over the edge and down to the next ragtag asphalt section. Ahead the concrete sidewalk resumes. Unfortunately, cars from the motel there have parked, completely blocking it. Angry and unstoppable, I swerve into the royal highway. I actually bounce along facing oncoming traffic for a good hundred meters or so, doubtless frightening drivers. Pretending I am not frightened myself. The dangers gradually give way to inconvenience. Streetlight poles are mounted right in the center of the sidewalk, squeezing wheelchairs into narrow passages. Sections of sidewalk are cracked into the past tense. I am making progress. I am thinking that at least in Los Angeles they make no pretense about pedestrian access in most parts of the city, let alone wheelchair access. And yet when they do, they probably do it better than this.
A quick cappuccino in the neighborhood's new branch of Peet's. But a relief to know that I have not only made this heroic journey, but will have gotten home before the next train would have delivered me. In fact, I'll pick up a little soup at Safeway. 'Will you help me to reach something' I ask a young woman in a logo-branded apron? What, she says? I ask this again. Yes, she tells me, I will help you reach something. I can't tell if she is being ironic or doing a very convincing imitation of an automaton. As for the checkout guy, this young kid looks positively frightened. I just know someone is beating him in the stockroom and hope he will slip me a note. The have-a-nice-day crap doesn't fool me. I hustle home.
It is only here, on Roble Ave., that the day's journey acquires form. Yesterday's heat, and even today's milder echo, sucks something from the quadriplegic soul. Things go neurologically haywire. My body's temperature regulator doesn't work. I don't sweat normally. Sympathetic nerve damage, they say. Whatever the physical cause, I feel old and helpless. Long after the actual weather has cooled off, and most denizens of Earth are no longer talking about the heat, we quadriplegics keep kvetching. We can't get cool. It takes all night to get the body back in balance. But the mind? This morning I woke up feeling despairing, defeated for no particular reason. Jane reminded me that yesterday had been a challenging one. And today? Well, in spirit I kicked neuromuscular butt. Traffic butt. Wheelchair butt. Nothing as dramatic as Lisbeth's exploits, but it would do. It definitely would do.
I awaken in the morning convinced that everything neuro has gone awry. Things seem out of focus. I don't believe my balance will last from bed, to standing, to dropping into the adjacent wheelchair. Nothing will last, that is the thing so readily apparent now, this morning, the last morning. Maybe. Fear pervades everything. Can I stand at the bathroom sink with everything out of focus? Turn on the electric tea kettle? Pour it? Dare to eat a peach?
Within a few minutes, the morning is doing a credible imitation of a middle-aged person waking up. Which may very well have a whiff of death about it. But what doesn't? That is the thing. And is that the thing underlying my anxiety? Or is Jane and my getting closer and me feeling the threat of attachment...is that the thing? Still another possibility. Jane wonders if feeling successful about my life isn't actually threatening me. Hard to say. Useless to speculate. All I know is that I am beyond the tea stage of things and into the bathroom.
The last time I had a fall was in this very bathroom. On these very tiles. This is where gravitational fear crystallizes. Down. I am going to slip, descend and break. I did break something once, and not exactly in a bathroom but in a bathhouse. A local hot tub place, where I stubbornly tried to get myself out of a difficult spa...and plummeted to my orthopedic doom. I can see it now, the ignominy of lying on the shower floor, my femur broken. I can also see the more minor...if that is the word...slip in my own bathroom. It seems more instructive for the present moment, composed as it was of spirit and flesh.
Late the previous night, actually in the wee hours of the morning, Marlou had woken me. Something was on her mind. Her funeral. She had planned it, wanted to talk about it, even though she was in remission, not even undergoing chemotherapy at that moment. But we talked. Or I listened. Instructions for her funeral. Wishing I could sleep instead. Wishing we did not have to drive to San Francisco for an opera matinee the very next day. All of which had me distracted enough during the morning's post-shower time before the mirror, hair combing and shaving to, as the British say, briefly lose the plot. That is to say, space out. Losing my balance and falling to the bathroom tiles. Marlou picked me up. She was perfectly strong at that point. While I was feeling perfectly weak.
Proving how deceptive appearances can be. Fear. Is it friend or foe? No doubt about it, the bathroom is a danger zone. But memory is a danger zone too, and where both converge...well, it's enough to make a person zone out. Which is the ever present danger. Having lost the spinal cord's ability to help keep me upright and positioned in space, I'm flying on visuals. The instruments are down. Proprioception virtually switched off, according to my physiotherapist. So I look out for trouble, sight substituting for balance. Which is fine, as long as I don't relax my vigilance for even a second. Being an eternally pensive person, ever drifting into random thought, spacing is a natural reflex.
But not on the shower seat. To get into the shower, I sit on a plastic seat that extends over the edge of the bathtub, slide my bottom into the shower zone, dragging the legs behind me. It's a tricky maneuver, the entry. But nothing compared to the exit. I have, like the much lampooned narcissistic photo subject, a good side and a bad side. The bad side is the paralyzed one. My right side. Getting out of the shower involves lifting my right paralyzed leg, all weight, inertia and a soupçon of spasticity. Having lifted it, I also have to slide, slipping my wet bottom across the plastic and around to face forward. I don't know how I do it. These words are not a figure of speech. I really don't know. It's clear that I brace my left hand against a railing, twist something that inches my thigh around the edge of the shower chair. But what exactly twists? I really don't know. Perhaps I push with the good leg, wrench my back around a bit and the right leg follows. Is that it? I don't know. Some bits of my body still move a little. And I rely upon those bits, working a lot to make something move a little.
It is a perilous moment. There's a certain balance, an opposition of forces. If the shower chair wasn't wet, I couldn't slide my butt. Because it is wet, there is the distinct possibility of sliding my butt off the chair. And down. Down where I do not like to consider. Hitting the bottom of the tub. Breaking something? Or just catching my leg on the edge of the tub, twisting, wrenching something?
Please understand. I do this every morning. It always works. Except for this morning, it seems. Conscious of the uncertainty here, I take an extra second or two to consider things. Consider what? Hamlet's sorry decline, the inevitable consequence of pausing a little too long on his own shower chair? Doubtless at the wrong moment, in the depths of the Danish winter, wondering not only how he was going to slide his butt into the drafty North Sea air, but why? That I'm always considering the latter, certainly that is my undoing. But I'm not undoing now. I'm doing. With a gulp and a wrench, I twist myself forward. I am facing the mirror, facing a handrail which I'm about to grab, facing the day.
Within a few minutes, the morning is doing a credible imitation of a middle-aged person waking up. Which may very well have a whiff of death about it. But what doesn't? That is the thing. And is that the thing underlying my anxiety? Or is Jane and my getting closer and me feeling the threat of attachment...is that the thing? Still another possibility. Jane wonders if feeling successful about my life isn't actually threatening me. Hard to say. Useless to speculate. All I know is that I am beyond the tea stage of things and into the bathroom.
The last time I had a fall was in this very bathroom. On these very tiles. This is where gravitational fear crystallizes. Down. I am going to slip, descend and break. I did break something once, and not exactly in a bathroom but in a bathhouse. A local hot tub place, where I stubbornly tried to get myself out of a difficult spa...and plummeted to my orthopedic doom. I can see it now, the ignominy of lying on the shower floor, my femur broken. I can also see the more minor...if that is the word...slip in my own bathroom. It seems more instructive for the present moment, composed as it was of spirit and flesh.
Late the previous night, actually in the wee hours of the morning, Marlou had woken me. Something was on her mind. Her funeral. She had planned it, wanted to talk about it, even though she was in remission, not even undergoing chemotherapy at that moment. But we talked. Or I listened. Instructions for her funeral. Wishing I could sleep instead. Wishing we did not have to drive to San Francisco for an opera matinee the very next day. All of which had me distracted enough during the morning's post-shower time before the mirror, hair combing and shaving to, as the British say, briefly lose the plot. That is to say, space out. Losing my balance and falling to the bathroom tiles. Marlou picked me up. She was perfectly strong at that point. While I was feeling perfectly weak.
Proving how deceptive appearances can be. Fear. Is it friend or foe? No doubt about it, the bathroom is a danger zone. But memory is a danger zone too, and where both converge...well, it's enough to make a person zone out. Which is the ever present danger. Having lost the spinal cord's ability to help keep me upright and positioned in space, I'm flying on visuals. The instruments are down. Proprioception virtually switched off, according to my physiotherapist. So I look out for trouble, sight substituting for balance. Which is fine, as long as I don't relax my vigilance for even a second. Being an eternally pensive person, ever drifting into random thought, spacing is a natural reflex.
But not on the shower seat. To get into the shower, I sit on a plastic seat that extends over the edge of the bathtub, slide my bottom into the shower zone, dragging the legs behind me. It's a tricky maneuver, the entry. But nothing compared to the exit. I have, like the much lampooned narcissistic photo subject, a good side and a bad side. The bad side is the paralyzed one. My right side. Getting out of the shower involves lifting my right paralyzed leg, all weight, inertia and a soupçon of spasticity. Having lifted it, I also have to slide, slipping my wet bottom across the plastic and around to face forward. I don't know how I do it. These words are not a figure of speech. I really don't know. It's clear that I brace my left hand against a railing, twist something that inches my thigh around the edge of the shower chair. But what exactly twists? I really don't know. Perhaps I push with the good leg, wrench my back around a bit and the right leg follows. Is that it? I don't know. Some bits of my body still move a little. And I rely upon those bits, working a lot to make something move a little.
It is a perilous moment. There's a certain balance, an opposition of forces. If the shower chair wasn't wet, I couldn't slide my butt. Because it is wet, there is the distinct possibility of sliding my butt off the chair. And down. Down where I do not like to consider. Hitting the bottom of the tub. Breaking something? Or just catching my leg on the edge of the tub, twisting, wrenching something?
Please understand. I do this every morning. It always works. Except for this morning, it seems. Conscious of the uncertainty here, I take an extra second or two to consider things. Consider what? Hamlet's sorry decline, the inevitable consequence of pausing a little too long on his own shower chair? Doubtless at the wrong moment, in the depths of the Danish winter, wondering not only how he was going to slide his butt into the drafty North Sea air, but why? That I'm always considering the latter, certainly that is my undoing. But I'm not undoing now. I'm doing. With a gulp and a wrench, I twist myself forward. I am facing the mirror, facing a handrail which I'm about to grab, facing the day.
