October 2010 Archives
Somehow it is all swirling around in my brain, images of Cartier-Bresson in the current exhibit at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and the words of my friend Richard. We are heading down Third Street, things strangely autumnal, both gray and warm, in the tradition of Bay Area Octobers. And the great French photographer who placed himself at the juncture of world events...the Chinese revolution, the death of Gandhi...while wandering side streets to place himself at the juncture of nothing in particular, except little boys peeing, neon signs flashing, prostitutes waiting. All the signs of a life adding up to a life, while Richard who happens to be in the career counseling business talks about the end of work.
The latter being my stage of things, one at which I confess to being somewhat stalled. Say you leave the job world in your 60s, Richard explains, there is a quality of not going back, of leaving things behind. Perhaps you'll become a consultant, waltzing in and out of companies to opine and assist. But all the time it's clear that whatever mark you have made on the organizational world, you have made. Nothing that follows will equal what you've done. Even if you're still making money, you're no longer making marks.
So what? How does one proceed? Cartier-Bresson hit the road early and never seemed to stop. The man must have been in constant motion. Getting into the middle of everything, people that were happening, places that weren't. The polemic and the aesthetic. But all the time acting, doing. He had little patience with the darkroom, the exhibit suggests. Teasing out the image behind the image must have taken too much time, been too confining. He wanted to be on assignment for Life Magazine grabbing China's Cultural Revolution while he could. All the optimism, foolhardiness, novelty and suffering evident in the faces of his subjects. Witnessing. Witnessing for the world. And now he's dead, and what's left of him seems jealously guarded by the French government, New York's MOMA, collectors and galleries. While Richard and I are on the drizzly streets of the provincial capital, wandering toward South Park and walking around the man passed out, sleeping or dead...one cannot say...right against an old brick office building on Third Street.
Over lunch up a gray alley that leads to the gray industrial space of Zuppa Restaurant, we talk about the glycemic impact of foods, the overall relevance of this matter, and how Richard lost 30 pounds. I am envious. What the hell, I may just take his advice. The conversation, whatever its merits, indicates with great clarity a sign of the times. How mine is running out. How I still have a digestive system to worry about. How Marlou knew Richard, how he turned up at both her funeral and her yahrzeit. And how we are here now talking about fiber and cholesterol and what's happening to Caltrain. We have to be on the 3:37 southbound, I tell him. There is a yawning gap in the schedule otherwise, a 90 minute hiatus, a commuters' blackhole.
We start down that blackhole right on time, the 3:37 blasting out of San Francisco in its gratifying way. The train bills itself as a 'semi-express,' and having been witness to 30 years in the life of Caltrain, I am gratified by this railway progress. In another era all the mid-day trains were slow. Now the schedule is peppered with expresses. But not for long. The national impoverishment, a poverty of spirit as well as money, is gradually eating holes in the Caltrain schedule. Still, the 3:37 is still running, racing, relatively speaking, down the Peninsula, stopping at Hillsdale Station, where in a manner of speaking the train should head into its final approach for Menlo Park. Except that nothing of the sort happens. At Hillsdale, the public address system comes to staticy life, the news echoing throughout the cars. We are stopping here. Indefinitely. There has been, the conductor tells us, a trespassing incident.
I know, being both an American and a Caltrain veteran, that this 'trespassing incident' involves the Grim Reaper. Death on the Tracks. This is what has happened. And while trains and death proceed with unswerving inevitability, we Americans are addicted to dodging the issue. We put pets 'to sleep.' We have even tried to do the same with condemned prisoners, with mixed pharmaceutical results. And Caltrain provides so many in the region with the best Anna Karenina moment, that this is where suicides occur. The Golden Gate Bridge. Caltrain. All you have to do is jump.
The difference, of course, is that when you jump from a bridge no one is staring up at your 125-mile-per-hour body hurtling toward the water. The same is hardly true for the locomotive driver as he witnesses your final corporeal moment midair between platform and tracks. Train engineers regularly get psychological counseling to deal with suicides. As for the victims, how many consider this reality? Are all suicidal people so estranged from human connection that their death's impact eludes them? Or is this a particularly American fact of life, that we are isolated both living and dying?
In any case, here we are at Hillsdale, Richard and I. And we are waiting. There has been a trespassing incident. We will be here at least ten minutes. And when ten minutes have passed, the conductor announces that we will know more in, you guessed it, ten minutes. Which, doing simple math, reveals itself to be half an hour. Bringing us all to the next point. The combining of the trains. The express behind us has pulled into Hillsdale, disgorged its ample passenger load, sending hundreds of weary commuters our way. Not to worry, the conductor tells us, because what's happening now is way cool. We are going to head south on the northbound track...after a couple of northbound trains rumble past us here at Hillsdale.
At this, an unseen, but clearly young, woman launches into mobile phone chatter. She just can't believe it. The train has been delayed 45 minutes, and we are barely moving. Someone has bought it, she says. Someone bought it in Belmont. And it's a crime, what's happening with this train. A crime, what with Caltrain salaries going up while their services go down. I mean, it's not exactly amazing, running a train. They've had trains...she pauses for a moment...well, since the 17th century...and Caltrain still can't get it together.
Someone tells her to shut up. Because the train is jammed with bodies, I cannot see who this someone is. Part of me wants to give this interventional passenger the Nobel Prize. Another part wants to bring us all to a weekend workshop in Zeitgeist communications. Richard says it best regarding the girl on the phone: life is difficult when the world revolves around you.
What tempers my anger is the knowledge that this is the monster we have created in America. A nation of individuals, all engaged in the free-market struggle for survival, consumers. This rail passenger consumer is not getting what she wants. The service is letting her down, and she is speaking her mind. That she could not read Caltrain's balance sheet, can't tell one century from the next and can't tell good from bad reportage, none of this matters. We are doomed, I think.
Yes, there has been an article in the San Jose Mercury News claiming that the train company's staff are raking in the bucks. The newspaper, on its last legs, has gotten very confused over the way the Caltrain management shares positions with a bus line. The issues are way too subtle for the young woman, no longer on the phone but now muttering how the unseen silencer is an asshole. I know the tireless Caltrain staff, after eight years of regular meetings with them. Cuts keep reducing their numbers, but not their dedication. Being a Caltrain advisory committee member is as close to a job description as I have these days. I think of the young woman. Stupid and egocentric and utterly modern in her coarseness, gullibility and aggrievedness. We are doomed.
