September 2010 Archives

'Hey, guys,' I say, rolling straight toward them, 'you are blocking my wheelchair.'

The tallest one seems to notice me for the first time, fully taking in my presence, my existence.  He turns to his friend, raising his eyebrows as though to say 'is he serious...doesn't he know who we are?'

I raise my head in mock cheer, a gesture somewhere between supremely confident and in-your-face defiant.  The smallest flick of the wheelchair joystick rolls me forward and into the shins of the shorter guy to my right.

'Fuck off,' he says, shoving my shoulder.

'Big mistake,' I say, hitting the chair's off button.  I am up and on my feet in seconds, slapping the tall one with the back of my hand, elbowing his friend.  'I would apologize,' I say.  'I really would.'

I am not saying this to anyone in particular but really should be addressing Mr. tall, for he is coming at me now with his fist, preparing to kick too if I sense correctly.  Nothing to do but grab his wrist and flip him, jujitsu style.  I raise my hand and the short one jumps back, and as I step toward him he runs.  The same gesture makes the tall one back into the street.  A car turning into the underground lot almost hits him.  He jumps between two parked Toyotas.  Both are staring at me, trying to make sense of this, how a guy rolling at chest height is now up and knocking them about.

I am trying to make sense of it too, rolling home from Caltrain passing these two guys by the café, almost disappointed that they are not menacing, such is my angry state.  My violent fantasy ended, I go inside and order some soup.  In the Indian summer warmth I consume the stuff in the evening semidarkness on the terrace, reading a newspaper in insufficient light.  Is my cold going away?  I guess.  It would be nice to stop waking up tired and achy.

Gosh, but it's gratifying to imagine leaping from my wheelchair and kicking butt.  The antecedent to such street fantasies is obvious enough to me.  But the preposterousness of the particular fantasy boggles even my mind.  Why would someone so supremely accomplished in martial arts be cruising around Menlo Park in a wheelchair?  Just looking for trouble?  Posing as incapacitated so as to get the jump on people?  Why?

A fantasy fails to gratify if it becomes too fantastic.  But this one keeps working.  Why not some other fantasy?  A wheelchair with built-in machine guns?  Secret laser rays emanating from some point between the wheels?  Even a chair that leaps and lurches at weapon-grade speed?  All of these scenarios make imaginative sense, if the wheelchair user remains what he is, a cripple.  But in my fantasy, the cripple is only intermittently disabled.  His situation comes and goes.

Which, if I think about it, mirrors my own life.  For stretches, significant periods of time, I do not register my disability.  Other things cross my mind.  This doesn't.  It comes and goes.  It comes the next morning on my way to Peet's.  As I approach, it all seems too much.  Someone will see me in my failure, that is the feeling.  I failed my job at the local high school foundation and will bump into some of the parents.  Someone, a reminder of my unaccomplished life, will appear.  I will want to disappear.  I will be stuck, staring at a cup of steaming caffeine.  So I will go elsewhere.  No, I won't.  I will roll straight toward Peet's, toward humiliation, the frightening, the unknown.  And whatever happens will not be a fantasy.

'Don't move,' the cop warns, in any two bit thriller.  The advice is eminently worthwhile.  It is what I need to remember these days, each day, every day.  For the cold that is supposedly over sneaks up on me, usually at night, and whispers this message in my ear: don't move.  Which is all one needs to know about this cold.  Things are better, much better, if one expends no energy at all.  Trouble is, the body needs to move.  Mine in particular.  A vicious trade off, this.  

So, for example, this very morning, damned if I didn't feel obliged to pedal my quadriplegic ass off on the exercycle.  Which was quite splendid for joints, well-being, mobility and lifespan, doubtless.  But here I am in the afternoon, swooning with the aches and fatigue of what is definitely a cold.  Go figure.

Where am I?  What has it meant to have Jane depart and return?  Why did I wake up out of a very deep sleep, my first with her in a couple of weeks, feeling so anxious this very morning?  What was there to say about all of this?

The getting of wisdom...it has no consistent way.  I tried to make sense of things this morning, musing and brooding upon emotional events.  But having stirred up ample endorphins on the exercycle, the psychic pot churned, pointless and pitiless.  What to do?  Think some more?  Write about it?  Assuming one can identify an 'it' - highly unlikely.

Ah, the book.  The William Stafford poems I bought in Minnesota.  Maybe have a look at that.  The book being in the book bag, the one I had brought with me on the flight from Minneapolis.  Sure enough, there it was, along with the apple from Wick's orchard.  Wick is the former postmaster of Moose Lake, Minnesota, and, I gather, possessor of an orchard or, at least, a tree.  Wick's apple had gone rotten, moving into deterioration mode in the space of only 10 days.  Funny, but there had been this fruity, decompositional scent about...and the embarrassing truth is that it must have been a little more apparent to anyone without a cold.  Such as Jane.  Oh well.

More important, the rotting apple might have led me to the book bag and William Stafford...that is the intuitive person's conclusion...had I been receptive, which I wasn't.  Or was I?  I got there in the end, and what was there?  That remains to be seen.  For now, I'm not moving.

I had expected something entirely different of the morning, in essence, health.  This is day number four of God knows how many, an uncommonly long common cold, if you ask me.  Waking groggy, nose still stopped up, but under the usual time pressure to prepare myself for Team Filipina, I swung my legs out of bed and swung into action.  The latter, of course, means tea.  Downing a cup made all the difference, and damned if I wasn't showered and ready for action.  When there was none.  No sign of Lorna, Bing or Manchu.  The morning yawned.  Everything possible.  Nothing likely.