It was over soon enough, but the day wasn't, which meant too many more hours of daylight and of consciousness. I scared myself, that's what I did. And, no, even after years of psychological instruction, I do not understand such things. I may be slightly better at surviving them. Perhaps there's that. Not much else.
I would not say that Jane and I had an idyllic weekend...unless one is sufficiently grounded to sense what an idyll meant to a guy like Tennyson. As opposed to some producer at DreamWorks. We had a pastoral journey. That is to say, we had some discomfort moving across the landscape. But finally alighted in a natural spot of great beauty, safely and pleasantly. The difficult part is key. We had, or I had, a misunderstanding or two still rattling about my brain. Keeping me awake, in fact. And which I feared we might never address. And yet we did, early our first morning at the Motel Inverness. Something had been bugging me in the night. And with the night barely behind us, we had our talk. Naturally with tea, its brewing and ingestion, pervading the hour. Or was it hours? Whatever. One of us is a Brit, one an apprentice Brit. So tea had to be part of it.
The day did not look promising. It barely looked like a day. What does it mean that in a changing planet, summer has piled itself atop summer to scorch Moscow and other parts, while summer quietly slips out of town here in Northern California? The coldest August on record, scream the local newspaper headlines. We were not arguing, Jane and I.
Well, we were. But not about the weather. But arguing is good. Brooding is good. Whatever it takes to face what needs to be faced. Which we did, quite thoroughly, and satisfactorily. So with the morning still young, the sky was still brooding, but I no longer was. In fact, I was feeling very good about my connection with Jane. And marveling, while trying not to feel too guilty, about this turn of fortune. Jane reminded me that in many cultures fortune is conceived as a wheel. With everything turning, ups and downs are temporary. So, go ahead, be exhilarated at one moment, crushed at the next. Just remember. To everything, turn, turn. There is a season. And this one, ours, is a good one.
Leaving us to the rest of the day. Which no sensible person would spend in the Motel Inverness. Not when there is breakfast to be had at the Pine Cone diner, Point Reyes. Not only breakfast, but lunch. The hour being what it was when we finally rolled in. Sorry, but I can't resist the oyster sandwich. Or the fresh oysters down the street. Or the oyster stew across from the fresh oysters down the street. There being only four real restaurants in all of Point Reyes. Yes, doubtless the fourth has some oyster thing happening on its menu too. That's why God invented adjacent Tomales Bay. To grow oysters. Afterwards, having grown sluggish, what was there to do but drive out toward the fabled Point Reyes lighthouse? Or one of the beaches along Drake's Bay?
A splendid idea, but not looking so splendid when one looked at the sky. The coldest August on record in the Tomales Bay region looks grey. And there's nothing wrong with gray. Except that blue looks better. So we drove along the bay, the symmetrically long and even body of water that is actually a rift valley and quietly conducts the San Andreas Fault out to sea. After which, I don't really know.... Are there underwater earthquakes? Or is the fault just too bored to act up? Must look into this.
Wherever the fault was headed, we were headed back into the fog. It hung dark and heavy over the mountains and plains of Point Reyes National Seashore. So we turned around. We returned to, of all things, Motel Inverness. Which had much to do with Jane. 'It's lovely,' she had said of the view from our terrace. It's not the sort of scene that excites everyone. But after a year or so together, we know this much about each other. It excites us.
There's something very satisfying about the green shallows of a disappearing bay, or beginning estuary, or incipient marshland. One fumbles about for nouns just as nature fumbles about for footing. Are we splashing or walking as our minds travel across the luminous blue channels and green islands that constitute this end of Tomales Bay? One of us, the one with fully enervated legs, did actually hike out to the end of the boardwalk which leads from the motel to the bird blind in the distance. I envied Jane. But not enough to take my crutch and fight my way out there myself. I'm sure she saw more than I did. But perhaps not. I was the one who noticed the quail family interactions. The big fat one perched on the railing outside the motel's lobby was standing guard. From my vantage point, four toddler quail happily bobbed for food in the motel lawn. Stirring to see the primal mother instinct at work, surely hardwired into the animal brain, more than training and example could pass from one generation to the next.
'Yes. When mother is sick, life is very difficult.' This signaled that our hour was up, the first of...well, there must have been hundreds. London, 1969. A woman analyst. A German Jewish refugee...and I could almost add 'of course,' except that would be someone else's idea of a cliché. For me it was family, more or less. And the beginning of years of intense inner and emotional reordering. Which began with the perspicacity evident in those very words. I had not talked about my mother in that, our first session. I was far too reticent, self-protecting and psychologically inexperienced to delve much. I don't recall mentioning my mother at all.
And now, more than four decades later and so far from the real Inverness that the copy seems more real than the original...I am the one who sizes up the picture, regarding the mother quail and the babies. It is something learned, relearned and unlearned. And when the weekend is over and I'm home alone...albeit briefly...the other part of the mother experience comes bursting out of the ether. Panic, anger, physical sensations such as losing balance. Which is the other side of the reconnecting-with-a-woman experience. By now somewhat heightened by that other experience, a wife who dies in one's arms. Which in turn must resonate with that earlier whiff of death, the unmothering mother.
And so one stumbles into a new relationship. Grateful that one can stumble at all. Mindful that stumbling is inherently dangerous and should not be attempted alone. Mindfulness being all one has in the most extreme and solitary moments of danger. Which come as though summoned.
Motel Inverness, the resident manager explains, has something of a checkered history. For a while, the operation fell into the hands of an enormously entertaining huckster, a felon on the lam. He had swindled a person or two in his day, and continued on this course in Inverness...where he somehow got the job of motel manager. He drained the place of funds, while covering his tracks with certain cosmetic improvements. When the law got too close, he hit the road. Leaving behind an ambiguous legacy. Yes, he was a con artist. And yet he did start a certain pattern of improvement that led to the current motel amenities. The terraces that face the marsh. A large deck and cheery...although ludicrously large and appointed...front office and lobby. Skylights, custom glass, beams and costly woodwork. Keep in mind that the Motel Inverness has all of five rooms.
And the upshot? The people of Inverness still recall him fondly. Some are rumored to even keep in touch with him, this quintessential American. Crook, self promoter, ripoff artist, whatever he is, he now lives somewhere abroad. Canada. Central America. No one seems to agree on this point. One thing is clear, that some in Inverness still love him, and Jane and I both found the story quite amusing. Which is either the result, or part of the cause, of loving each other.
More than four decades ago, about one year before I had my first session with the London analyst, my mother hustled out of my hospital room. Once she was safely down the corridor, my highly acute hearing clicked on. Even with the door shut, I could make out the nurses' voices in the hallway. 'Well,' one muttered, 'I knew Paul had problems. And we just met the reason why.'
They missed the other part. That my mother was a toughie. Not an attractive quality, but essential if one is going to survive. The latter became my stock in trade. I inherited the genes from her. Part of the package. Part of the mother.
I would not say that Jane and I had an idyllic weekend...unless one is sufficiently grounded to sense what an idyll meant to a guy like Tennyson. As opposed to some producer at DreamWorks. We had a pastoral journey. That is to say, we had some discomfort moving across the landscape. But finally alighted in a natural spot of great beauty, safely and pleasantly. The difficult part is key. We had, or I had, a misunderstanding or two still rattling about my brain. Keeping me awake, in fact. And which I feared we might never address. And yet we did, early our first morning at the Motel Inverness. Something had been bugging me in the night. And with the night barely behind us, we had our talk. Naturally with tea, its brewing and ingestion, pervading the hour. Or was it hours? Whatever. One of us is a Brit, one an apprentice Brit. So tea had to be part of it.
The day did not look promising. It barely looked like a day. What does it mean that in a changing planet, summer has piled itself atop summer to scorch Moscow and other parts, while summer quietly slips out of town here in Northern California? The coldest August on record, scream the local newspaper headlines. We were not arguing, Jane and I.
Well, we were. But not about the weather. But arguing is good. Brooding is good. Whatever it takes to face what needs to be faced. Which we did, quite thoroughly, and satisfactorily. So with the morning still young, the sky was still brooding, but I no longer was. In fact, I was feeling very good about my connection with Jane. And marveling, while trying not to feel too guilty, about this turn of fortune. Jane reminded me that in many cultures fortune is conceived as a wheel. With everything turning, ups and downs are temporary. So, go ahead, be exhilarated at one moment, crushed at the next. Just remember. To everything, turn, turn. There is a season. And this one, ours, is a good one.
Leaving us to the rest of the day. Which no sensible person would spend in the Motel Inverness. Not when there is breakfast to be had at the Pine Cone diner, Point Reyes. Not only breakfast, but lunch. The hour being what it was when we finally rolled in. Sorry, but I can't resist the oyster sandwich. Or the fresh oysters down the street. Or the oyster stew across from the fresh oysters down the street. There being only four real restaurants in all of Point Reyes. Yes, doubtless the fourth has some oyster thing happening on its menu too. That's why God invented adjacent Tomales Bay. To grow oysters. Afterwards, having grown sluggish, what was there to do but drive out toward the fabled Point Reyes lighthouse? Or one of the beaches along Drake's Bay?
A splendid idea, but not looking so splendid when one looked at the sky. The coldest August on record in the Tomales Bay region looks grey. And there's nothing wrong with gray. Except that blue looks better. So we drove along the bay, the symmetrically long and even body of water that is actually a rift valley and quietly conducts the San Andreas Fault out to sea. After which, I don't really know.... Are there underwater earthquakes? Or is the fault just too bored to act up? Must look into this.
Wherever the fault was headed, we were headed back into the fog. It hung dark and heavy over the mountains and plains of Point Reyes National Seashore. So we turned around. We returned to, of all things, Motel Inverness. Which had much to do with Jane. 'It's lovely,' she had said of the view from our terrace. It's not the sort of scene that excites everyone. But after a year or so together, we know this much about each other. It excites us.