All of which makes me get up Saturday morning and put my own world together the only way possible. Once Team Filipina has dressed me and my morning exercycle bout is behind me, I head to the library. I make it a point to buy good new literature hardbound then pass each book on to Nick, the librarian. Sure enough, he's delighted to have my latest. Outside, things are gray but noisy, as Saturday's Halloween parade drifts past. They have all assembled outside the library, parents and little kids, most in costume. And now they are heading for Menlo Park's main street, led by a police cruiser. The latter is so old that I wonder if it is meant to be a classic car. But, no, it seems to be what it is, some sort of Chevrolet hailing from the late 1980s, red light rotating and stopping traffic as the families make their way past restaurants and shops and banks. There are floats, nothing commercial at all. In fact, the effect is so unremarkable, little kids as cowboys and demons and royalty, walking along without much awareness of onlookers, that it is hard to say who is watching whom. In short, it is a true civic event. Devoid of showbiz. Nothing to sell. Nothing to buy. Just a chance to stare at each other and remember that there is another generation, even another day.
The latter being my stage of things, one at which I confess to being somewhat stalled. Say you leave the job world in your 60s, Richard explains, there is a quality of not going back, of leaving things behind. Perhaps you'll become a consultant, waltzing in and out of companies to opine and assist. But all the time it's clear that whatever mark you have made on the organizational world, you have made. Nothing that follows will equal what you've done. Even if you're still making money, you're no longer making marks.
So what? How does one proceed? Cartier-Bresson hit the road early and never seemed to stop. The man must have been in constant motion. Getting into the middle of everything, people that were happening, places that weren't. The polemic and the aesthetic. But all the time acting, doing. He had little patience with the darkroom, the exhibit suggests. Teasing out the image behind the image must have taken too much time, been too confining. He wanted to be on assignment for Life Magazine grabbing China's Cultural Revolution while he could. All the optimism, foolhardiness, novelty and suffering evident in the faces of his subjects. Witnessing. Witnessing for the world. And now he's dead, and what's left of him seems jealously guarded by the French government, New York's MOMA, collectors and galleries. While Richard and I are on the drizzly streets of the provincial capital, wandering toward South Park and walking around the man passed out, sleeping or dead...one cannot say...right against an old brick office building on Third Street.
Over lunch up a gray alley that leads to the gray industrial space of Zuppa Restaurant, we talk about the glycemic impact of foods, the overall relevance of this matter, and how Richard lost 30 pounds. I am envious. What the hell, I may just take his advice. The conversation, whatever its merits, indicates with great clarity a sign of the times. How mine is running out. How I still have a digestive system to worry about. How Marlou knew Richard, how he turned up at both her funeral and her yahrzeit. And how we are here now talking about fiber and cholesterol and what's happening to Caltrain. We have to be on the 3:37 southbound, I tell him. There is a yawning gap in the schedule otherwise, a 90 minute hiatus, a commuters' blackhole.
We start down that blackhole right on time, the 3:37 blasting out of San Francisco in its gratifying way. The train bills itself as a 'semi-express,' and having been witness to 30 years in the life of Caltrain, I am gratified by this railway progress. In another era all the mid-day trains were slow. Now the schedule is peppered with expresses. But not for long. The national impoverishment, a poverty of spirit as well as money, is gradually eating holes in the Caltrain schedule. Still, the 3:37 is still running, racing, relatively speaking, down the Peninsula, stopping at Hillsdale Station, where in a manner of speaking the train should head into its final approach for Menlo Park. Except that nothing of the sort happens. At Hillsdale, the public address system comes to staticy life, the news echoing throughout the cars. We are stopping here. Indefinitely. There has been, the conductor tells us, a trespassing incident.
I know, being both an American and a Caltrain veteran, that this 'trespassing incident' involves the Grim Reaper. Death on the Tracks. This is what has happened. And while trains and death proceed with unswerving inevitability, we Americans are addicted to dodging the issue. We put pets 'to sleep.' We have even tried to do the same with condemned prisoners, with mixed pharmaceutical results. And Caltrain provides so many in the region with the best Anna Karenina moment, that this is where suicides occur. The Golden Gate Bridge. Caltrain. All you have to do is jump.
The difference, of course, is that when you jump from a bridge no one is staring up at your 125-mile-per-hour body hurtling toward the water. The same is hardly true for the locomotive driver as he witnesses your final corporeal moment midair between platform and tracks. Train engineers regularly get psychological counseling to deal with suicides. As for the victims, how many consider this reality? Are all suicidal people so estranged from human connection that their death's impact eludes them? Or is this a particularly American fact of life, that we are isolated both living and dying?
In any case, here we are at Hillsdale, Richard and I. And we are waiting. There has been a trespassing incident. We will be here at least ten minutes. And when ten minutes have passed, the conductor announces that we will know more in, you guessed it, ten minutes. Which, doing simple math, reveals itself to be half an hour. Bringing us all to the next point. The combining of the trains. The express behind us has pulled into Hillsdale, disgorged its ample passenger load, sending hundreds of weary commuters our way. Not to worry, the conductor tells us, because what's happening now is way cool. We are going to head south on the northbound track...after a couple of northbound trains rumble past us here at Hillsdale.
At this, an unseen, but clearly young, woman launches into mobile phone chatter. She just can't believe it. The train has been delayed 45 minutes, and we are barely moving. Someone has bought it, she says. Someone bought it in Belmont. And it's a crime, what's happening with this train. A crime, what with Caltrain salaries going up while their services go down. I mean, it's not exactly amazing, running a train. They've had trains...she pauses for a moment...well, since the 17th century...and Caltrain still can't get it together.
Someone tells her to shut up. Because the train is jammed with bodies, I cannot see who this someone is. Part of me wants to give this interventional passenger the Nobel Prize. Another part wants to bring us all to a weekend workshop in Zeitgeist communications. Richard says it best regarding the girl on the phone: life is difficult when the world revolves around you.
What tempers my anger is the knowledge that this is the monster we have created in America. A nation of individuals, all engaged in the free-market struggle for survival, consumers. This rail passenger consumer is not getting what she wants. The service is letting her down, and she is speaking her mind. That she could not read Caltrain's balance sheet, can't tell one century from the next and can't tell good from bad reportage, none of this matters. We are doomed, I think.