My attention inevitably turns at such junctures to that which is not done.  Even better, that which is done improperly.  That which is broken.  There is so much of this about these days....  But I wasn't really looking.  Still feeling sick, my looking was greatly restricted.  What to do next?  The product of a sick mind, this narrowing of focus, but a good product, one must admit.

With Team Filipina missing in action, I dressed myself in minimal fashion.  Shorts.  Shoes, no socks.  Shirt.  Next objective?  With my head lolling, energy draining, only attainable goals came into view.  Spaghetti sauce.  A leitmotif of the last 24 hours.  Bing, yesterday's Team Filipina representative, picked an impressive quantity of tomatoes.  How much?  What in a southern novel would be described as a mess o' tomatoes.  Washed, put in the pot...no, this is the scary part.  This did not happen yesterday, the truth now drifts into my addled brain...but the day before.  Tomatoes picked, washed and cored by...was it Manchu?  Which Filipina Team member?  Never mind.  One day earlier, cooking started, then Bing plucked the tomato skins from the brew, and the mixture boiled down throughout the day...after she had added onions, garlic, thyme from the garden...pronouncing my refrigerated oregano to be mildewed.  Forget it.  I am losing track of everything.  That is the horror and the beauty of disease.

Spaghetti sauce.  Long day's journey into spaghetti sauce.  Long week's journey.  And why?  Why does one boil tomatoes down so assiduously to make something that the local supermarkets serve up by the gallon, at reasonable quality and a fraction of the price?  That fresh tomato taste?  Is that what this is all about?  Truth is, I long ago forgot what this was all about.  I seem to have had this cold for years.  It seems decades ago that I could really taste anything.  Which does pose a problem in the seasoning department.  I thought that I had put Manchu through all the necessary paces - or was it Bing - regarding spices.  But I would fail any taste test these days.

So, this is bachelorhood.  This is bachelorhood with illness.  This is bachelorhood with illness, without Jane, and without end.  Will she be impressed by this spaghetti sauce at the end of the weeklong road?  Will there be anything left of the stuff after all this boiling?  Will anyone care?  Will anyone even know?  Who is the bell tolling for, and whether or not you seek to know, does anyone give a flying fuck?

The spaghetti sauce is turning an unnatural red, I swear.  This tone could be an artifact of the fluorescent lighting in my kitchen.  Or it could be the hue that tomatoes achieve after days of boiling.  In fairness, it should be pointed out that this spaghetti sauce is under way in a slow-cooker.  And why not?  Heard of slow cuisine.  How else to make such food?  Let us not quibble.  The sauce has been slightly south of simmering for eons, and is now shifting into the ultraviolet spectrum.  And God only knows how the stuff will taste.  Do not send to know.

Thus the narrowness of my current focus.  Although fate has intervened in the form of the Sunday New York Times and, incredibly, the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.  Never mind the sheer wood-product heft of either publication, it's what lies behind...the death of a wife and the lack of patience with things polemical...the decline in the nation's reportage...the dumbing down of everything.  And here it is, The Times, restarting doubtless as I had in some absent moment requested, and The Chronicle, verging on bankruptcy, no one at the throttle, papers delivered to the wrong people, on the wrong day, for the wrong reasons.  And me with a cold.

Perhaps it's time for another trip on the Coast Starlight.  Seattle, here I come.  Here we come, if Jane can be convinced.  What else is the train for?  Yes, it does convey one to the Northwest, but that is beside the point.  The point is to get in a compartment, lurch and rattle upon the great rails of life, watching Oakland drift by.  That is the point.  It is, in fact, so pointless as to be transcendent.  Even now, I am looking for Amtrak's 800-number.

There came a time when the frequency of sneezing, the nose's drip, the general ache had to be called what it was, and no evasions into hay fever, but a cold.  I don't get them, not normally.  But these times are not normal, are they?  Jane being gone, for example.  A major spilkes right there.  And a prolonged one, first my conference and a week away, then her conference and another week.  Not to mention the dubious effects of transporting oneself with 150 others, all breathing and re-breathing the same microbe-laden air, for over four airline hours.  Trouble with the latter explanation is that I don't buy it, not really.  I rarely get sick from flying about.  I think that the anxiety of being on my own for couple of weeks has stirred the psychic pot.  Upset, angered, frightened and generally sent me down the viral road.  Everything is psychogenic, I am inclined to believe.  And so there you have it.  Nose dripping, face sneezing and it's not summer time and living isn't easy.  

Are colds supposed to make you tired?  This one kept me awake, or perhaps it was the little red decongestant pill from Walgreens.  I don't want another night like the last one.  I want to be pleasantly conked out during the worst infectious hours.  Fact is, these mornings require more attention than usual.  At 7:30 AM I confront Team Filipina.  The hard-working Lorna has handed me off this week to her colleague Bing, who after a couple of mornings and a major automobile breakdown, was replaced by Manchu...if I heard her correctly, which I am convinced I didn't.  I think she's actually Menchtu, but it doesn't matter.  She is a member of Team Filipina, and they're on the case, these women, my case, and one can only be grateful.  

It's not rocket science, what goes on here in the mornings.  Get the cripple in his trousers, heat his muffin, peel his banana.  Just don't call him Sir, as Manchu or Mensch U kept referring to me.  I'm not that old, I tried to tell her, though I quickly gave up, being unconvinced myself.  

