Thanks

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.