Yes, there has been an article in the San Jose Mercury News claiming that the train company's staff are raking in the bucks. The newspaper, on its last legs, has gotten very confused over the way the Caltrain management shares positions with a bus line. The issues are way too subtle for the young woman, no longer on the phone but now muttering how the unseen silencer is an asshole. I know the tireless Caltrain staff, after eight years of regular meetings with them. Cuts keep reducing their numbers, but not their dedication. Being a Caltrain advisory committee member is as close to a job description as I have these days. I think of the young woman. Stupid and egocentric and utterly modern in her coarseness, gullibility and aggrievedness. We are doomed.
All of which makes me get up Saturday morning and put my own world together the only way possible. Once Team Filipina has dressed me and my morning exercycle bout is behind me, I head to the library. I make it a point to buy good new literature hardbound then pass each book on to Nick, the librarian. Sure enough, he's delighted to have my latest. Outside, things are gray but noisy, as Saturday's Halloween parade drifts past. They have all assembled outside the library, parents and little kids, most in costume. And now they are heading for Menlo Park's main street, led by a police cruiser. The latter is so old that I wonder if it is meant to be a classic car. But, no, it seems to be what it is, some sort of Chevrolet hailing from the late 1980s, red light rotating and stopping traffic as the families make their way past restaurants and shops and banks. There are floats, nothing commercial at all. In fact, the effect is so unremarkable, little kids as cowboys and demons and royalty, walking along without much awareness of onlookers, that it is hard to say who is watching whom. In short, it is a true civic event. Devoid of showbiz. Nothing to sell. Nothing to buy. Just a chance to stare at each other and remember that there is another generation, even another day.
Where was I? Oh yes, I was up to my eyeballs in scalding water in the hottest of the hot springs at Harbin Hot Springs. What was I doing there? I was there with Jane, of course, and being a middle-aged guy who is more than usually bent out of shape in the musculoskeletal sense...there's nothing like getting into hot water.
Until it's time to get out of it. The buoyancy, the penetrating effects of mineral-laden water heated to the brink of the infernal, all of this is indescribably soothing to an achey-jointed person who spends his days listing to one wrong side or the other, everything out of alignment, orthopedic stress vectors heading one way when they should proceed in another. And then, release. Warmth, fierce warmth flooding the achiness, sulfurous rocky water bobbing the torso upwards, bloodways surging, breath accelerating with the thermal shock of it all. Until, discretion intervenes, and it's time to ascend the concrete steps that got you into this.
Which at first is quite easy, all the mineral buoyancy helping you along at the deepest part of the hot pool. The effect diminishing with each step you take, the body emerging, giving up watery support in favor of the usual air, gravity taking over. While the opposite occurs in the head, body ascending, blood descending. Things growing fainter, weaker.
Which brings one face to face with fear. This is where panic intervenes. I am losing control. Weakening, support going, everything collapsing under me, no longer able to hold and failing, down and down. As opposed to feeling lightheaded and stamina compromised. In which case I would sit down on the steps. Unable to get up? Harbin is full of hot water seekers like me. Jane is there. She, and those around her, would help me stand. Even lift me. And things would be okay.
Once, I found myself swooning and short of quadriplegic breath after emerging from Harbin's hottest pool, and damned if a nubile French doctor did not emerge, all young breasts and loveliness, advising me to lower my head on the stone bench while she lifted my legs in the air. The relief was instantaneous. I only wish I had been conscious enough to enjoy the full experience. Having had one swoon too many, I called a halt to further hot spring immersions for the day.
But the occasional dip into anxiety can be most instructive.
Recent mornings in Menlo Park, once either Jane or my Filipina team member has departed, a caving emptiness takes over. Secretly, quietly, mild panic creeps in as well. The usual solution is to get coffee. The other solution is to go away for a few days with Jane to Harbin Hot Springs. Everything about the latter is right. The place is old, slightly ramshackle, patched together, which is to say, it has qualities of soul. Wheelchair access is risible, mild dangers abound, so nothing can be taken for granted. What can one feel but grateful wheeling into the Harbin restaurant via the back door of its kitchen?
And there's a further level of gratitude inherent here, for the sloping walkway down the hill could prove mildly fatal. Jane had gone ahead at some point to order coffee at one breakfast or other, and I had insisted on going it alone down the slope to the kitchen door. Which proceeded smoothly until the last turn when the rain-slicked asphalt slope inclined a bit too much for my wheels...and I went skidding, frantically turning right towards the kitchen entrance and away from what was to the left, a brain-bouncing flight of stone steps. As for fear? No time to worry in such circumstances, just to act.
Which in a bit of Longfellow, recently sent to me by Jane, proves to be all we can do. Act. Not emptily, but doing what one can, taking matters enjoyably in hand. Doing what seems like the next thing to do. And when life generally runs out, we do what we have to do. We die. Or we sit down until it's time to get up again. We die later. Whatever. Panicking along the way makes little sense, that is the point. Anxiety.
As for clarity, that's what comes of a good hot springs soak. Much of the orthopedic background pain level ebbs away. Leaving the pain of the foreground, the chronically aching back, for example. Which can, fortunately, be attended to. Leaving peace and the right kind of emptiness. Fear and emptiness being oddly intertwined.
Take this very morning. Rain. Imagine such a thing happening in California. But there it is, falling as the gentle variety from heaven. And quite daunting. My mission, one I proudly execute, is to acquire the vegetable wherewithal for Jane's evening curry. Being Sunday, there is the open air market, bursting with peaches, peppers, pickles and Peter Piper himself, if one looks hard enough. But what I am looking at is rain. It seems too much at 10 AM. So I head for the supermarket, indoors and warm, which proves to be indoors and cold. Vegetables have been sprayed, cooling air wafting around them, and I might as well be outside. Which, two hours later, I decide is exactly what I shall do. Never mind that I have already purchased chard, flowering kale and all sorts of exotica for Jane's cooking. I head out again. I know there are plenty of leaves for tonight's meal, in fact, too much. I don't care. This is madness. It is the opposite of fear. And it is what I want to do. Vegetables be damned.
And I retain one bit of wisdom from my Harbin moments. The rain had settled over the hot springs valley, clouds muffling the arid slopes, a confusion of climate sounds with a confusion of vegetation. The whole thing driven mad by the people who manage and use the hot springs. The Harbin style being a mishmash of post-60s and seven-dwarves new age, with a soupçon of hobbit, none of it 'working' in any particular way, but very much there, and reminding one that this is not Menlo Park. That and the trips down the main rain-slicked footpath, which Jane and I both realized should not be tried alone...making us grab the first available person to help steady my wheelchair. And out of all this, my simple realization that since Marlou's death, since the worst of the grief went away, I am left with a new, and somewhat empty, or simply blank, situation. I haven't found a new purpose. Marlou's death was one purpose. Getting over it, another. And now, what do I do? Today's, and tomorrow's, open question.