As for the getting of wisdom, it does happen.  Consider my current cold.  I am going with the flow.  And it's flowing copiously, from nose, sinuses, hell itself.  Call me crazy, but I don't like being slowed by anything, and so do not take kindly to bed.  Or even reduced activity.  But this time, somehow I know better.  Jane, caregiver extraordinaire, isn't about, but I am, and just giving way, letting things slow to their natural viral pace.  Hanging loose, hanging out, hanging up the phone.  I am not in.  I am out.  Out of it.

I canceled one trip to San Francisco, yesterday.  And it was hard.  I need regular exposure to the City.  And this afternoon's film?  Another cancellation.  I fell asleep this morning at 10:15 AM, in the living room, having been quite well rested the night before.  The cold.

In the altered reality of a cold, there are opportunities.  It's an excellent time to do major computer overhauls.  Good thing I had wisely scheduled both cold and system installation for the same day.  There I was, coughing and sneezing while a pleasantly hyped up Jewish guy unboxed my new Dell computer.  Way cool.  He's also a specialist in voice recognition, and had brought new software.  Even though my own voice was beyond recognition, it did not matter, such was the state of the new technology.  I was barking away commands, dictating whole pages of text with greater ease than ever.  Okay, so I was also swooning occasionally, my nose dripping.  And I had to escape at one point, rolling over to the local supermarket restaurant for some soup.  When I returned, things were rolling, data that is.  The computer guy was draining my old system into the new one.  I stared at the process as though not quite comprehending.

Which was good.  In a state of health, the proceedings would have upset me no end.  The prospect of having to learn everything afresh, not finding my BBC radio programs, losing iTunes, stumbling about e-mail.  Under normal circumstances, all this change flashing new, new, new...well, it would have made me run for cover.  But not now.  The cold experience had insulated me, shoving everything back several steps, removing me.  I stared, sneezed and things happened.

And thus protected from the sharp end of experience, the new computer kicked into action, with a forgiving desktop microphone that does not have to be strapped my head.  Change.  Even progress.  A byproduct of solitude.  And illness.

It is a strange day that begins with a recollection of my father boiling sweetbreads.  But there it is, a pot on the stove of his suburban kitchen, the thing steaming away while its contents seethed.  Sweetbreads are, my father pointed out, thymus glands.  He had a way of discoursing, my father did, rocking from the balls of his feet to his heels, while considering something.  The thought that this habit might arise from some cellular memory of davening, the bowing motions of Jewish prayer, would have first puzzled, then appalled him.  He wouldn't know about that sort of thing, my father would have assured me, shtetl history being the domain of Poles and Belarusians.  No, he was just holding forth, my father was.  He was making his sweetbreads.  Rocking back and forth, staring into the steam.

Ours was a peculiar bachelor household.  Perhaps all bachelor households are.  I had chosen to live with my father after his divorce, so here we were, my father, brother and I, doing things like this, making sweetbreads.  Everyone ate them, my father explained.  By "everyone," my father meant his family, his parents, two siblings, and Irish cook, Bridie, in their suburban home in Mount Vernon, New York.  Everyone.  Which in Riverside, California, meant no one.  I am not even sure how he obtained these calf parts, but there they were, the Alpha-Beta meat department label testifying for their authenticity.  This "everyone" business rankled in my adolescent brain.  This was a throwback.  My father's youth was centuries past.  I could not understand, as I do now, that childhood is always briefly backwards and around the last corner.  But I had turned too many post-pubescent corners to endure this stuff.  My father and his boiling.

Nor could I understand this, his primitive way of trying to find a life.  His wife, it seemed, was more than gone.  While my mother was not heartily devoted to the kitchen, she did have a way with beef and vegetable soup.  Her own bread.  A limited but rather sturdy repertoire.  All of which had vanished.  But my father's childhood had not, and here it was steaming on our stove.

The truth is that I was in college by now, only an occasional visitor to his house.  My brother and sister were getting the full brunt of the sweetbreads boiling.  It's just that I recall the road that got us here.  Following the divorce, there was a succession of cooks and housekeepers.  What happened to them?  I honestly can't recall.  My father complained about each of them.  I do recall that much.  Verda, a black woman, cooked only Southern fare.  He complained about this as though anyone could see the downside.  I could not.  Particularly in view of what followed Verda and her successors.

The pressure cooker.  The tongue.  The latter must have been another favorite among my father's German Jewish household.  Why not?  Certainly the dish was authentically German.  Even Jewish.  And there it was, sticking out at us, lolling on its side, an enormous tongue, not licking, just sticking.  It was life giving us the finger.  Except that instead of the finger, there was the tongue.  As for the pressure cooker, my father delighted in the thing.  I am not sure why.  The pot hissed, its weighted rocker emitting steam in rhythmic bursts.  It never felt safe to me.  My father never felt safe to me.  I had seen him out of control before, during, and after his divorce, and he was a difficult man to entirely trust with household matters.  He was now at the helm of his own domestic ship, fascinated by kitchen devices, determined to deal with things his own bachelor way.