There's something very satisfying about the green shallows of a disappearing bay, or beginning estuary, or incipient marshland. One fumbles about for nouns just as nature fumbles about for footing. Are we splashing or walking as our minds travel across the luminous blue channels and green islands that constitute this end of Tomales Bay? One of us, the one with fully enervated legs, did actually hike out to the end of the boardwalk which leads from the motel to the bird blind in the distance. I envied Jane. But not enough to take my crutch and fight my way out there myself. I'm sure she saw more than I did. But perhaps not. I was the one who noticed the quail family interactions. The big fat one perched on the railing outside the motel's lobby was standing guard. From my vantage point, four toddler quail happily bobbed for food in the motel lawn. Stirring to see the primal mother instinct at work, surely hardwired into the animal brain, more than training and example could pass from one generation to the next.
'Yes. When mother is sick, life is very difficult.' This signaled that our hour was up, the first of...well, there must have been hundreds. London, 1969. A woman analyst. A German Jewish refugee...and I could almost add 'of course,' except that would be someone else's idea of a cliché. For me it was family, more or less. And the beginning of years of intense inner and emotional reordering. Which began with the perspicacity evident in those very words. I had not talked about my mother in that, our first session. I was far too reticent, self-protecting and psychologically inexperienced to delve much. I don't recall mentioning my mother at all.
And now, more than four decades later and so far from the real Inverness that the copy seems more real than the original...I am the one who sizes up the picture, regarding the mother quail and the babies. It is something learned, relearned and unlearned. And when the weekend is over and I'm home alone...albeit briefly...the other part of the mother experience comes bursting out of the ether. Panic, anger, physical sensations such as losing balance. Which is the other side of the reconnecting-with-a-woman experience. By now somewhat heightened by that other experience, a wife who dies in one's arms. Which in turn must resonate with that earlier whiff of death, the unmothering mother.
And so one stumbles into a new relationship. Grateful that one can stumble at all. Mindful that stumbling is inherently dangerous and should not be attempted alone. Mindfulness being all one has in the most extreme and solitary moments of danger. Which come as though summoned.
Motel Inverness, the resident manager explains, has something of a checkered history. For a while, the operation fell into the hands of an enormously entertaining huckster, a felon on the lam. He had swindled a person or two in his day, and continued on this course in Inverness...where he somehow got the job of motel manager. He drained the place of funds, while covering his tracks with certain cosmetic improvements. When the law got too close, he hit the road. Leaving behind an ambiguous legacy. Yes, he was a con artist. And yet he did start a certain pattern of improvement that led to the current motel amenities. The terraces that face the marsh. A large deck and cheery...although ludicrously large and appointed...front office and lobby. Skylights, custom glass, beams and costly woodwork. Keep in mind that the Motel Inverness has all of five rooms.
And the upshot? The people of Inverness still recall him fondly. Some are rumored to even keep in touch with him, this quintessential American. Crook, self promoter, ripoff artist, whatever he is, he now lives somewhere abroad. Canada. Central America. No one seems to agree on this point. One thing is clear, that some in Inverness still love him, and Jane and I both found the story quite amusing. Which is either the result, or part of the cause, of loving each other.
More than four decades ago, about one year before I had my first session with the London analyst, my mother hustled out of my hospital room. Once she was safely down the corridor, my highly acute hearing clicked on. Even with the door shut, I could make out the nurses' voices in the hallway. 'Well,' one muttered, 'I knew Paul had problems. And we just met the reason why.'
They missed the other part. That my mother was a toughie. Not an attractive quality, but essential if one is going to survive. The latter became my stock in trade. I inherited the genes from her. Part of the package. Part of the mother.
It is complex, taking care of oneself. And at the heart of the matter lies the nature of one's self. The latter can only change, or become more apparent, or seem different after watching the life slowly drain from someone beloved. And so it is that 14 months later, I have finally settled on a strategy for newsprint recycling.
In editing an anthology of poetry, Robert Bly included one interesting bit of prose. Charles Darwin's account of the effects of science in his own life. As he got deeper into his observations, analysis and life-origins thinking, Darwin reports a curious event. The moment when he could no longer read Shakespeare. In fact, poetic writing in general. I can't recall more about Bly's snippet. But this is the gist. Once the mind was directed to reason and analyze, the other sensibilities began to wane.
Which feels much like my thing with newspapers. Since Marlou's death, my resistance to them has mounted. Even The Nation, one of my favorite political outlets, has become hard to read. I don't precisely know what is happening. Something.
Still, I have a solution. Coffee. Take the newspapers out to coffee. Buy each of them, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, a latte. While you're at it, buy one for yourself. The caffeine will do nicely with the frenzied atmosphere of the reportage. You'll actually read some of it. And, not insignificant, leave the papers on the table when you are finished. Let the café recycle them, if it wishes. In any case, it is no longer your problem. Showing that despite your liberal sensibilities, you are quite capable of utter and complete social irresponsibility.
I need to be fully caffeinated to deal with work that is recurrent, perhaps obsessive. I tell myself the following: if I keep torturing myself with the same scene, replaying a memory, surely this is for a reason. Something needs working out. It is the dying Marlou, of course.
She is in bed, our bed, propped up, weakening, looking my way. I have rolled into the bedroom to talk to her, probably between bouts of ghastliness. But in this remembered scene, I am sitting at her bedside, as close as one can get. People placed chairs in the narrow passage between wall and bed so they could visit, talk, stare. I kept asking to have the chairs moved. Sometimes I just gave up. Giving up being rather easy at the time. In this scene, might as well call it a dream for all its likely verisimilitude...I recall Marlou's helpless look, her sinking, weakness. She is propped, perhaps pinned, against the pillows, wearing a high necked nightgown. She looks beautiful in this memory. The memory itself is not. I also feel helpless, hopeless. Not to mention exhausted. These moments where hard work for me. Necessary, not enjoyable. Everything in me heavy and depleted, spent like uranium.
I must have actually been on the bed, lying next to Marlou when we talked about the blindness. Did we actually talk? Did Marlou tell me she had lost the vision in one eye? Either she said it, or someone said it, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. And today that is what horrifies me. There was so much else 'wrong', if one can use the term of understatement, by way of body failure...that an optic nerve shutting down here or there hardly mattered. What I recall in the most recent replaying of this scene is my own fear and retreat. I was there, active as I could be, which means I wasn't there completely.
And almost a year and a half later, I still have trouble with newspapers, polemics. Actually, I have trouble with the amount. Defense critic Andrew Bacevich has been in San Francisco recently. He says it all. I don't need to hear more about this. Put him in charge. Or show me a way to put someone like him in charge, and I'll support it. Beyond that, I lack bandwidth, as we say in California. I lack patience. The latter having been in very small supply since Marlou's death.
But there is a much more positive way of looking at all this. It's time to read. And read something else. Poetry for example. I'm getting back into reading poems. Literature in general. Not to mention music, good drama, spirit-expanding art. Grief puts us on track, steers us like a train. There's no resisting. And down the track, there has to be something different. Maybe even something healing.
In editing an anthology of poetry, Robert Bly included one interesting bit of prose. Charles Darwin's account of the effects of science in his own life. As he got deeper into his observations, analysis and life-origins thinking, Darwin reports a curious event. The moment when he could no longer read Shakespeare. In fact, poetic writing in general. I can't recall more about Bly's snippet. But this is the gist. Once the mind was directed to reason and analyze, the other sensibilities began to wane.
Which feels much like my thing with newspapers. Since Marlou's death, my resistance to them has mounted. Even The Nation, one of my favorite political outlets, has become hard to read. I don't precisely know what is happening. Something.
Still, I have a solution. Coffee. Take the newspapers out to coffee. Buy each of them, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, a latte. While you're at it, buy one for yourself. The caffeine will do nicely with the frenzied atmosphere of the reportage. You'll actually read some of it. And, not insignificant, leave the papers on the table when you are finished. Let the café recycle them, if it wishes. In any case, it is no longer your problem. Showing that despite your liberal sensibilities, you are quite capable of utter and complete social irresponsibility.
I need to be fully caffeinated to deal with work that is recurrent, perhaps obsessive. I tell myself the following: if I keep torturing myself with the same scene, replaying a memory, surely this is for a reason. Something needs working out. It is the dying Marlou, of course.
She is in bed, our bed, propped up, weakening, looking my way. I have rolled into the bedroom to talk to her, probably between bouts of ghastliness. But in this remembered scene, I am sitting at her bedside, as close as one can get. People placed chairs in the narrow passage between wall and bed so they could visit, talk, stare. I kept asking to have the chairs moved. Sometimes I just gave up. Giving up being rather easy at the time. In this scene, might as well call it a dream for all its likely verisimilitude...I recall Marlou's helpless look, her sinking, weakness. She is propped, perhaps pinned, against the pillows, wearing a high necked nightgown. She looks beautiful in this memory. The memory itself is not. I also feel helpless, hopeless. Not to mention exhausted. These moments where hard work for me. Necessary, not enjoyable. Everything in me heavy and depleted, spent like uranium.
I must have actually been on the bed, lying next to Marlou when we talked about the blindness. Did we actually talk? Did Marlou tell me she had lost the vision in one eye? Either she said it, or someone said it, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. And today that is what horrifies me. There was so much else 'wrong', if one can use the term of understatement, by way of body failure...that an optic nerve shutting down here or there hardly mattered. What I recall in the most recent replaying of this scene is my own fear and retreat. I was there, active as I could be, which means I wasn't there completely.
And almost a year and a half later, I still have trouble with newspapers, polemics. Actually, I have trouble with the amount. Defense critic Andrew Bacevich has been in San Francisco recently. He says it all. I don't need to hear more about this. Put him in charge. Or show me a way to put someone like him in charge, and I'll support it. Beyond that, I lack bandwidth, as we say in California. I lack patience. The latter having been in very small supply since Marlou's death.
But there is a much more positive way of looking at all this. It's time to read. And read something else. Poetry for example. I'm getting back into reading poems. Literature in general. Not to mention music, good drama, spirit-expanding art. Grief puts us on track, steers us like a train. There's no resisting. And down the track, there has to be something different. Maybe even something healing.
My old friend Susan, visiting from Los Angeles, extends her arm, I take it, and so begins my afternoon constitutional. I no longer walk without help. At least, not any distance. I do not rule out the possibility that this represents loss of nerve. What I fear is that it represents loss of nervous system. My balance seems more wavering than ever. My proprioception has been on the wane for decades. I can't really tell where my right leg is these days without a visual check. Ah, yes, there it is. Attached to my hip. Forming a convenient link to my foot.