Until it's time to get out of it. The buoyancy, the penetrating effects of mineral-laden water heated to the brink of the infernal, all of this is indescribably soothing to an achey-jointed person who spends his days listing to one wrong side or the other, everything out of alignment, orthopedic stress vectors heading one way when they should proceed in another. And then, release. Warmth, fierce warmth flooding the achiness, sulfurous rocky water bobbing the torso upwards, bloodways surging, breath accelerating with the thermal shock of it all. Until, discretion intervenes, and it's time to ascend the concrete steps that got you into this.
Which at first is quite easy, all the mineral buoyancy helping you along at the deepest part of the hot pool. The effect diminishing with each step you take, the body emerging, giving up watery support in favor of the usual air, gravity taking over. While the opposite occurs in the head, body ascending, blood descending. Things growing fainter, weaker.
Which brings one face to face with fear. This is where panic intervenes. I am losing control. Weakening, support going, everything collapsing under me, no longer able to hold and failing, down and down. As opposed to feeling lightheaded and stamina compromised. In which case I would sit down on the steps. Unable to get up? Harbin is full of hot water seekers like me. Jane is there. She, and those around her, would help me stand. Even lift me. And things would be okay.
Once, I found myself swooning and short of quadriplegic breath after emerging from Harbin's hottest pool, and damned if a nubile French doctor did not emerge, all young breasts and loveliness, advising me to lower my head on the stone bench while she lifted my legs in the air. The relief was instantaneous. I only wish I had been conscious enough to enjoy the full experience. Having had one swoon too many, I called a halt to further hot spring immersions for the day.
But the occasional dip into anxiety can be most instructive.
Recent mornings in Menlo Park, once either Jane or my Filipina team member has departed, a caving emptiness takes over. Secretly, quietly, mild panic creeps in as well. The usual solution is to get coffee. The other solution is to go away for a few days with Jane to Harbin Hot Springs. Everything about the latter is right. The place is old, slightly ramshackle, patched together, which is to say, it has qualities of soul. Wheelchair access is risible, mild dangers abound, so nothing can be taken for granted. What can one feel but grateful wheeling into the Harbin restaurant via the back door of its kitchen?
And there's a further level of gratitude inherent here, for the sloping walkway down the hill could prove mildly fatal. Jane had gone ahead at some point to order coffee at one breakfast or other, and I had insisted on going it alone down the slope to the kitchen door. Which proceeded smoothly until the last turn when the rain-slicked asphalt slope inclined a bit too much for my wheels...and I went skidding, frantically turning right towards the kitchen entrance and away from what was to the left, a brain-bouncing flight of stone steps. As for fear? No time to worry in such circumstances, just to act.
Which in a bit of Longfellow, recently sent to me by Jane, proves to be all we can do. Act. Not emptily, but doing what one can, taking matters enjoyably in hand. Doing what seems like the next thing to do. And when life generally runs out, we do what we have to do. We die. Or we sit down until it's time to get up again. We die later. Whatever. Panicking along the way makes little sense, that is the point. Anxiety.
As for clarity, that's what comes of a good hot springs soak. Much of the orthopedic background pain level ebbs away. Leaving the pain of the foreground, the chronically aching back, for example. Which can, fortunately, be attended to. Leaving peace and the right kind of emptiness. Fear and emptiness being oddly intertwined.
Take this very morning. Rain. Imagine such a thing happening in California. But there it is, falling as the gentle variety from heaven. And quite daunting. My mission, one I proudly execute, is to acquire the vegetable wherewithal for Jane's evening curry. Being Sunday, there is the open air market, bursting with peaches, peppers, pickles and Peter Piper himself, if one looks hard enough. But what I am looking at is rain. It seems too much at 10 AM. So I head for the supermarket, indoors and warm, which proves to be indoors and cold. Vegetables have been sprayed, cooling air wafting around them, and I might as well be outside. Which, two hours later, I decide is exactly what I shall do. Never mind that I have already purchased chard, flowering kale and all sorts of exotica for Jane's cooking. I head out again. I know there are plenty of leaves for tonight's meal, in fact, too much. I don't care. This is madness. It is the opposite of fear. And it is what I want to do. Vegetables be damned.
And I retain one bit of wisdom from my Harbin moments. The rain had settled over the hot springs valley, clouds muffling the arid slopes, a confusion of climate sounds with a confusion of vegetation. The whole thing driven mad by the people who manage and use the hot springs. The Harbin style being a mishmash of post-60s and seven-dwarves new age, with a soupçon of hobbit, none of it 'working' in any particular way, but very much there, and reminding one that this is not Menlo Park. That and the trips down the main rain-slicked footpath, which Jane and I both realized should not be tried alone...making us grab the first available person to help steady my wheelchair. And out of all this, my simple realization that since Marlou's death, since the worst of the grief went away, I am left with a new, and somewhat empty, or simply blank, situation. I haven't found a new purpose. Marlou's death was one purpose. Getting over it, another. And now, what do I do? Today's, and tomorrow's, open question.
In my fantasy life I am a lecturer. Walter Mitty drives a submarine. I drive a lectern. What am I lecturing about? The very things I cannot stand to read about in the newspapers. Actually, they are the lessons from my life. Knowledge I stumbled across at the hands of fate. The stuff no one will listen to, or too few understand, or requires enough explanation to exceed the current American attention span. The stuff that is important to me, because I have lived it. And for all my personal frustration, there may be a larger point. Maybe it is in our blood, our destiny, our role as elders to try to tell someone what we know. There's a cliff ahead. The bridge is washed out. Listen to me. Go back. Stop.
I open up today's salon.com. The liberal website includes an article from a woman who says she was 'against guns,' then in response to a stalker, decided she needed a handgun - under advice from the Portland police department. The woman author is a freelancer, according to the byline. The story could be plausible. But it sounds a bit fishy. In particular the 'against guns' phraseology sounds a little too pat. Nothing nuanced in her opposition to acquiring a gun - and something a little too enthusiastic about her being armed and ready for the attacker. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that salon.com has fallen for something here. I suspect one of the gun groups is behind this. And what now? What do I do now?
I brood. This generally is what I do. Yes, on a practical level, I may have a go at this story. I may try to find out who the author is, or isn't, with a clumsy Internet search. Salon.com may hear from me. But generally I will brood. Brood and remember.