Sauerkraut came home with my father from the supermarket.  It was, I recall, appalling stuff.  Fortunately, he made no attempt to prepare the dish himself.  Doubtless, he did not know how.  He barely knew how to cook, Bridie having shielded him from kitchen chores throughout his youth.  Never mind, for there it was, Safeway sauerkraut steaming on our stove.  I thought, honestly thought, he had gone over some edge.  The stuff not only smelled bad, but permeated the atmosphere of our home.  It was like the tear gas I recalled from the worst days at Berkeley, a sharp, insidious fog that was designed to cling to clothing and settle deep in the mind.

Bachelorhood is now a state that life sends me in and out of, something cyclical or spasmodic.  The seemingly hopeless permanence of my father's post-divorce household no longer clings to my own condition.  In fact, I even sense its virtues.  Something will have completed itself, when I sense its attributes.  What are my day-to-day habits of male homemaking?  Somehow, I believe that a habit of cleaning my glasses with my laundered underwear ranks fairly high.  Even higher, the habit of reaching into the dirty clothes hamper to find something with which to blow my nose.  Then there is the Miss Haversham Syndrome, which I attribute to being frozen in time post-Marlou...piles of papers not attended to, things not fixed, matters drifting along.  But the truth is that this condition would obtain regardless.  Marlou, had she lived, would simply have intervened.  Fixing things, replacing others, getting rid of piles, even redecorating at regular intervals.

The new computer cometh, it doth, and so I have been scurrying about in preparation of this event.  It's a Dell office system, which sounds very professional, and doubtless enormously disruptive.  I have backed things up.  I have tried to clean off my desk.  The latter is an enormous challenge.  Things need to be dealt with, one by one.  Decisions have to be made, matters let go of, dreams abandoned, small ones, but dreams.  Will I join The Commonwealth Club?  Probably not, San Francisco being just too far away, and train service likely to deteriorate in the near future...transit funds mysteriously draining away in the last days of The Austrian Terminator, our guv.  What about this thing, next to the stapler?

Upon inspection, it proves to be iconic.  I recall its use, but not its origins.  The thing is a thick wooden dowel with a floating compass attached.  I would have assumed this was for automobiles, but it was a bicycle accoutrement, with a clamp that would easily fit on a handlebar.  In fact, this most certainly is what it was, for the compass rings.  There is a finger lever at its base that activates a bell.  And this was the whole point, putting a bell on the end of a wooden stick for Marlou to grab, shake, and summon assistance.

But of course it's really a compass, a bicycle compass, and this is what the dying Marlou held in her hand, something the Egyptians might have sent off with the dead to navigate the netherworld.  And why has it been sitting on my desk for 18 months?  Hard to say, but now that I have noticed it, the thing has become what it is -- a compass.  And where does this compass belong?  Somewhere else, that is the point.  I will let it linger for a few days, then it goes.  As for Melanie Reid, the London Times columnist who experienced a spinal cord injury, and I just keep thinking I will write to...well, I either will or I won't...but her column can go in the rubbish.  Desk clear.  Smooth clerical sailing ahead.

As for the two copies of the book Mourning and Mitzvah, not to mention the volume on the Kabbalistic interpretation of Kaddish, God only knows, no pun intended, what I'm supposed to do.  But I do have a hunch.  They're going on the bookshelf.  They are leaving my desk.  Should I read either?  No.  Absolutely not.  I don't want to.  I have no intention of doing so, yet these books will fulfill a higher purpose.  They are like those canteens mounted in thick khaki canvas holders that could, in theory, clip on a belt, leftovers from World War II, that somehow found their way into my summer camp experience in the 1950s.  They are war surplus, these books.  Matériel that was forward stationed in anticipation of some military clash that never occurred, the battle preempted by peace.  Treaty signed, conflict ended, leaving stuff deployed in the field.  And in the light of peaceful day, all the grim apparatus looks preposterous, as though its function was never clear, always oversized and unwieldy.  Army surplus.  A bargain.  

Bingo, I should have said to Bing when she wandered through my front door this morning at a premature hour.  All hours being premature these days, mornings arriving with frightening certainty.  On my own for these two weeks, me off to one conference, then Jane off to another, I waltz in and out of anxieties.  They come with the dawn.  Beginning with getting out of bed.  Sitting up in the quasi-dark, standing and staggering to the adjacent wheelchair.  Will I make it?  Will Bing make it?  She is Lorna's replacement this week.  Yes, even Lorna has bailed on me, working for some undeserving family across town while I sit alone and deserted, quivering in my quadriplegic boots.  

So here she is, Bing, one of Lorna's Filipina friends, someone I have only spoken to on the phone, and at 7:30 AM emerging naked and dripping from the shower, there she is, saying hello, grabbing a towel, and getting to work.  I should feel grateful for her, grateful to her, and I do.  But I also feel grateful for me, for being able to inspire the necessary trust in people.  Is the world's wheelchair population inherently less sexually threatening?  Oh, perhaps.  But I like to think that I am a big boy, appreciate the big picture, and when a stranger comes into my nakedness, we both know it's no big deal.

It's the big void that opens when she departs.  The thing that sends me scurrying out for coffee at an early hour.  Tea, I remind myself, has already infused me with an ample morning dose of caffeine.  So what is sending me out into the screaming world?  Will the answer appear as I bounce down Live Oak Avenue?  And which direction do I turn down Live Oak Avenue?  Retirement, ah...the choices are dizzying.  Some subtle form of internal guidance system must now activate itself.  M. Swann's Way, which is it?  He has more than one, of course.  To the left, a.k.a., Peet's Way, lies a certain amount of noise, it seems...a crush of people, some of whom I know, admittedly.  And company, just enough, might be welcome.  To the right, eastbound, the town's big outdoor café with its one attraction this morning, the bookstore next door where I long ago ordered an Anne Tyler novel.  Might be nice to have something to read.  And this is just enough to bend me right, and I'm off, feeling indolent and just a little lost.

