Fear

'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.