I had been living in London only for a few months when at lunchtime I wandered into a pub near my psychoanalyst's office. Any true Briton would realize, at this point in the narrative, how the story has an American tint. But not the reality. No, it was me waiting to see my German Jewish analyst. And an old guy in the lunchtime pub urging me to join him at the bar.
As a young man I did not understand the pub thing. Britons, of course, immediately slip into gear regarding the conventions of a public house. But the whole thing was, at that point in my life, bewildering. Strangers saying hello. Everyone drinking. The ready topics of football, road conditions or weather, never coming easily to me. Britons remarking about my disability, elaborately making way for me, often joking about my aluminum stick and whom I might hit or trip. Banter from a nation that had its share of war wounded. So many things going on.
I had been out of the hospital for less than a year, was still getting used to the neuromuscular horror that had become my life. And, of course, did not appreciate that this was my golden era of mobility. The wheelchair was still more than 20 years away. I was getting around everywhere with a crutch. And a wing, and a prayer, and a cardboard tube ticket. The latter was generally dry, unless I ran out of urinary options in the endless Underground. Which meant schlepping about London with sodden trousers, waiting for things to dry. Which they eventually did, except for the urine-soaked tube ticket in my pocket.
But this pub in Montagu Square, Mayfair, was pleasantly empty at midday and this particular man so friendly and avuncular that, what the hell, I climbed up on the barstool beside him. He asked me this. I told him that. And he pronounced his judgment: well, mate, you're a bit banged up, but you can still handle your pint.
Deciding this was a high compliment, swelling with a sense of male bonding, camaraderie and general welcome to the British Isles, damned if I didn't indulge in half a pint at lunchtime. Fuck the urinary consequences. I was going to have a good time, balance and elimination be damned.
'What happened to you, mate?'
I had ingested just enough alcohol to answer him. He took it in, my account of the shooting on a Berkeley street. The man stared at the pub mirror as though for answers. He turned to me. 'But where did the bloke get the gun?'
I stared back. What kind of question was this? What kind of bloke would ask something so silly? I shook my head as though dispelling water in my ears. He bought the gun, I said. He stole it, maybe. Whatever.
The man in the pub persisted. But who sold it to him?
I was 22 years of age, still believed older people were out of it, and had no patience for this silly exchange. It took a while, a year or more, to understand the sanity emanating from the man in the pub. Britons never saw guns, and even today, most still do not. Yes, things have changed. Drug traffickers in Brixton, South London, terrorists smuggling in handguns, all this has come to pass. But the gun laws are still there, firearms are hard to come by, the British Olympic rifle team practices in Ireland. And America remains nuts.
So what am I supposed to do with this woman writing in salon.com? I am suspicious of her piece, but will anyone listen to me? Probably not. But this is, and always has been, part of the human condition. Not listening. The need to speak anyway. And, above all, the need not to mumble. And not to brood.
I open up today's salon.com. The liberal website includes an article from a woman who says she was 'against guns,' then in response to a stalker, decided she needed a handgun - under advice from the Portland police department. The woman author is a freelancer, according to the byline. The story could be plausible. But it sounds a bit fishy. In particular the 'against guns' phraseology sounds a little too pat. Nothing nuanced in her opposition to acquiring a gun - and something a little too enthusiastic about her being armed and ready for the attacker. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that salon.com has fallen for something here. I suspect one of the gun groups is behind this. And what now? What do I do now?
I brood. This generally is what I do. Yes, on a practical level, I may have a go at this story. I may try to find out who the author is, or isn't, with a clumsy Internet search. Salon.com may hear from me. But generally I will brood. Brood and remember.
I had been living in London only for a few months when at lunchtime I wandered into a pub near my psychoanalyst's office. Any true Briton would realize, at this point in the narrative, how the story has an American tint. But not the reality. No, it was me waiting to see my German Jewish analyst. And an old guy in the lunchtime pub urging me to join him at the bar.
As a young man I did not understand the pub thing. Britons, of course, immediately slip into gear regarding the conventions of a public house. But the whole thing was, at that point in my life, bewildering. Strangers saying hello. Everyone drinking. The ready topics of football, road conditions or weather, never coming easily to me. Britons remarking about my disability, elaborately making way for me, often joking about my aluminum stick and whom I might hit or trip. Banter from a nation that had its share of war wounded. So many things going on.
I had been out of the hospital for less than a year, was still getting used to the neuromuscular horror that had become my life. And, of course, did not appreciate that this was my golden era of mobility. The wheelchair was still more than 20 years away. I was getting around everywhere with a crutch. And a wing, and a prayer, and a cardboard tube ticket. The latter was generally dry, unless I ran out of urinary options in the endless Underground. Which meant schlepping about London with sodden trousers, waiting for things to dry. Which they eventually did, except for the urine-soaked tube ticket in my pocket.
But this pub in Montagu Square, Mayfair, was pleasantly empty at midday and this particular man so friendly and avuncular that, what the hell, I climbed up on the barstool beside him. He asked me this. I told him that. And he pronounced his judgment: well, mate, you're a bit banged up, but you can still handle your pint.
Deciding this was a high compliment, swelling with a sense of male bonding, camaraderie and general welcome to the British Isles, damned if I didn't indulge in half a pint at lunchtime. Fuck the urinary consequences. I was going to have a good time, balance and elimination be damned.
'What happened to you, mate?'
I had ingested just enough alcohol to answer him. He took it in, my account of the shooting on a Berkeley street. The man stared at the pub mirror as though for answers. He turned to me. 'But where did the bloke get the gun?'
I stared back. What kind of question was this? What kind of bloke would ask something so silly? I shook my head as though dispelling water in my ears. He bought the gun, I said. He stole it, maybe. Whatever.
The man in the pub persisted. But who sold it to him?
I was 22 years of age, still believed older people were out of it, and had no patience for this silly exchange. It took a while, a year or more, to understand the sanity emanating from the man in the pub. Britons never saw guns, and even today, most still do not. Yes, things have changed. Drug traffickers in Brixton, South London, terrorists smuggling in handguns, all this has come to pass. But the gun laws are still there, firearms are hard to come by, the British Olympic rifle team practices in Ireland. And America remains nuts.
So what am I supposed to do with this woman writing in salon.com? I am suspicious of her piece, but will anyone listen to me? Probably not. But this is, and always has been, part of the human condition. Not listening. The need to speak anyway. And, above all, the need not to mumble. And not to brood.