It's an old feeling I encounter in the extroverted bustle of Café Borrone.  I am the disabled one, the incapable, the misshapen, the out of it, lesser and undeserving.  Not only do I have the chutzpah to order a double cappuccino, but the presumption to ask the girl at the cash register, and she is a girl, to fumble about in my fanny pack for six cents.  Which table, she asks?  That one.  The one by the wall, in the corner, out of the line of sight, out of the line of traffic, out of circulation.  Out of it.  I spot Rick within seconds.  He is here a lot, breakfasting on his own, for he is on his own.  His wife has been very ill for very long.  I don't even ask if she is still alive.  Rick is, that's for sure, and before I know it we are deep into a discussion of Things Italian.  Rick being one himself, authentic, holder of two passports.  We share thoughts on grape arbors.  Italians were born to fashion them, no matter how many centuries it takes, and we non-Italians were born to marvel.  Thus, my cappuccino.  Rick is off to some meeting somewhere.  And I am alone again.

We all die alone, they say.  Who "they" are, and how "they" know this, would seem to cry out for a fuller explanation.  But we do not quibble.  This matter of aloneness varies in impact.  And the variables?  Love.  Why mess about with anything else?  Who loves me?  Rick, recently departed for some fickle client?  Jane, absconded to some retreat center?  My sister, who called later in the morning?  Is enough love ever enough?  Yes.  I seem to have enough now, enough to go to the bookstore by the café, pick up my Anne Tyler and speed home.  It doesn't take much sometimes.  Bumping into someone, even the barista at Peet's saying "here, Paul."  Enough to get on.

At home, Angel Butler has sent me an e-mail.  Nice name she, he, has.  Even nicer to see his/her communiqué labeled spam.  No such label with the ensuing phone call, though this is not quite true.  There's that telltale pause, the gap in sound that presages the sales call.  Or the schnooring call.  But the fact is I wait patiently to see who is there.  If I really didn't like these calls, or objected to them that highly, dodging the telephonic bullet would actually be quite easy.  But I'm not dodging.  I'm sitting here waiting.

"Is this Paul?"  Never answer such a question.  For one thing, the matter is deeply existential.  Who is Paul?  Why is Paul?  How much of Paul is within Paul?  No, move on.  Who is this, I ask?  It is Rita from Nuance, manufacturer of the very voice recognition software that is making this blog possible.  Before she can get much out of her mouth, I tell Rita that I am buying the latest version of her product from a retailer.  How much, she asks?

Although I am routinely hard on salespeople, it must be noted that at this point I actually take the time to scan through a series of e-mails in search of the answer.  How much is 1st Voice charging for the software I have agreed to purchase from them?  Incredibly, I find the e-mail and give her the information.  The price is less, much less, than the one Rita mentioned moments ago.  Just a moment, she says.  Rita is temporarily gone.  In the background she is talking to her supervisor, doubtless.  Why not?  Why not let everything unfold as it is, me here in Menlo Park watching the fog lift, beginning to feel more loved?

That's the price of the download, Rita tells me, back on the telephone line and breathless with discovery.  I say nothing, absolutely nothing.  Excuse me, she asks, are you there?  Trouble is, Rita has stumbled upon even more rocky existential ground.  Where is there?  And if I was there, how would I know it?  Yes, I say.  What's the point, I ask?  Well, Rita tells me, if I buy the software from her I will have the actual product shipped to me.  I can hold it in my hand, she says.  I don't want it in my hand, I tell her, I want it in my computer.  Rita is sputtering now.  I'm feeling tired, slightly sadistic, and think it's time to go.  Goodbye, I say.

Someone at last week's conference put it this way, regarding the search for meaning.  A famous saying, he assures me: love God, and you'll find him in 20 years -- hate God, and you'll find him in two.  Damned if this thing doesn't come to mind right now.  Because Rita has unleashed my God-hating side.  Which could be said to be curmudgeonly, or even perverse.  Whatever.  It is a path.  It seems to be leading me on.

Back in town less than 12 hours after a week away, and what is there to do but speed into the suburban center in search of oatmeal and a cappuccino?  As I fumbled about the apartment this morning, the state of affairs came into pleasant focus.  Fresh irises on the piano.  Fresh milk in the refrigerator.  Belgian chocolates, and a card from Jane on the dining table, a reminder that I'm not alone, well cared for, and one must say, lucky and grateful.  Enough to smooth the anxious pavement of anxiety.  It spreads out in all directions this morning, the day's fable unfolding, and as I bounce down Live Oak Avenue there he is, the harbinger at the opening of act three, pushing his shopping cart full of aluminum and plastic rubbish.  He makes his living recycling, this man, but where he makes his bed, that is the issue.  The homeless, the wandering, the people without a place, do they foreshadow the future of the nation?  Hard to say, but after four hours on a plane yesterday reading The Nation, The New Yorker, reading the tray table, the back seat in front of me, reading between the lines...oy, it doesn't look good.

Obama is playing the long game, a friend assured me.  Meaning, don't obsess about the midterm elections.  Let the Republicans retake Congress, and let's see what they do.  The long game.  Since I have so little control over any of this, might as well try to see things in the longer, or bigger, perspective.  Be the change, they say.  What change?  In fact, maybe it isn't change at all, just being as best one can.  