As Susan and I walk, the preposterousness of my general life situation, or at least its eccentricity, bursts forth. First, there are The Narrows. One expects tight passages in a river or a canyon. But not in a footpath. Tom, my landlord and benefactor of almost two low-rent decades, is deeply averse to change. Even change in the form of shrubbery. Fact is, the hedges along the concrete sidewalk outside my apartment are overgrown. They have done what plants do. They have grown. They have grown about 18 inches across the concrete. That is why two people walking, at least one quadriplegic walking and holding the arm of a friend, can barely squeeze by. It's part of my physiotherapy, I tell myself.
At the end of the footpath, where the cement expires at a fence, I turn around without absorbing the reality. The fence is on the brink of destruction. The wood is beyond decay. It is undergoing a splintery kind of disintegration all its own. It sags. It tilts. The splinters give the tops of the posts a feathery look. This could easily masquerade for something in a folk art museum. The fence some woman in El Paso made of toothpicks. Nevermind. Susan and I turn around, my arm still through hers, and we reverse course to my wheelchair parked just beyond my apartment.
On the way, an encroaching hedge narrows our course. I keep sticking my crutch very close to the edge of the cement. Susan will have to fend for herself. She will have to make sure her arms don't get scratches in the passing hedge. For the latter has not only overgrown the sidewalk, but achieved maximum breadth, then died. It is approximately 95% brown. It needs to be pulled up, ground into organic sawdust, composted and replaced with new privets. I refuse to consider the conversations I've had with Tom on this topic. If the hedges are trimmed back, he insists, they will die. The fact that one is already dead has eluded him. Arguing seems pointless. I can only think of the famous Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot. The one that is supposedly stunned and pining for the fjords. Nevermind. This is where I live, how I live, how I exercise and how I survive. The condition of the hedges is beyond my control.
But not beyond my assessment. Life is good. This is what I generally forget. And need to remember.
Over lunch, Susan has been talking about life in Los Angeles. Anti-Hispanic sentiment is reaching a high pitch among an economically squeezed populace. Ugly remarks are commonplace. Which makes me happy to be in and around San Francisco. Sanctuary City. Reaction to Arizona's anti-immigrant demagoguery is fairly mild in these parts, because no one takes the matter very seriously. It's an immigrant nation, ours. I love the title of a book I have never read on one aspect of 20th-century American history: How the Irish Became White.
Anyway, I'm here, not LA. And this is something to be grateful for. Not to mention the fact that this very night some of the nation's greatest classical musicians will have a go at Spanish music in Menlo Park's new theater. Not flamenco or Manuel de Falla. Renaissance and earlier stuff, I think. It's only a wheelchair ride away. In my hometown. Not to be taken for granted.
And the garden. I suppose I have done a perfectly good job with it. Gardening has taught me more than I can comprehend about soil and compost and pests. But, I must remember when complaining about his Hedges of the Past, it was Tom who made the apartment land-grant garden possible. It is his property, after all.
But there's more. Has there ever been an agrarian civilization that did not give thanks for a bountiful harvest? Surely there was a reason for this. No one, medieval lord or peasant, seems to have patted himself on the back for brilliant composting, drainage or pest control. At harvest, it was time to thank...what? Honestly, it doesn't matter, as long as it's something bigger than one single American ego. Yes, I am a good gardener. But the truth is, I am also a lucky one. I don't know what I'm doing, not really. It's just that what I'm doing happens to be right.
Grateful. Grateful for not being Isaac Rosenberg, dead in his late 20s, succumbing like millions of his generation in the Great War. Was it the Somme? I will have to find out at least that much. Meanwhile, something possessed me to order his collection of poems. Another gift. Something else to be thankful for. My own capacity for melancholic reflection. Which I just think of as being serious. Never mind. I will rent this apartment until I don't rent it. Something will come next. Possibly a small hedge fire. A burning cigarette tossed here or there, plenty to get the old deadwood ablaze. And at the first sound of the fire crew, I will be out the door in my new electric wheelchair. Well, fairly new. The one that tilts.
As Susan and I walk, the preposterousness of my general life situation, or at least its eccentricity, bursts forth. First, there are The Narrows. One expects tight passages in a river or a canyon. But not in a footpath. Tom, my landlord and benefactor of almost two low-rent decades, is deeply averse to change. Even change in the form of shrubbery. Fact is, the hedges along the concrete sidewalk outside my apartment are overgrown. They have done what plants do. They have grown. They have grown about 18 inches across the concrete. That is why two people walking, at least one quadriplegic walking and holding the arm of a friend, can barely squeeze by. It's part of my physiotherapy, I tell myself.
At the end of the footpath, where the cement expires at a fence, I turn around without absorbing the reality. The fence is on the brink of destruction. The wood is beyond decay. It is undergoing a splintery kind of disintegration all its own. It sags. It tilts. The splinters give the tops of the posts a feathery look. This could easily masquerade for something in a folk art museum. The fence some woman in El Paso made of toothpicks. Nevermind. Susan and I turn around, my arm still through hers, and we reverse course to my wheelchair parked just beyond my apartment.
On the way, an encroaching hedge narrows our course. I keep sticking my crutch very close to the edge of the cement. Susan will have to fend for herself. She will have to make sure her arms don't get scratches in the passing hedge. For the latter has not only overgrown the sidewalk, but achieved maximum breadth, then died. It is approximately 95% brown. It needs to be pulled up, ground into organic sawdust, composted and replaced with new privets. I refuse to consider the conversations I've had with Tom on this topic. If the hedges are trimmed back, he insists, they will die. The fact that one is already dead has eluded him. Arguing seems pointless. I can only think of the famous Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot. The one that is supposedly stunned and pining for the fjords. Nevermind. This is where I live, how I live, how I exercise and how I survive. The condition of the hedges is beyond my control.
But not beyond my assessment. Life is good. This is what I generally forget. And need to remember.
Over lunch, Susan has been talking about life in Los Angeles. Anti-Hispanic sentiment is reaching a high pitch among an economically squeezed populace. Ugly remarks are commonplace. Which makes me happy to be in and around San Francisco. Sanctuary City. Reaction to Arizona's anti-immigrant demagoguery is fairly mild in these parts, because no one takes the matter very seriously. It's an immigrant nation, ours. I love the title of a book I have never read on one aspect of 20th-century American history: How the Irish Became White.
Anyway, I'm here, not LA. And this is something to be grateful for. Not to mention the fact that this very night some of the nation's greatest classical musicians will have a go at Spanish music in Menlo Park's new theater. Not flamenco or Manuel de Falla. Renaissance and earlier stuff, I think. It's only a wheelchair ride away. In my hometown. Not to be taken for granted.
And the garden. I suppose I have done a perfectly good job with it. Gardening has taught me more than I can comprehend about soil and compost and pests. But, I must remember when complaining about his Hedges of the Past, it was Tom who made the apartment land-grant garden possible. It is his property, after all.
But there's more. Has there ever been an agrarian civilization that did not give thanks for a bountiful harvest? Surely there was a reason for this. No one, medieval lord or peasant, seems to have patted himself on the back for brilliant composting, drainage or pest control. At harvest, it was time to thank...what? Honestly, it doesn't matter, as long as it's something bigger than one single American ego. Yes, I am a good gardener. But the truth is, I am also a lucky one. I don't know what I'm doing, not really. It's just that what I'm doing happens to be right.
Grateful. Grateful for not being Isaac Rosenberg, dead in his late 20s, succumbing like millions of his generation in the Great War. Was it the Somme? I will have to find out at least that much. Meanwhile, something possessed me to order his collection of poems. Another gift. Something else to be thankful for. My own capacity for melancholic reflection. Which I just think of as being serious. Never mind. I will rent this apartment until I don't rent it. Something will come next. Possibly a small hedge fire. A burning cigarette tossed here or there, plenty to get the old deadwood ablaze. And at the first sound of the fire crew, I will be out the door in my new electric wheelchair. Well, fairly new. The one that tilts.
It's coming. Actually, it's coming next summer, but the way the San Francisco Opera is carrying on, you would think the whole cast of horn-helmeted, spear-carrying Norsemen was already claiming their bags at the airport. They're not. And the prospect of shelling out hundreds of dollars to endure something interminable, humorless and German...a redundancy, I know...well it seems downright silly.
The problem is, I am actually an ignoramus here. I have never attended a Wagner opera, dismissing the genre along the lines of Woody Allen's quip about invading Poland. When in truth, what do I know? I have heard a bit of Wagner on the radio, and it does surge. In fact, it seems to surge on and on, the way the Magic Fingers do at Motel 6. Again, I should shut up. In fact, I really should shut up, because so many friends of mine, people of depth, insist that Wagner is an utter delight. I need to shut my mouth, grit my teeth and buy a ticket or two.
Besides, even an anti-Semitic asshole like Wagner can know a good thematic thing when he sees it. Rings do hold their power. After my divorce, mercifully almost 20 years ago, I did not know what to do with the former wedding ring. It seemed wrong to throw away. Being gold, after all. Hang on to it, some said. You can make something else from it, some other sort of jewelry. This seemed extraordinarily unlikely. Besides, I didn't want the silly thing forged into something new. I really wanted to get rid of it. Funny thing about rings. You can't. So the erstwhile wedding ring sat in a compartment in my desk drawer, right there next to the paperclips and gummed three-ring punch hole protectors. Both being rings. Showing that I am not devoid of logic.
Marlou's thing with rings...well, it was an overwhelming fact of our marriage. Strangely, this much fiercer saga began with a divorce. Hers. Marlou's mother gave her soon-to-be-divorced daughter the gift of a family heirloom. It came, I believe, from Marlou's great-grandmother, a native of Sweden, and a woman before her time. She immigrated to this country, itself a bold move. And she came alone. She married at some point, lived somewhere around Chicago, and when things domestic did not pan out, got divorced. This, in an era when people just didn't do that sort of thing. Particularly women. I may have a detail or two wrong here, but as in all things with rings, it's the spirit that counts.
It was rather a magnificent antique ring, the one that Marlou wore. Full of family history. And pulsing with some burden of family psychology that eluded both of us. Marlou began dreaming about the ring. At times, she dreamt that she had lost it. At other times, an intruder broke into our bedroom and stole it away. Frequently, she simply rose in the middle of the night, walked to the wardrobe and made sure it was still there, where she put it, always put it, when retiring.