Shortly before I awaken, my dreams are taking me to a pizza place on Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, a low, squat structure with a particular name. And after waking up and drifting toward the kitchen to make tea, it seems that there is nothing of significance in this nocturnal fragment except the restaurant's title, which I turn over in my mind, believing that something symbolic or, at least, a dreamy pun will emerge. Yet within minutes, I have forgotten the name of the pizza place. It has disappeared, because I have pursued it. Get close to its significance, and the thing backs away.
And I was on to some bigger truth here, until it shrank to nothing. Where was I?
On the mornings when Jane is around, I like the way she grabs one arm and pulls me into a sitting position. She saves me the physical energy of getting halfway out of bed. But she really yanks on my spirit as much as my arm. On my own, I recall that the morning is a good time for middle-aged guys to have heart attacks. The reasons are partly physiological and partly of the spirit. Monday mornings, the day so many defeated men return to work, that's when the cardiac worst occurs.
Of course, for me, it is a major challenge, sitting up in bed. Actually, it is hard to describe how I do it. My Swedish TempurPedic mattress with all its orthopedic squishiness has a way of caving in on itself, making me fall backwards as my weak torso muscles try to pull me forward. So, it's a matter of twisting one leg off the edge, then the other, then kicking with the good leg while pulling with the good abdominals. When musculoskeletal forces are not properly aligned, the whole thing gets enormously frustrating, requiring several kicks to get me over my center of sedentary gravity. Which gets me angry. And it is my belief, right or wrong, that too much morning rage is a bad thing. Not good for the heart. Which heart, the wise person might ask? For a little motivating quadriplegic fury may be just what the doctor ordered. Which doctor? There is no doctor, that is precisely the point, but there is plenty of medical advice, free advice, and I am not even out of bed without fearing a heart attack. And whether this is fear of death's blankness or life's fury, no one can say. And at 6:30 in the morning no sensible person is saying anything. Where was I?
Like it or not, despite my claim of not being a computer person, my desktop PC is at the center of my life. Which is why my wheelchair heads there first, is drawn there, because all things flow, good and bad, from its digital guts. E-mail. Am I expecting a communiqué from the Nobel Prize committee? Music. It's a reality. I have no other, or no better, lyric channel. And there it is, wafting, throbbing, direct from the BBC, complete with the day's news, now eight hours late, and full of the latest on the Conservatives' budget.
But on this particular morning, something else is happening. My computer is checking its discs. It may have slipped one. Another may be herniated. Not to worry, for the process, whatever it is, is now 14% complete. This information appears at the end of an impressively technical account of the disc organization system, how both used space and free space have been vetted, how many errors have appeared - none - and what is to come in the disc testing department. Most gratifying is that it's all happening automatically. My computer's innards are caring for themselves. They do not need prodding or even watching to sort themselves out. It's a lengthy process, and a thorough one, and once completed, things in my life will be more solid, free of error. As the Disc Doctor software explains, 'your system will be more stable.' I could almost throw my hands heavenward. Too bad I lack the neuromuscular wherewithal, not to mention a map of the cosmos.
I am on my rowing machine, Jane having strapped my feet into their stirrups. Fog hangs over the morning. Things have a look of cold, but not the feeling. A gray October day, nothing more, and it is entirely possible that the sun will shortly break through the overcast. For now, thanks to my cleansed and sanitized computer disks, BBC Radio 4's absolute best correspondents are telling me what it's like in Abu Dhabi, South Africa and, weirdest of all, Washington DC. An iPod delivers this to my ears while my brain tries to keep track of both the world and my remaining number of strokes. As for strokes, I fear having one here, while deeply engaged in aerobic exercise. It doesn't happen this morning, but my upstairs neighbor says good morning on his way to work, and climbing into his car further observes 'you'll be feeling good in half an hour.' It's the endorphins, of course. He's right. Some days, it's moment by moment. It's endorphins, caffeine, the computer, whatever it takes, and whatever we can get.
And I was on to some bigger truth here, until it shrank to nothing. Where was I?
On the mornings when Jane is around, I like the way she grabs one arm and pulls me into a sitting position. She saves me the physical energy of getting halfway out of bed. But she really yanks on my spirit as much as my arm. On my own, I recall that the morning is a good time for middle-aged guys to have heart attacks. The reasons are partly physiological and partly of the spirit. Monday mornings, the day so many defeated men return to work, that's when the cardiac worst occurs.
Of course, for me, it is a major challenge, sitting up in bed. Actually, it is hard to describe how I do it. My Swedish TempurPedic mattress with all its orthopedic squishiness has a way of caving in on itself, making me fall backwards as my weak torso muscles try to pull me forward. So, it's a matter of twisting one leg off the edge, then the other, then kicking with the good leg while pulling with the good abdominals. When musculoskeletal forces are not properly aligned, the whole thing gets enormously frustrating, requiring several kicks to get me over my center of sedentary gravity. Which gets me angry. And it is my belief, right or wrong, that too much morning rage is a bad thing. Not good for the heart. Which heart, the wise person might ask? For a little motivating quadriplegic fury may be just what the doctor ordered. Which doctor? There is no doctor, that is precisely the point, but there is plenty of medical advice, free advice, and I am not even out of bed without fearing a heart attack. And whether this is fear of death's blankness or life's fury, no one can say. And at 6:30 in the morning no sensible person is saying anything. Where was I?
Like it or not, despite my claim of not being a computer person, my desktop PC is at the center of my life. Which is why my wheelchair heads there first, is drawn there, because all things flow, good and bad, from its digital guts. E-mail. Am I expecting a communiqué from the Nobel Prize committee? Music. It's a reality. I have no other, or no better, lyric channel. And there it is, wafting, throbbing, direct from the BBC, complete with the day's news, now eight hours late, and full of the latest on the Conservatives' budget.
But on this particular morning, something else is happening. My computer is checking its discs. It may have slipped one. Another may be herniated. Not to worry, for the process, whatever it is, is now 14% complete. This information appears at the end of an impressively technical account of the disc organization system, how both used space and free space have been vetted, how many errors have appeared - none - and what is to come in the disc testing department. Most gratifying is that it's all happening automatically. My computer's innards are caring for themselves. They do not need prodding or even watching to sort themselves out. It's a lengthy process, and a thorough one, and once completed, things in my life will be more solid, free of error. As the Disc Doctor software explains, 'your system will be more stable.' I could almost throw my hands heavenward. Too bad I lack the neuromuscular wherewithal, not to mention a map of the cosmos.