That might be why, refueled with oatmeal and California caffeine, I notice the dry cleaning guy eyeing the parked cars behind his shop.  He is a quiet and decent man, Chinese-American, who incredibly remembers my name.  I rarely dry clean anything.  Months go by between visits to his shop.  But he has got my name in his computer, not to mention his brain, and this is the sort of small thing that needs acknowledgment.  So I hail him across the asphalt, aware that my voice is not very loud.  He hesitates a moment, then looks around.  It's me.  He waves back.  I say good morning, quickly moving on.  We could, I suppose, extend this, exchange a bit of chitchat.  It would not be unprecedented this sort of thing.  But I am a cautious person.  Perhaps we will get there, the chitchat stage.  How's the weather?  Whether or not we're together....

Just beyond, I run into the same homeless guy.  He has progressed from Live Oak Avenue, to here, one street to the north, his shopping cart almost full of cans and bottles.  It is way he holds his head down, in the attitude of an old farmer pushing a plow, trying to keep up with his horse...this is what I notice.  Resignation, doggedness, blinkered determination.  His shopping cart and the adjacent newspaper vending machines narrow the sidewalk.  Excuse me, I say, squeezing by him.  I could say more, but what would it be?  He sees me and mutters something, distracted, elsewhere.

Inside Trader Joe's, there is a festival of lights, all of it florescent.  I do not need anything, that is fairly clear, but I do need to be here, to buy stuff.  What stuff?  Oh, a banana couldn't hurt.  Beyond that, I am buying the stuff that one needs when Jane Is Away.  We have both been away, these weeks, in distant part of the country, attending our separate conferences.  And now I am back, and she is gone, and I can feel it rising from moment to moment, the anxiety that has been plaguing me about being on my own.  Falling in the bathroom.  Falling in the kitchen.  Falling like snow, always down, no end to the descent.  A moment of dizziness as I rise to take a pee break, but it isn't real dizziness, and as soon as I turn on the radio and hear NPR babbling away, my anxiety goes away too.  What's really dizzying is the possibility of abandonment.  Lying on the bathroom floor, unable to get up, forgotten.  Helpless.  No phone, no person, no Jane.

So, I have decided how to remedy this situation.  Call someone.  Give them a ring when I go into the shower, a ring when I emerge, and don't go it alone.  It's that simple.  It's that simple for all of us, but we are Americans, which makes this simple thing complicated.  I am dependent upon Jane.  Interdependent, a friend corrects me.  Dependency is bad, no it is good, and it is hard being on my own, but I am not on my own.  A fact which I need to own.  In Trader Joe's, I seek out the low-calorie, high-fiber end of the food spectrum, hoping to counter a week of institutional conference dining in Minnesota.  Of course, once I am home, the truth becomes clear.  I have all these things, in one form or another, already in my freezer.  The rest is in the refrigerator bit.  I don't need to stock up, I need to lighten up.  Eat less has its corollary, buy less.  But it is too late.  I am already hard at work trying to jam stuff into the freezer.  

The problem is that Jane has already tackled this problem, as has Archimedes, and the physical facts could not be simpler.  One cannot put more than 10 gallons into a 10 gallon container, this is my conclusion.  I shuffle packages in and out, finally solving a sort of Rubik's cube puzzle with my frozen goods.  The freezer door shuts, just barely.  I will think twice before eating any of this stuff.

The garden.  The next thing that needs attention.  Not practical attention, just mental attuning.  I need to spend time there, between the raised beds, pulling a weed here, planting a brussels sprout there.  The latter being a long overdue task, partly a long avoided problem.  Like my freezer, space is at a premium in my agricultural boxes.  The planned winter crop of brussels sprouts, the seedlings sprouted from last year's failed and gone-to-germination plants, well I'm not sure it's really worth the trouble.  And I foresee trouble.  After all, with the close of tomato season there will be a rapid disassembling of all the vines, their stakes, plastic ties and so on.  A large crop of green tomatoes, yes, and then back outside to chop up the vines, sprinkle cover crop seeds uber alles, then the winter sprouting of the vetch, clover, ryegrass and...the newfound complication, fava beans.  

Yes, that's the other thing, Jane wants me to grow them as an edible crop.  Why not?  Because it complicates things, the goal of loosening and fertilizing the soil with plants that all get plowed under at the same point...that point now becoming diffuse and uncertain, the life cycle of fava beans being something of an unknown.  That, and this row of predicted brussels sprouts, looming over everything, if all goes well.  And some skilled garden hand will face the challenge of turning the cover crop under, while the adjacent brussels sprouts loom over...one set of roots getting leveraged up, while the others remain.  It's all too much.

But everything is too much if you think too much, isn't it?  Which is all that needs to be said about the anxiety and almost anything else.  My freezer is full, that is the essential fact.  My heart is full too, that is the other.  

Oy.  A week of fear, uncertainty and doubt.  The latter combination proudly fueled the salesforce of IBM for years, often abbreviated as FUD.  With computers, the idea was that changing from a big honking mainframe to some pansy-ass smaller system or, God forbid, a different brand not known to the board of directors country club membership, well that could get you in trouble.  Fear, as far as I can see, gets you in trouble always.  There are no right moves.  Only wrong ones.  In fact, as I discovered this week, moving is not advisable.  Better become stationary.  Unless there's an earthquake, in which case, you might grab a few pillows.  Otherwise, sit.