The problem with powerful dreams is that they scream for consciousness. They impel us toward some sort of knowledge, and if they get in our way, we begin screaming ourselves. Which soon began to happen. The dreams turned into nightmares, content the same...ring loss, ring theft...but cranked up in volume and terror. Marlou began waking and screaming in the night. I'd had just enough psychoanalysis myself to feel frustrated, anxious and concerned as the nightmares took over. But Marlou wasn't one for too much inner delving. She accepted the nightmares. Life went on, despite the occasional violent interruption at night. Now and then on holiday, we would find ourselves returning to a hotel room in search of the ring. Which miraculously was never actually lost. Whatever its meaning, the centrality and mythic power of Marlou's ring seemed beyond doubt.
As for our wedding rings, Marlou had custom ones made. Somehow this fell to her. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps I was feeling a bit ring-shy. Marlou went to a local jeweler, a Chinese-American man, purchased what she wanted and returned with something more. Stories. The man was full of tales of marriage, generally instructive, supportive. She was a shy woman, Marlou, intensely private, yet she could open her heart in extraordinary ways. Perhaps she needed a baseline of formality, some sort of politesse that established trust, even credibility, a foundation for a personal exchange within an impersonal container. I probably know something about this myself.
So what to do with this, the next ring? Ring #2. Something about this, the loss of two relationships counted in jewelry, bothered me. I was quite certain that the first wedding ring was still in my desk drawer. In fact, in the left divider, adjacent to keys or something with an equally infinite shelf life. Whenever I finally removed my wedding ring, the good marriage's symbolic remnant...the thing would get plunked down next to its predecessor. Both gold. No sense in throwing them away. Waste not, want not.
I asked the young rabbi I see occasionally, my grief guide. What does one do with wedding rings after death of a spouse? Nothing, he said. No need to deal with that now. I was enormously relieved. He's an intuitive guy, this rabbi. Enough stress already. The ring would sort itself out.
Every few months I would stare at the ring and wonder. Why am I still wearing this? Does it mean I cannot let go? Does it mean I am living in the past? Is this ring retention in honor of Marlou? All that sort of thing, not to mention the social impact. Did people think I was still married? Why not? What would be wrong with that? And then I would forget the whole thing. The ring did not get in the way. Literally or symbolically. Who knew what people thought? And who cared?
Jane cared about me, that was increasingly clear. And I cared about her. The ring? I must have mentioned it a time or two. She understood. It would sort itself out. I did not want to be pushed. That much I knew. The whole death experience had been pushing me for over a year, for several years, in fact, as soon as the diagnosis. Fuck the ring. Or so it seemed. But that's the thing about rings, the ring thing. Their power, in one form or another, never wanes. One has to give Wagner credit for forging an enduring franchise. No pun intended.
It would be time to take off the ring, when it was time to take off the ring. And on one recent day when the topic arose, I knew what to do. I asked Jane to slip it off my finger. Was I being pushed? I am highly sensitive in this arena, and a full body scan revealed no such pressure. It was time. And it was time to get some help. One doesn't have to do everything alone, and one shouldn't. After a year together, Jane and I, and not always an easy one, overshadowed as it has been by grief, it was time to move the ring cycle to its next stage.
My desk drawer, of course. Right next to the divorced ring. Except that time, bad memory and fate had already moved things along. I couldn't find the divorced ring. All I could find was Marlou's. Someone had removed it from her finger. And I had placed it, wisely and carefully, in a small plastic bag. Where the next one went. The two together, memorial to a marriage, honoring the past. Not forgotten, just no longer used. Nevermind the ring. For now there's just a finger with a white tan line. All it needs is a few days in the sun.
The problem is, I am actually an ignoramus here. I have never attended a Wagner opera, dismissing the genre along the lines of Woody Allen's quip about invading Poland. When in truth, what do I know? I have heard a bit of Wagner on the radio, and it does surge. In fact, it seems to surge on and on, the way the Magic Fingers do at Motel 6. Again, I should shut up. In fact, I really should shut up, because so many friends of mine, people of depth, insist that Wagner is an utter delight. I need to shut my mouth, grit my teeth and buy a ticket or two.
Besides, even an anti-Semitic asshole like Wagner can know a good thematic thing when he sees it. Rings do hold their power. After my divorce, mercifully almost 20 years ago, I did not know what to do with the former wedding ring. It seemed wrong to throw away. Being gold, after all. Hang on to it, some said. You can make something else from it, some other sort of jewelry. This seemed extraordinarily unlikely. Besides, I didn't want the silly thing forged into something new. I really wanted to get rid of it. Funny thing about rings. You can't. So the erstwhile wedding ring sat in a compartment in my desk drawer, right there next to the paperclips and gummed three-ring punch hole protectors. Both being rings. Showing that I am not devoid of logic.
Marlou's thing with rings...well, it was an overwhelming fact of our marriage. Strangely, this much fiercer saga began with a divorce. Hers. Marlou's mother gave her soon-to-be-divorced daughter the gift of a family heirloom. It came, I believe, from Marlou's great-grandmother, a native of Sweden, and a woman before her time. She immigrated to this country, itself a bold move. And she came alone. She married at some point, lived somewhere around Chicago, and when things domestic did not pan out, got divorced. This, in an era when people just didn't do that sort of thing. Particularly women. I may have a detail or two wrong here, but as in all things with rings, it's the spirit that counts.
It was rather a magnificent antique ring, the one that Marlou wore. Full of family history. And pulsing with some burden of family psychology that eluded both of us. Marlou began dreaming about the ring. At times, she dreamt that she had lost it. At other times, an intruder broke into our bedroom and stole it away. Frequently, she simply rose in the middle of the night, walked to the wardrobe and made sure it was still there, where she put it, always put it, when retiring.
The problem with powerful dreams is that they scream for consciousness. They impel us toward some sort of knowledge, and if they get in our way, we begin screaming ourselves. Which soon began to happen. The dreams turned into nightmares, content the same...ring loss, ring theft...but cranked up in volume and terror. Marlou began waking and screaming in the night. I'd had just enough psychoanalysis myself to feel frustrated, anxious and concerned as the nightmares took over. But Marlou wasn't one for too much inner delving. She accepted the nightmares. Life went on, despite the occasional violent interruption at night. Now and then on holiday, we would find ourselves returning to a hotel room in search of the ring. Which miraculously was never actually lost. Whatever its meaning, the centrality and mythic power of Marlou's ring seemed beyond doubt.
As for our wedding rings, Marlou had custom ones made. Somehow this fell to her. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps I was feeling a bit ring-shy. Marlou went to a local jeweler, a Chinese-American man, purchased what she wanted and returned with something more. Stories. The man was full of tales of marriage, generally instructive, supportive. She was a shy woman, Marlou, intensely private, yet she could open her heart in extraordinary ways. Perhaps she needed a baseline of formality, some sort of politesse that established trust, even credibility, a foundation for a personal exchange within an impersonal container. I probably know something about this myself.
So what to do with this, the next ring? Ring #2. Something about this, the loss of two relationships counted in jewelry, bothered me. I was quite certain that the first wedding ring was still in my desk drawer. In fact, in the left divider, adjacent to keys or something with an equally infinite shelf life. Whenever I finally removed my wedding ring, the good marriage's symbolic remnant...the thing would get plunked down next to its predecessor. Both gold. No sense in throwing them away. Waste not, want not.
I asked the young rabbi I see occasionally, my grief guide. What does one do with wedding rings after death of a spouse? Nothing, he said. No need to deal with that now. I was enormously relieved. He's an intuitive guy, this rabbi. Enough stress already. The ring would sort itself out.
Every few months I would stare at the ring and wonder. Why am I still wearing this? Does it mean I cannot let go? Does it mean I am living in the past? Is this ring retention in honor of Marlou? All that sort of thing, not to mention the social impact. Did people think I was still married? Why not? What would be wrong with that? And then I would forget the whole thing. The ring did not get in the way. Literally or symbolically. Who knew what people thought? And who cared?
Jane cared about me, that was increasingly clear. And I cared about her. The ring? I must have mentioned it a time or two. She understood. It would sort itself out. I did not want to be pushed. That much I knew. The whole death experience had been pushing me for over a year, for several years, in fact, as soon as the diagnosis. Fuck the ring. Or so it seemed. But that's the thing about rings, the ring thing. Their power, in one form or another, never wanes. One has to give Wagner credit for forging an enduring franchise. No pun intended.
It would be time to take off the ring, when it was time to take off the ring. And on one recent day when the topic arose, I knew what to do. I asked Jane to slip it off my finger. Was I being pushed? I am highly sensitive in this arena, and a full body scan revealed no such pressure. It was time. And it was time to get some help. One doesn't have to do everything alone, and one shouldn't. After a year together, Jane and I, and not always an easy one, overshadowed as it has been by grief, it was time to move the ring cycle to its next stage.
My desk drawer, of course. Right next to the divorced ring. Except that time, bad memory and fate had already moved things along. I couldn't find the divorced ring. All I could find was Marlou's. Someone had removed it from her finger. And I had placed it, wisely and carefully, in a small plastic bag. Where the next one went. The two together, memorial to a marriage, honoring the past. Not forgotten, just no longer used. Nevermind the ring. For now there's just a finger with a white tan line. All it needs is a few days in the sun.
I awaken bereft, doubting the worthwhileness of lifting my torso to vertical, lost in bedroom space, perceiving little except my own heaviness. The summer day is gray, cool and probably much like the one my cousin Caroline is currently experiencing in Gloucestershire. Global warming has sucked the heat out of California, deposited some in the American midwest, the rest in western Russia. Leaving me with the bedroom ceiling, the morning and summertime, when the livin' is supposed to be easy.
Caffeination may not be the ultimate solution, but it will suffice for now. Lorna, my usual morning helper, has decamped with her husband to their mountain cabin. I slip on shorts, drop my feet into oversized shoes...comical looking yet capacious without my leg brace...and hit the battery-powered road. There are only two viable options for coffee in Menlo Park, plus a couple of marginal possibilities. Say, four cafés where the food or the cappuccino pass muster. They beckon like points on a compass. Two lie to the west, two to the east. They seem so routine, so hammered into my consciousness, that I can't help noting the stodginess of my life. Contracting in scope, it seems.