I am on my rowing machine, Jane having strapped my feet into their stirrups. Fog hangs over the morning. Things have a look of cold, but not the feeling. A gray October day, nothing more, and it is entirely possible that the sun will shortly break through the overcast. For now, thanks to my cleansed and sanitized computer disks, BBC Radio 4's absolute best correspondents are telling me what it's like in Abu Dhabi, South Africa and, weirdest of all, Washington DC. An iPod delivers this to my ears while my brain tries to keep track of both the world and my remaining number of strokes. As for strokes, I fear having one here, while deeply engaged in aerobic exercise. It doesn't happen this morning, but my upstairs neighbor says good morning on his way to work, and climbing into his car further observes 'you'll be feeling good in half an hour.' It's the endorphins, of course. He's right. Some days, it's moment by moment. It's endorphins, caffeine, the computer, whatever it takes, and whatever we can get.
It is the rainiest and grayest of October afternoons, an effect heightened by what has come before, an unrelentingly summer-like autumn. Yes, this morning the meteorological curtain descended, cutting one season off from the next, and here we are, my sister Susie and I in the dark cloudy carport. My goal is to get on the exercycle, have my feet snapped into their bicycle-shoe pedal clips, before Susie departs for the airport. I can tell that she doesn't want to do this. She has failed in the past, she says. I vaguely recall some time long ago, probably around the time of Marlou's death, when Susie had a go at the bicycle shoe thing and had trouble.
Actually, it is rather tricky. The shoes are designed for bicyclists to snap their own feet into corresponding pedals. They are simply not for quadriplegic use, meaning that someone else will grab the foot, insert it into the pedal with two hands, twisting the metal pieces until they lock. But this is what we are doing, my sister and I. And having gotten my neurologically normal left foot into its pedal position, we are working on the next one, the paralyzed one.
Thing is, friends who meet Susie remark on our contrasting dispositions, hers more lighthearted, devil may care. At crucial, and recent, points in my life, my sister has provided a welcome escape from my own seriousness. But in this moment, as she grabs my heavy, lifeless right leg and tries to wedge it into place on the exercycle, it is she who seems burdened. The weight of my foot and ankle is considerable, but this is even heavier. It borders on hopelessness, this mood. She has that sadness and resignation I recognize in myself. Which is particularly disturbing in view of our supposed roles. If Susie can't make me laugh, brighten and lighten, who can? She is out of work, feels she is running out of options and, with the advance of years, time. I speak calmly, gently, reminding both of us that this is no big deal. Just a matter of grasping the heel, twisting and pushing at the same time. Snap. The foot locks into place.
* * *
I am old, I keep telling Jane. Meaning, my energy does not seem what it was, my body aches, only so many years are left. And as all the wise agree, age is our last opponent. We are certain to lose, so why fight?
One night 20 years ago, I arrived at a meeting of a local men's group. My first marriage was dissolving, my spirit dragging, the future looking dismal. Worse, I had become isolated in my sadness, had lost the knack of meeting people, social confidence nil. So in that abysmal, high-schoolish moment when the group was breaking up, people talking about going out for dinner, when I had no one to talk to, no one to talk to me...I had Clint. He approached me, a man a decade or two older, smiling. It was nice to have me there, he said. Clint. I was feeling so awkward, unwanted, that without someone stepping forward, the men's group might have seen the last of me. Which would have been most unfortunate. The group marked a social turning point, my reconnection with people. I made friends. One of them, of course, Clint.
And now Jane and I are sitting at Clint's dinner table with Phyllis. Twenty years have gone by, Clint is dying of melanoma, and my concern is age. Jane has made dinner, hustling a meal into existence with little apparent effort. Everyone is grateful for her presence. The four of us join hands, express thanks, then commence eating. It's not usual for me, the saying of grace. But it's time to learn something new.
Clint is learning something new every moment. He has eschewed the usual cancer remedies. There will be no radiation, no chemotherapy napalm, just time unfolding and tumors growing. He fully acknowledges the latter blossoming in his brain. Clint says he can feel them, feel their effect in his right lobe. He also says he is enjoying himself, even as the unwanted growths take out this and that communicative, conceptual or bodily function. In short, I am humbled in his presence. I feel the same about Phyllis. And the evening is a glorious one, laughing over Jane's ability to feed me, talking about environmental issues, gardening. It is not all over, until it is over, and it is not over.
Nor are the effects of Clint's moment of conversation with me at a meeting 20 years ago. That is happening too, happening tonight, rolling through time like a cosmic ripple. Making me understand what the Buddhists seem to be on about. That compassion, kindness, the small actions we take and the choices we make, all this has an impact. And may be the one thing about us that is most desirably immortal. We have a dinner. We have a life. We have our time, whatever allotted. And tonight, we have all this together.
Actually, it is rather tricky. The shoes are designed for bicyclists to snap their own feet into corresponding pedals. They are simply not for quadriplegic use, meaning that someone else will grab the foot, insert it into the pedal with two hands, twisting the metal pieces until they lock. But this is what we are doing, my sister and I. And having gotten my neurologically normal left foot into its pedal position, we are working on the next one, the paralyzed one.
Thing is, friends who meet Susie remark on our contrasting dispositions, hers more lighthearted, devil may care. At crucial, and recent, points in my life, my sister has provided a welcome escape from my own seriousness. But in this moment, as she grabs my heavy, lifeless right leg and tries to wedge it into place on the exercycle, it is she who seems burdened. The weight of my foot and ankle is considerable, but this is even heavier. It borders on hopelessness, this mood. She has that sadness and resignation I recognize in myself. Which is particularly disturbing in view of our supposed roles. If Susie can't make me laugh, brighten and lighten, who can? She is out of work, feels she is running out of options and, with the advance of years, time. I speak calmly, gently, reminding both of us that this is no big deal. Just a matter of grasping the heel, twisting and pushing at the same time. Snap. The foot locks into place.
* * *
I am old, I keep telling Jane. Meaning, my energy does not seem what it was, my body aches, only so many years are left. And as all the wise agree, age is our last opponent. We are certain to lose, so why fight?
One night 20 years ago, I arrived at a meeting of a local men's group. My first marriage was dissolving, my spirit dragging, the future looking dismal. Worse, I had become isolated in my sadness, had lost the knack of meeting people, social confidence nil. So in that abysmal, high-schoolish moment when the group was breaking up, people talking about going out for dinner, when I had no one to talk to, no one to talk to me...I had Clint. He approached me, a man a decade or two older, smiling. It was nice to have me there, he said. Clint. I was feeling so awkward, unwanted, that without someone stepping forward, the men's group might have seen the last of me. Which would have been most unfortunate. The group marked a social turning point, my reconnection with people. I made friends. One of them, of course, Clint.