Fact is, I have a new relationship.  Not that this is news, Jane and I, but it may be news to the psyche.  But let us not dabble in causalities.  Let's go straight to the symptoms.  I have had the feeling that my balance is going.  At times, I have seemed downright dizzy, as reported earlier.  This would be legitimate cause for concern, if the phenomenon didn't go as soon as Jane arrived.  She has been tied up with family matters, enjoyable ones, but there's deep trust in an intimate relationship.  And deep trust stirs up deep fears, deep everything, particularly deep vulnerabilities.

Fast forward to this morning, Jane and I going for a morning constitutional.  My balance had returned, but then, so had she.  I know what's been happening, the head-spinning effects of panic.  About what?  Something too primal to understand.  But reconstructed psychoanalytically, the whole thing probably does come down to glomming on to an erratic, unreliable mother, at a point in life when there were no points in life.  And the only point to life being the reliable appearance of the person with the tits.  Or the bottle.  I honestly don't know the details here.

So, Jane has been gone in pursuit of the normal stuff of life.  Leaving me to...well, discover a thing or two.  Such as the basic technique of managing anxiety.  That is to say, my technique.  It's a most undignified thing, infantile panic.  It's not the sort of propensity you want to display on Facebook.  It's a multifaceted thing, which first and foremost requires getting in touch with oneself.  That is to say, the fact that I don't fucking want to be alone.  And yet I must be, as all of us must be, and what happens then?

For me, it has meant asking for help.  Having someone in every morning, for example.  Being nervous about getting in and out of the shower, a well-documented potential trouble spot, there is a simple antidote to anxiety.  Phone someone before getting in and out.  Or e-mail.  Leave the front door open.  Station a cordless phone in the bathroom.  

More than that, I have been voicing aloud unconscious mutterings.  What if in this moment of extreme fear of falling, I do in fact fall, thereby proving that my fear of falling isn't a fear...I recite the text back to myself.  No shame, I must add at the end of the narration, for this is what it is to be human.  A baby.  One is at the core, a baby, and you must have been a beautiful...etc. I am not alone.  Baby, I love you.  You are my babe.  Just try not to throw a kicking temper tantrum on the bathroom floor, unless you really must.  Then go for it.  Breaking your hip might be a little over the top, but do that too, if you must.  It's all okay.  The Good Mother.

The worst thing about fear is the way it dominates, robbing the moment of any power, forcing one's entire attention elsewhere.  Deflecting from moments like this morning, when Jane and I hit the road hard and early.  Labor Day, after all, and only a crazy person would drive anywhere.  But crazy people tend to sleep in on holidays, leaving much of the road to us.  Over the hill and down the dale, to ocean's edge, where gulls prevail.

This has become a routine, for the two of us.  But like any routine for someone who feels the advance of years, has seen death linger and has real doubts about his longevity, well it's not routine, this routine.  It has the bittersweet, rather pleasant sense of something established, even mutually discovered.  Always enjoyable, and never to be taken for granted.  I don't know if this is the aftermath of Marlou or just an amplification of my basic orientation.  Were there times after being left for dead on a Berkeley street, when I forgot about the possibility of dying?  Certainly there were times when the possibility seemed more distant, but never remote.

Is this good?  Yeah.  Just look at the San Mateo coast, crumbling like a cake or a wedge of white Silton, all rendered filmy through the morning mist.  Which keeps rising, but never rises.  Softening everything, diffusing light in a certain way.  Perhaps one doesn't notice these things unless there exists the possibility that they may only get noticed once.  The first time, the last time, the only time.  Jane and I are driving home, and we have done this a bit by now, building a shared history.  Of uncertain duration.  A bit of fear always at the background, but this is what consciousness is for.  To provide us with a day's agenda.  What needs to be examined, faced, overcome.

'Keep a bag packed and live near the border.'  Did one of the German Jews in my family actually say this?  No, I do not believe so.  The words must emanate from some novel.  I don't know what it means that I can't recall which one.  The spirit of things has taken over, details blurring.  This is one of the secrets of growing older, that one not only forgets, but one wants to forget, not out of avoidance, but to refocus.  To concentrate on what's important.  The bag, the border, but live.

It makes me nervous living in America these days.  Much of the populace can no longer distinguish truth from fiction, fear from reality.  I fully expect to be detained and questioned in some dystopian phase of our future.  Which is interesting.  Since I keep thinking that I won't be around.  Fear.  Fear of being around at the wrong moment.  God, you can't win.  So you must keep looking out the window, for just up the coast from the cliffs of California's Dover, filtered through a Constable-like air, there are artichokes.  Fields of them, the earth black as...well, black earth.  While Jane is talking about the history of England's forests, its woodsmanship, a system of arboreal management that is thousands of years old.  People keep passing things on.  That is their immortality.  And mine?  Well, nothing to worry about, but perhaps the next thing to consider.

Milton tried to make it into an epic soap opera, Dante tried to MapQuest the place, but it was all unnecessary, for we know what it is...utterly static and unrelentingly hot...hell.  The condition currently applying to Menlo Park, California.  Hell.  As in, before it freezes over.  Or hot as.  Or go to.  You name it, outside we are on location with the docudrama Hellfire.  The temperature, if one can call it that, has soared into the 90s.  Note that only in clichéd rhetoric do temperatures soar.  In reality, they intensify, gaining evil mass like Rush Limbaugh.  Increasingly nasty.  And draining the quadriplegic soul down to its minimum reserves.  