Mildly unnerving to get behind the wheel of my van, these days. I can't tell if my reactions have slowed, my paranoia accelerated. Or if I simply do not drive enough to stay in practice, keep my confidence up. In any case, a drive around Palo Alto yesterday proved mildly exhausting. Thus distracted, it occurs to me that my wheelchair control has turned westward, reacting like a Ouija board, toward the Illy coffee at the neighborhood's upscale grocer. It hardly matters. For half the experience of going for coffee lies in the going. It's maybe a two-minute bounce down Fair Oaks Avenue, but that's long enough to see some portion of life pass before my eyes.
I've gone to the dogs. Jane has two of them. And hanging out with her has resembled a merging of families, not to mention species. When I explain that Jane is raising rescue dogs people invariably jump to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps it's my choice of words. They are not the St. Bernards with caskets of brandy, which is what people tend to assume. More precisely, they associate the guy in the wheelchair with helper dogs. And that's not it. Rescued dogs, that would be the better description. Her dogs have been rescued from bad owners. They were abused in various ways, and Jane is undoing the damage.
More fascinating is the underlying, and shared, human psychology. I am either an enabler, co-conspirator or partner in all this rescuing. Take Bixby. Is he some mixture of spaniel and sheep dog? I am very weak on breeds, but stronger on backgrounds. Occasionally one reads about some demented person who had given over an entire house to cats or dogs, the animals breeding uncontrollably, unattended, fed but otherwise forgotten. Thus, Bixby's origins.
And seemingly, my own. Why wander down the Bixby road without explaining how much I identify with this dog? Let me count the ways. When I first met this dog, he was skittish and fearful. Bixby would look up at me, back away. Then approach. Then back away. In emotional terms, I am utterly familiar with this. Liking people, cautious about approaching them, making some overture, retreating. Trying it again.
Yet isn't this a childhood wound that has largely healed? In scope, isn't this par for the human course? What is it that emotionally sucks me into Bixby and his losses and struggles? Surely I have moved on. Hell, Bixby has moved on, even in the brief year I have known him. Now he approaches and much of the time submits to petting. As do I. Ask Jane.
It's a bittersweet connection, Bixby's and mine. I sense his tentativeness and fear. I sense his need for connection. And perhaps most invigorating for me, I sense his joy.
Bixby grew into doggiehood with strange patterns and blanks. Just yesterday, the four of us headed out for a bit of shopping, the two dogs on leads, me in the wheelchair. Bixby stopped to sniff a bush. Seemingly the most routine of dog activities, but not for him. Jane advised that I keep some distance while Bixby went about his olfactory explorations. The four of us proceeded another block or so, then another sniffing, followed by a peeing. Jane was relieved.
This is where Isabella comes into the picture. This dog is part boxer, I think. In any case, her origins with a homeless person have left her generally anxious, starved for affection, and almost Bixby's opposite. Given the option, Isabella would accept petting on a 24-hour basis. As Bixby's housemate, her role has been canine instructress. Isabella has shown him how to wander about the world sniffing, not to mention peeing and marking. Thus Jane's advice to back off and give Bixby a moment to sniff, get it together, assemble the otherwise automatic associations that lead dogs to urinate.
Bixby never learned to play. Who knows what went on inside his 25-dog house? Certainly eating was problematic. To this day, with each bite of doggy kibble, Bixby wanders from bowl to front room to chew. He returns to get another bite of food, retreats to eat, returns. Even dining must not have been safe.
In any case, play was a luxury that didn't happen. Jane describes how Isabella began playfully batting Bixby around to show him how to have normal doggy skirmishes. For the longest while there was no reaction. Then, gradually, he got it. Now the two of them rough house, play-wrestling and mildly snarling. Still, there are gaps. Isabella occasionally drops a ball in front of Bixby, gives it a push and watches to see if he will chase it. No dice. Bixby isn't having any of this ball chasing. And, who knows? Having emerged from his hell house partially blind, he may not be able to see well enough to chase anything.
That I find all of this so poignant, well, how curious. The truth is that I grew up without enough play. Life became preternaturally grim around third grade. Something in me became falsely adult. My job was to save my parents' marriage. It was hard work, round-the-clock, and without a neighborhood and other children, there were few distractions from the mission.
There wasn't much play. And there wasn't much joy. Marlou noticed my trouble with expressing the latter. I seem afraid to let go. Afraid that the high moments, life's Dionysian peaks, will...what? Lift to me too far and drop me too hard? Reveal the extent of my longing?
Which is why Bixby is my current therapist. He has an open look about him, something hopeful, when he runs up to me. And he does run, even dances about, whenever we meet. We have a bond. And in his dog's life, where everything is shorter and condensed, his development teaches me much about my own. Bixby can get downright exuberant these days. Yes, he's still a bit afraid of petting. But he has this way of throwing back his head, lifting his paws and prancing. It's joyous, infectious and maybe not all that canine.
The only curious thing is why it's all so poignant. Sometimes this quality threatens to overwhelm me. Perhaps through lack of perspective. Maybe it's just life. Maybe things feel this way to lots of people. Maybe we are all in the doghouse.
Caffeination may not be the ultimate solution, but it will suffice for now. Lorna, my usual morning helper, has decamped with her husband to their mountain cabin. I slip on shorts, drop my feet into oversized shoes...comical looking yet capacious without my leg brace...and hit the battery-powered road. There are only two viable options for coffee in Menlo Park, plus a couple of marginal possibilities. Say, four cafés where the food or the cappuccino pass muster. They beckon like points on a compass. Two lie to the west, two to the east. They seem so routine, so hammered into my consciousness, that I can't help noting the stodginess of my life. Contracting in scope, it seems.
Mildly unnerving to get behind the wheel of my van, these days. I can't tell if my reactions have slowed, my paranoia accelerated. Or if I simply do not drive enough to stay in practice, keep my confidence up. In any case, a drive around Palo Alto yesterday proved mildly exhausting. Thus distracted, it occurs to me that my wheelchair control has turned westward, reacting like a Ouija board, toward the Illy coffee at the neighborhood's upscale grocer. It hardly matters. For half the experience of going for coffee lies in the going. It's maybe a two-minute bounce down Fair Oaks Avenue, but that's long enough to see some portion of life pass before my eyes.
I've gone to the dogs. Jane has two of them. And hanging out with her has resembled a merging of families, not to mention species. When I explain that Jane is raising rescue dogs people invariably jump to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps it's my choice of words. They are not the St. Bernards with caskets of brandy, which is what people tend to assume. More precisely, they associate the guy in the wheelchair with helper dogs. And that's not it. Rescued dogs, that would be the better description. Her dogs have been rescued from bad owners. They were abused in various ways, and Jane is undoing the damage.
More fascinating is the underlying, and shared, human psychology. I am either an enabler, co-conspirator or partner in all this rescuing. Take Bixby. Is he some mixture of spaniel and sheep dog? I am very weak on breeds, but stronger on backgrounds. Occasionally one reads about some demented person who had given over an entire house to cats or dogs, the animals breeding uncontrollably, unattended, fed but otherwise forgotten. Thus, Bixby's origins.
And seemingly, my own. Why wander down the Bixby road without explaining how much I identify with this dog? Let me count the ways. When I first met this dog, he was skittish and fearful. Bixby would look up at me, back away. Then approach. Then back away. In emotional terms, I am utterly familiar with this. Liking people, cautious about approaching them, making some overture, retreating. Trying it again.
Yet isn't this a childhood wound that has largely healed? In scope, isn't this par for the human course? What is it that emotionally sucks me into Bixby and his losses and struggles? Surely I have moved on. Hell, Bixby has moved on, even in the brief year I have known him. Now he approaches and much of the time submits to petting. As do I. Ask Jane.
It's a bittersweet connection, Bixby's and mine. I sense his tentativeness and fear. I sense his need for connection. And perhaps most invigorating for me, I sense his joy.
Bixby grew into doggiehood with strange patterns and blanks. Just yesterday, the four of us headed out for a bit of shopping, the two dogs on leads, me in the wheelchair. Bixby stopped to sniff a bush. Seemingly the most routine of dog activities, but not for him. Jane advised that I keep some distance while Bixby went about his olfactory explorations. The four of us proceeded another block or so, then another sniffing, followed by a peeing. Jane was relieved.
This is where Isabella comes into the picture. This dog is part boxer, I think. In any case, her origins with a homeless person have left her generally anxious, starved for affection, and almost Bixby's opposite. Given the option, Isabella would accept petting on a 24-hour basis. As Bixby's housemate, her role has been canine instructress. Isabella has shown him how to wander about the world sniffing, not to mention peeing and marking. Thus Jane's advice to back off and give Bixby a moment to sniff, get it together, assemble the otherwise automatic associations that lead dogs to urinate.
Bixby never learned to play. Who knows what went on inside his 25-dog house? Certainly eating was problematic. To this day, with each bite of doggy kibble, Bixby wanders from bowl to front room to chew. He returns to get another bite of food, retreats to eat, returns. Even dining must not have been safe.
In any case, play was a luxury that didn't happen. Jane describes how Isabella began playfully batting Bixby around to show him how to have normal doggy skirmishes. For the longest while there was no reaction. Then, gradually, he got it. Now the two of them rough house, play-wrestling and mildly snarling. Still, there are gaps. Isabella occasionally drops a ball in front of Bixby, gives it a push and watches to see if he will chase it. No dice. Bixby isn't having any of this ball chasing. And, who knows? Having emerged from his hell house partially blind, he may not be able to see well enough to chase anything.
That I find all of this so poignant, well, how curious. The truth is that I grew up without enough play. Life became preternaturally grim around third grade. Something in me became falsely adult. My job was to save my parents' marriage. It was hard work, round-the-clock, and without a neighborhood and other children, there were few distractions from the mission.
There wasn't much play. And there wasn't much joy. Marlou noticed my trouble with expressing the latter. I seem afraid to let go. Afraid that the high moments, life's Dionysian peaks, will...what? Lift to me too far and drop me too hard? Reveal the extent of my longing?
Which is why Bixby is my current therapist. He has an open look about him, something hopeful, when he runs up to me. And he does run, even dances about, whenever we meet. We have a bond. And in his dog's life, where everything is shorter and condensed, his development teaches me much about my own. Bixby can get downright exuberant these days. Yes, he's still a bit afraid of petting. But he has this way of throwing back his head, lifting his paws and prancing. It's joyous, infectious and maybe not all that canine.
The only curious thing is why it's all so poignant. Sometimes this quality threatens to overwhelm me. Perhaps through lack of perspective. Maybe it's just life. Maybe things feel this way to lots of people. Maybe we are all in the doghouse.
At 4 AM, I find myself in some public housing project, sharing an elevator with a man wielding a cosh and a cotton swab with chloroform...who clearly wishes me ill and would doubtless do me in, but for the timely opening of the elevator door and the appearance of a resident. I waken and stare at the ceiling. Do all people have nightmares of this sort? What does it mean and what, if anything, should I do about it? Perhaps it is enough that I can get back to sleep. Which I do. A full eight hours being pleasantly unaccounted for.
Which brings me to the morning shower. It is a dangerous place for quadriplegics, the bathroom. The bathtub in particular. It's a long way down to the porcelain bottom of the tub. And a long way up, should someone find themselves there. That, and the fact that the real danger is never the one that presents itself. It's the unexpected. And this morning, having unlocked the front door for the 8 AM arrival of my daily helper, having gotten myself centered on the plastic shower chair, everything safe and accounted for, damned if the cosmic fucker doesn't come after me.
It's the cold water. I can't turn the knob. This is the direct result of the recent 'improvement' my landlord Tom has made to the shower. Having replaced not only the leaking washers, but the old-fashioned and much more functional faucet knobs, I am now facing a situation. I cannot turn this cold water on. The handle won't budge. Worse, I won't budge. I have had enough caffeine to get me as far as the shower chair, and this is it. I am not getting out of the shower to, for example, grab a washcloth which might aid in gripping the stubborn knob.
What to do? That is always the question. With a disability, such issues arise regularly, but unexpectedly. Adaptation is constant. I am going to have a fucking shower. So get out of my way. And this is another thing. I cannot believe that someone is not doing this to me. Frequently, that someone is myself. At the moment, pleasantly, and perhaps having had a good rest, I blame the faucet and absence of cold water on some other. Why? Why? This is my morning lament. I grab the cold water handle very hard and do everything possible to make it turn. This includes gritting my teeth. Nothing happens. I decide that I will use hot water only, turning the spray on for the briefest of spritzes. This on and off effort, I am confident, will do the job. Surprisingly, it does. In the end, I have had a shower, of sorts, doubtless very water-efficient. And, yes, anticipating the next day, a dry washcloth does provide the cushioned grip necessary to free the cold water faucet. Oy.
Thus, my life. Which, when I think about it, is much easier than schlepping about with fellow Neanderthals in search of berries, dodging the occasional sabertooth, and probably not getting a lot of sleep. From this perspective, I have little to complain about. I have the luxury of consciousness. And these days, much of the latter focuses squarely on death.
'I have a toothache,' announces the student in Ionesco's 'The Lesson.' Poor thing, her body is already decaying. This is how it begins. And it doesn't matter what happens next. She can strap herself into the most antiseptic of airline seats and fly her bacterial self around the planet. No matter. She is still poised on the brink of decomposition. Me? I am not only poised, but staring at the heart of the process. Watching months of kitchen waste go into the compost tumbler in my garden. Just a little thing, it is, a chamber smaller than a mini beer keg on rollers. Stuff goes in, I roll it about for aeration, and it grows sodden, odoriferous, then expires in a heap of nothingness. Just this morning Paul, my occasional helper, buried three months of the compost in a tiny corner of one raised bed.
And to what effect? Do I not know? Am I not the Tomato Man? I have grown tomatoes in these parts for nigh on 20 years. I am an old-timer, an agrarian, of the earth. And what have I seen? Well, I have seen lots of curled and dying tomato leaves. Every gardener knows about this. The two soil pests that plague home grown tomatoes. They are officially known as 'wilts,' and the seed industry invests heavily in breeding varieties that are immune. Garden websites will advise you against growing tomatoes in the same location two years in a row.
Supposedly, it's that simple, unless you listen to the high priests of organic gardening. Yes, it appears to be a sort of religion, but never mind. Some things are ruined by religion, others improved, and many unscathed. The general idea is that there is something damn close to magical about 'natural' fertilizers, pest control measures, and the like. In fact advocates of organic gardening go on to boring length about the topic. Actually, I know precious little. But I happen to be into decomposition these days. So quite by accident, I have become something of a believer myself.
First, I noticed that tomato plants may begin to succumb to wilt disease -- but there's a chicken shit solution. Yep, just drop by your local garden center. Buy a bag of chicken manure, dig the stuff into the ground, and the wilt will more or less stop. Organic growers believe in things biotic. This means, if I understand correctly, that all the bacteria and natural organisms of soil are not only good, but essential. Is the chicken manure cure for wilt part of this general concept? I believe so, but don't quote me. I don't really know. I don't really care. More interesting was what happened after I began digging in heaps of smelly crap from my compost tumbler. And I do mean smelly. Try decomposing cabbage leaves for several months, and you'll get the idea.
I suppose that I like the efficiency of composting. Some people are deeply committed to recycling. All these practices that remind us of the finite earth are a good thing, it seems to me. Anyway, my eco-minded green thing is compost. And a succession of smelly mashes have gone from the plastic compost tumbler right into the ground. Right next to the current tomatoes. Which are producing tomatoes at a rate that defies belief.
Belief in what? This and that, is the answer. Western culture is cracking open like an overcooked egg. Trust me, one can see evidence in my garden. The rigid adherents to biochemistry line up on one side, the woo-woo acolytes of organic farming on the other. Neither understands the other's knowledge, and both could benefit from a month's job swap. I mean, if you're raising tomatoes pesticide-free and grown with fermented yak dung, it can't hurt to learn about the chemical absorption and uptake of nitrogen. And if you spend days staring at molecular models onscreen, it can't hurt to grab a shovel and see what my compost does. Because a physiotherapist can know more than a doctor. And a widower can know more...than he wants to.
Which brings me to the morning shower. It is a dangerous place for quadriplegics, the bathroom. The bathtub in particular. It's a long way down to the porcelain bottom of the tub. And a long way up, should someone find themselves there. That, and the fact that the real danger is never the one that presents itself. It's the unexpected. And this morning, having unlocked the front door for the 8 AM arrival of my daily helper, having gotten myself centered on the plastic shower chair, everything safe and accounted for, damned if the cosmic fucker doesn't come after me.
It's the cold water. I can't turn the knob. This is the direct result of the recent 'improvement' my landlord Tom has made to the shower. Having replaced not only the leaking washers, but the old-fashioned and much more functional faucet knobs, I am now facing a situation. I cannot turn this cold water on. The handle won't budge. Worse, I won't budge. I have had enough caffeine to get me as far as the shower chair, and this is it. I am not getting out of the shower to, for example, grab a washcloth which might aid in gripping the stubborn knob.
What to do? That is always the question. With a disability, such issues arise regularly, but unexpectedly. Adaptation is constant. I am going to have a fucking shower. So get out of my way. And this is another thing. I cannot believe that someone is not doing this to me. Frequently, that someone is myself. At the moment, pleasantly, and perhaps having had a good rest, I blame the faucet and absence of cold water on some other. Why? Why? This is my morning lament. I grab the cold water handle very hard and do everything possible to make it turn. This includes gritting my teeth. Nothing happens. I decide that I will use hot water only, turning the spray on for the briefest of spritzes. This on and off effort, I am confident, will do the job. Surprisingly, it does. In the end, I have had a shower, of sorts, doubtless very water-efficient. And, yes, anticipating the next day, a dry washcloth does provide the cushioned grip necessary to free the cold water faucet. Oy.
Thus, my life. Which, when I think about it, is much easier than schlepping about with fellow Neanderthals in search of berries, dodging the occasional sabertooth, and probably not getting a lot of sleep. From this perspective, I have little to complain about. I have the luxury of consciousness. And these days, much of the latter focuses squarely on death.
'I have a toothache,' announces the student in Ionesco's 'The Lesson.' Poor thing, her body is already decaying. This is how it begins. And it doesn't matter what happens next. She can strap herself into the most antiseptic of airline seats and fly her bacterial self around the planet. No matter. She is still poised on the brink of decomposition. Me? I am not only poised, but staring at the heart of the process. Watching months of kitchen waste go into the compost tumbler in my garden. Just a little thing, it is, a chamber smaller than a mini beer keg on rollers. Stuff goes in, I roll it about for aeration, and it grows sodden, odoriferous, then expires in a heap of nothingness. Just this morning Paul, my occasional helper, buried three months of the compost in a tiny corner of one raised bed.
And to what effect? Do I not know? Am I not the Tomato Man? I have grown tomatoes in these parts for nigh on 20 years. I am an old-timer, an agrarian, of the earth. And what have I seen? Well, I have seen lots of curled and dying tomato leaves. Every gardener knows about this. The two soil pests that plague home grown tomatoes. They are officially known as 'wilts,' and the seed industry invests heavily in breeding varieties that are immune. Garden websites will advise you against growing tomatoes in the same location two years in a row.
Supposedly, it's that simple, unless you listen to the high priests of organic gardening. Yes, it appears to be a sort of religion, but never mind. Some things are ruined by religion, others improved, and many unscathed. The general idea is that there is something damn close to magical about 'natural' fertilizers, pest control measures, and the like. In fact advocates of organic gardening go on to boring length about the topic. Actually, I know precious little. But I happen to be into decomposition these days. So quite by accident, I have become something of a believer myself.
First, I noticed that tomato plants may begin to succumb to wilt disease -- but there's a chicken shit solution. Yep, just drop by your local garden center. Buy a bag of chicken manure, dig the stuff into the ground, and the wilt will more or less stop. Organic growers believe in things biotic. This means, if I understand correctly, that all the bacteria and natural organisms of soil are not only good, but essential. Is the chicken manure cure for wilt part of this general concept? I believe so, but don't quote me. I don't really know. I don't really care. More interesting was what happened after I began digging in heaps of smelly crap from my compost tumbler. And I do mean smelly. Try decomposing cabbage leaves for several months, and you'll get the idea.