And we're not talking fluid.  I'm not sure what we are talking.  What happens when I get overheated, well, it shouldn't happen to a dog.  Even a mad dog, of the sort Noel Coward likened to Englishmen.  Never mind.  And that is the problem, once it starts getting hot I no longer have one.  The mind, that is.  It is gone, Gone With the Wind, of which there is none.  That is the other problem.  The Bay Area was designed for a sort of automated cooling, a Pacific Ocean-based technology that reliably works most of the time, but not all the time.  It is, in short, the weather equivalent of Microsoft Windows.  Pretty good, not completely reliable, and we're stuck with it.  So fuck you.

Of course, one cannot avoid venturing out.  Definitely a mistake when the Devils Breath is blowing from the northeast, but there seems to be little choice.  Stay inside and introspect all day?  Hardly.  Yet what's out there is not encouraging.  One step outside the door, actually four steps, down to where the concrete surrounding my apartment has begun to radiate, and you'll see what I mean.  No, you probably won't.  That's because there are excellent odds that you can sweat.  No sweat, people say.  They say it, thinking of perspiration as an intermittent phenomenon, something associated with exertion or living in Phoenix.  But in my case, no sweat is a constant.  Little sympathetic nerve damage, no sweat.  No sweat forever.  Well, a little, just not enough.

That's why the baking asphalt reduces me to a primordial state.  Not Alabama, but very low on the evolutionary scale.  In fact, if the heat keeps up, I have every reason to believe I will grow a few scales.  Their evolutionary function is well established, and the quadriplegic species has not yet developed effective defenses.  Scales would be good.

They weren't the ones my mother had in mind, of course.  Those were the ones I was supposed to practice on the baby grand piano she had purchased with my Musical Career in mind.  Unwisely, I will admit this, something in me balked at the notion of piano lessons.  It was bad enough that I didn't know how to throw a baseball, in fact, barely knew the rules of the game.  On top of this deficiency, I was supposed to bang away at the baby grand.  Fuck it, I decided.  Of course, my mother persevered.  This tug of war went on long enough for the piano itself to become involved.

The hot winds blowing up from Palm Springs fought their way under closed doors, through window cracks, and went to work on the piano.  Someone claimed it was out of tune.  This certainly wasn't me.  I mentally abandoned the thing early on.  Well not quite, for a while I did practice this and that, and while piano scales are not exactly music to the ears, what was happening to the desiccating piano, manufactured somewhere on the East Coast, well, it was what one would imagine.  Straight from hell.  At first, my mother kept calling in a tuner.  Perfectly sensible, of course, and this guy would sprawl beneath the piano, then stand over it, flicking a tuning fork, staring at the piano strings as though possessed.  I stared with him.  Actually, it was quite interesting what was under the lid.  When the piano tuner was present, I had an opportunity to twang away at these wires, study the felt hammers.  When the tuner went away, the bad sounds actually worsened.  By the time of his return, something had actually cracked.  The sounding board, I think, if there is such a thing beyond the metaphorical.  Anyway, something wooden simply could not take the Upper Sonoran breath of hell known as the summer wind.  Not being yet spinal-cord-injured, I did not even notice the heat.  Except for the piano.  The thing was clearly on its way out the door, and I could not have cared less.

These days, I can't help thinking of my friends Joe and Laurel in Sacramento.  Yes, their home is thoroughly air-conditioned, I have no doubt.  But on a day like this, they must be at one of the lowest levels of hell, the place where the real Badass types go.  The sidewalks turn into a stirfry.  Patio furniture glows red.  A walk to, say, pick up the paper on the radiant driveway plunges one into a human shake and bake.  Okay, so that's Sacramento, but I have to admit that's where I met Marlou.  Actually, I met her twice.  The first time in November apparently did not have sufficiently adverse conditions underlying it.  So it took a second time, a summer visit, which forced both of us into the backyard swimming pool.  The cooling water everywhere.  Some of it running off Marlou's breasts.  Time passing.  And, what the heck, maybe we should try a date.

Proving that heat has a redeeming purpose.  It cooks our asses.  Cooks our brains.  Cooks us down into something along the lines of a human fricassee.  More basic, sometimes erotic.  Making everything unpredictable, out of the quadriplegic's control, what little control there is.  Chill out, they say.  Be cool, they used to say.  That's a hell of a way to...meet someone, it could be said.  Yet without the heat, without the day's focus drawn to the body and its needs, where would I be today?  No sense in speculating, of course.  I am having enough trouble dealing with the next few minutes.  Jane has promised that the fog is going to roll into night.  'The fog' being that semi-reliable coolant Bay Area residents count on, or think they can count on.  Where is it?  What if I go outside, where it is reliably hotter, look up the street toward the Coastal Range and see, or do not see, the stuff creeping in on little cat's feet?  Better not.  That's why God invented the Internet.  The Weather Channel has, everyone knows, an advanced technology called The Temperature Thingy which is much more reliable than, say, sticking one's finger out the window.  And damned if the website doesn't look promising.  In fact, sub-90s, 89.5°F.  I note the half degree, wondering if they normally use these increments.  The whole thing smacks of retail prices expressed in terms like $10.99.  But never mind.  There appears to be a trend.  Cool or cooler.  Which I think is pretty damn cool indeed, one hell of a hot deal.