I suppose that I like the efficiency of composting. Some people are deeply committed to recycling. All these practices that remind us of the finite earth are a good thing, it seems to me. Anyway, my eco-minded green thing is compost. And a succession of smelly mashes have gone from the plastic compost tumbler right into the ground. Right next to the current tomatoes. Which are producing tomatoes at a rate that defies belief.
Belief in what? This and that, is the answer. Western culture is cracking open like an overcooked egg. Trust me, one can see evidence in my garden. The rigid adherents to biochemistry line up on one side, the woo-woo acolytes of organic farming on the other. Neither understands the other's knowledge, and both could benefit from a month's job swap. I mean, if you're raising tomatoes pesticide-free and grown with fermented yak dung, it can't hurt to learn about the chemical absorption and uptake of nitrogen. And if you spend days staring at molecular models onscreen, it can't hurt to grab a shovel and see what my compost does. Because a physiotherapist can know more than a doctor. And a widower can know more...than he wants to.
I have been tired lately. Several causes have come to mind. I may be sleeping poorly. I may be depressed. I may be focusing on Marlou's shawl, inexplicably sitting on the sofa in my front room. The garment doubles, I suppose, as a rug. The sort of blanket that once warmed the laps of Victorian heroines. This seems to be at the center of things. The shawl.
The curious fact is that I can imagine Marlou wearing it, and this image comes to mind without pain or regret. There she is, my departed wife, wrapping this shawl around herself for an evening out. It is both the wrapping and the wearing that strike me now. I can see Marlou pulling the shawl up and over her shoulders in a way that was distinctly hers. She had a grace. She was graceful. The quality was deeply and unshakably hers.
Marlou's mother recalls watching her daughter, barely at the toddler stage, standing in her crib. There was a small bowl of Cheerios next to the little girl. Marlou carefully picked the cereal pieces one by one, eyed each and placed the single morsel in her mouth. Then she picked up another. She never dropped them. Or crushed them. Marlou had a quality of precision and delicacy. It was there when she helped me dress. Or stand up from some low chair. It was there when she set the table. It was her. And that her mother noticed this quality early on, well, that is another important part of the story. Being noticed must strengthen us, encourage our finer qualities.
Many say that in getting over the death of a loved one, there comes a stage when one forgets the worst. The agony of dying. The misery of aging. This fades away, and a more idealized memory takes over. The person in their prime, at their best. I have always distrusted this process. Much of the last year, the notion of forgetting Marlou's suffering felt like betrayal and denial. I was in no mood to prettify what she endured. Or pretend that she wasn't ravaged at the end.
Still, this thing has occurred. On a Saturday afternoon, she has risen, in a manner of speaking, to sit on the couch, draw up her shawl one side at a time and sit, with accustomed composure, looking at the wall. I have been looking at the same wall all year, sometimes feeling up against it. But now I am looking at Marlou, or the remembered Marlou, and seeing what I have not seen for a long time.
That we live in our bodies, and we live a certain way. This quality of Marlou's, this gracefulness and poise. It had to be natural because the alternative would have been horrible. Marlou was comfortable in her body. Her personal carriage was neither over controlled nor prissy. She had plenty of sensual ease and looseness about her. Combined with gracefulness. There was a beauty in this. And it reflected an inner beauty. And I see it now, not entirely certain what it means or meant, but it has entered my life in a particular way. And it's sitting on my couch.
What's sitting on my bird feeder would be no mystery to Marlou. I can spot the finches, including the goldfinches, but the rest? This knack of identifying Bewick's Wren, both by birdsong and characteristic crown, fit in with Marlou's general capacity for delicacy and detail. As for me, the birds are mostly a blur. They bat about in what for an introvert is a sort of background. I see them. I also see their impact, the astonishing decline in bird seed, seemingly hourly, as they eat their way through my feeder. But this afternoon for the first time in a long while I am seeing what happens. Six birds at a time, sometimes seven, work the feeder. There's a bird on each of the four perches sticking its beak into a feeding hole. And there is the backup. At regular intervals, the latter lunge from their perches, fly at a feeding bird with talons spread and wings beating furiously, and drive off the competitor. That bird feeds a while. Another on a branch comes at it. And so it goes. Musical perches. It's not a pretty thing, the food chain.
It's not a pretty thing, survival. Nature in all its harshness must be incorporated. Which brings me to the strange gift of Jane. She has that rare ability to see the upside in human experience without denying its cruelty or pain. And she appreciates the moment. This is her sort of thing, watching the birds as they are, right now. A sober, credible optimism. I have needed someone like this. There are not many.
And this is death in a guise I have not yet experienced. But what I recognize as closer to the time-honored and universal version. Marlou, looking quite unscathed, adjusting her shawl, as though getting ready. For what, eternity? For my own death? In any case, she is sitting there, both composed and sensual, ready for what's next. She is smiling, and that is important. She is neither looking at me nor ignoring me. She is looking ahead. At the wall, I think. Or at the blank TV screen. The latter, which looked massive when the installers moved it into our living room, had long been a point of contention...until it was switched on and filled with movies, which Marlou loved. Now the contention is long forgotten, as are the movies. And the fact that I rarely turn the thing on now hardly matters.
For Marlou is happily staring ahead. She has survived her own death. She is back, and at her best. Not idealized, but simply at her finest. She had, or has, a quality of peace and repose that I lack. A natural optimism. Gentleness, femininity and the capacity to wait. Actually, she could not wait long without saying something irreverent. Her sardonic side could be harsh. But not at this moment. If she is about to say something, her words will deflate and include at the same time. Like lunging at soap bubbles with a knitting needle. Something joyous and sharp.
In short, Marlou is back. She has decided to visit for a while this afternoon, doubtless will soon depart. Only to return. I think she has come back, because her pictures have gone away. They now stare at each other in a desk drawer. I don't know what Marlou wants, but she seems content enough. There's no hurry, that's clear enough.
The curious fact is that I can imagine Marlou wearing it, and this image comes to mind without pain or regret. There she is, my departed wife, wrapping this shawl around herself for an evening out. It is both the wrapping and the wearing that strike me now. I can see Marlou pulling the shawl up and over her shoulders in a way that was distinctly hers. She had a grace. She was graceful. The quality was deeply and unshakably hers.
Marlou's mother recalls watching her daughter, barely at the toddler stage, standing in her crib. There was a small bowl of Cheerios next to the little girl. Marlou carefully picked the cereal pieces one by one, eyed each and placed the single morsel in her mouth. Then she picked up another. She never dropped them. Or crushed them. Marlou had a quality of precision and delicacy. It was there when she helped me dress. Or stand up from some low chair. It was there when she set the table. It was her. And that her mother noticed this quality early on, well, that is another important part of the story. Being noticed must strengthen us, encourage our finer qualities.
Many say that in getting over the death of a loved one, there comes a stage when one forgets the worst. The agony of dying. The misery of aging. This fades away, and a more idealized memory takes over. The person in their prime, at their best. I have always distrusted this process. Much of the last year, the notion of forgetting Marlou's suffering felt like betrayal and denial. I was in no mood to prettify what she endured. Or pretend that she wasn't ravaged at the end.
Still, this thing has occurred. On a Saturday afternoon, she has risen, in a manner of speaking, to sit on the couch, draw up her shawl one side at a time and sit, with accustomed composure, looking at the wall. I have been looking at the same wall all year, sometimes feeling up against it. But now I am looking at Marlou, or the remembered Marlou, and seeing what I have not seen for a long time.
That we live in our bodies, and we live a certain way. This quality of Marlou's, this gracefulness and poise. It had to be natural because the alternative would have been horrible. Marlou was comfortable in her body. Her personal carriage was neither over controlled nor prissy. She had plenty of sensual ease and looseness about her. Combined with gracefulness. There was a beauty in this. And it reflected an inner beauty. And I see it now, not entirely certain what it means or meant, but it has entered my life in a particular way. And it's sitting on my couch.
What's sitting on my bird feeder would be no mystery to Marlou. I can spot the finches, including the goldfinches, but the rest? This knack of identifying Bewick's Wren, both by birdsong and characteristic crown, fit in with Marlou's general capacity for delicacy and detail. As for me, the birds are mostly a blur. They bat about in what for an introvert is a sort of background. I see them. I also see their impact, the astonishing decline in bird seed, seemingly hourly, as they eat their way through my feeder. But this afternoon for the first time in a long while I am seeing what happens. Six birds at a time, sometimes seven, work the feeder. There's a bird on each of the four perches sticking its beak into a feeding hole. And there is the backup. At regular intervals, the latter lunge from their perches, fly at a feeding bird with talons spread and wings beating furiously, and drive off the competitor. That bird feeds a while. Another on a branch comes at it. And so it goes. Musical perches. It's not a pretty thing, the food chain.
It's not a pretty thing, survival. Nature in all its harshness must be incorporated. Which brings me to the strange gift of Jane. She has that rare ability to see the upside in human experience without denying its cruelty or pain. And she appreciates the moment. This is her sort of thing, watching the birds as they are, right now. A sober, credible optimism. I have needed someone like this. There are not many.
And this is death in a guise I have not yet experienced. But what I recognize as closer to the time-honored and universal version. Marlou, looking quite unscathed, adjusting her shawl, as though getting ready. For what, eternity? For my own death? In any case, she is sitting there, both composed and sensual, ready for what's next. She is smiling, and that is important. She is neither looking at me nor ignoring me. She is looking ahead. At the wall, I think. Or at the blank TV screen. The latter, which looked massive when the installers moved it into our living room, had long been a point of contention...until it was switched on and filled with movies, which Marlou loved. Now the contention is long forgotten, as are the movies. And the fact that I rarely turn the thing on now hardly matters.
For Marlou is happily staring ahead. She has survived her own death. She is back, and at her best. Not idealized, but simply at her finest. She had, or has, a quality of peace and repose that I lack. A natural optimism. Gentleness, femininity and the capacity to wait. Actually, she could not wait long without saying something irreverent. Her sardonic side could be harsh. But not at this moment. If she is about to say something, her words will deflate and include at the same time. Like lunging at soap bubbles with a knitting needle. Something joyous and sharp.
In short, Marlou is back. She has decided to visit for a while this afternoon, doubtless will soon depart. Only to return. I think she has come back, because her pictures have gone away. They now stare at each other in a desk drawer. I don't know what Marlou wants, but she seems content enough. There's no hurry, that's clear enough.