And now Jane and I are sitting at Clint's dinner table with Phyllis. Twenty years have gone by, Clint is dying of melanoma, and my concern is age. Jane has made dinner, hustling a meal into existence with little apparent effort. Everyone is grateful for her presence. The four of us join hands, express thanks, then commence eating. It's not usual for me, the saying of grace. But it's time to learn something new.
Clint is learning something new every moment. He has eschewed the usual cancer remedies. There will be no radiation, no chemotherapy napalm, just time unfolding and tumors growing. He fully acknowledges the latter blossoming in his brain. Clint says he can feel them, feel their effect in his right lobe. He also says he is enjoying himself, even as the unwanted growths take out this and that communicative, conceptual or bodily function. In short, I am humbled in his presence. I feel the same about Phyllis. And the evening is a glorious one, laughing over Jane's ability to feed me, talking about environmental issues, gardening. It is not all over, until it is over, and it is not over.
Nor are the effects of Clint's moment of conversation with me at a meeting 20 years ago. That is happening too, happening tonight, rolling through time like a cosmic ripple. Making me understand what the Buddhists seem to be on about. That compassion, kindness, the small actions we take and the choices we make, all this has an impact. And may be the one thing about us that is most desirably immortal. We have a dinner. We have a life. We have our time, whatever allotted. And tonight, we have all this together.
Something in me is frantic by the time I get my wheelchair hydraulically lifted into the van, maneuver about and stagger toward the driver's seat. It's partly physical. My body has been aching all day, and the reasons are unclear. Even before the first act of this evening's Madame Butterfly I was up and schlepping about the back of the opera house with my crutch, anything to keep joints moving. Same thing at intermission. And by the time it was all over, something in me was all over too. And now here I am, at last in the van, and I have this déjà vu feel about what I just said to Jane. She had speculated about climbing inside while the wheelchair lift was in its outside position, and I was explaining why it wasn't possible...recalling how I explained the same thing to Marlou. But more than recalling, and more than déjà vu, as though I am falling forward in space, perhaps time, the continuity of things as either been interrupted or revealed. And shamefaced in this moment of asynchronous discovery.
For I am explaining to yet another of my women how things work in disabled life. And I'm having this Lothario moment adding them up, the women, as though there are vast numbers. The general sense having nothing to do with conquests or being the playboy, more of fatigue. Which has much to do with an evening of quadriplegic sitting, coupled with Puccini's tale of loss and exploitation. All this perhaps confused by my sister, here for the opera and the weekend, for I have probably explained this thing about the wheelchair lift and the door to her as well. And now all I want to do is get out of here, being overloaded with Puccini-borne sadness and utter fatigue.
I am glad not to be doing this alone. Jane, Susie and I are backing, straightening, somehow turning the gigantic Ford towards its next destination. And although San Francisco's streets are riddled with potholes and end-of-empire neglect and decay, they still lead where they lead. Now sweeping with the other 101 freeway lemmings southward, banking around San Francisco General Hospital and remembering that years ago, 30 or so, I used to drive home from Berkeley on Saturday nights with friends, home to San Francisco, stoned out of my head. Which I am definitely not now, feeling the paranoid crush of cars as we all turn toward 280 South, tilting and barreling toward Daly City. Which appears in minutes, although they are long, dark and anxious minutes. I'm getting used to, it must be admitted, driving this van again. Last Sunday a van drive up and back to San Francisco for Marriage of Figaro. And now this. Which isn't much of anything, slipping off the highway at Daly City for night in a motel. Susie and I have a conference in the morning, Jane has a meeting, all of this happening in San Francisco, so rather than drive up and down the Peninsula, here we are at the Daly City Hampton Inn.
Why not? Something in me rebels at the motel experience this night, and I sleep very poorly. I do have some remarkably strong dreams, perhaps stimulated by the tragic tale of Butterfly. I don't know. In the morning Jane gets me, or what's left of me, up, dressed and in my wheelchair, while the day stretches on daunting and preposterous.
What am I doing? Why did I jam all this activity together? 'Are we still feeling old?' Jane asks, making me laugh in a way that is both deep and relieving. For I see this aching and fatigue as a sign of gerontological doom. And the not sleeping? Well, this morning, I'm too tired to think about being tired and the possible origins. For one thing, I have to drive again. Fortunately, all of about two miles. San Francisco State University, site of today's environmentalism conference, being just up the road. Jane sets off to her meeting, Susie and I head for ours, and although the day is clearly a disaster, it certainly doesn't feel like one.
San Francisco State. My alma mater, or one of them. Strangely, I have no feeling for the place. It is, as they say, a commuter campus. Which is good. I was in my mid-20s when beginning my MA, in my late 20s by the time the degree was completed. I was too old for residence halls by then, including these, the ones looming in the chilly fog. The campus looks in bad shape. Landscaping worse than ever. The one machine that takes money for parking outside the conference center is broken. But the signs that warn of that things happen to people who disobey them, these are still up and functioning. There will be consequences. Unnamed, parking fines. Perhaps getting towed. Not that I need to worry, for help, in the form of a campus cop, is not far away. Turns out that there have been threats against people featured at today's conference. Which says a lot about the gathering. And the presence of the police, says a lot of good about San Francisco, the state University, the future. And says even more about why the conference kept me wide awake, sleepless or not, the rest of the day.
For I am explaining to yet another of my women how things work in disabled life. And I'm having this Lothario moment adding them up, the women, as though there are vast numbers. The general sense having nothing to do with conquests or being the playboy, more of fatigue. Which has much to do with an evening of quadriplegic sitting, coupled with Puccini's tale of loss and exploitation. All this perhaps confused by my sister, here for the opera and the weekend, for I have probably explained this thing about the wheelchair lift and the door to her as well. And now all I want to do is get out of here, being overloaded with Puccini-borne sadness and utter fatigue.
I am glad not to be doing this alone. Jane, Susie and I are backing, straightening, somehow turning the gigantic Ford towards its next destination. And although San Francisco's streets are riddled with potholes and end-of-empire neglect and decay, they still lead where they lead. Now sweeping with the other 101 freeway lemmings southward, banking around San Francisco General Hospital and remembering that years ago, 30 or so, I used to drive home from Berkeley on Saturday nights with friends, home to San Francisco, stoned out of my head. Which I am definitely not now, feeling the paranoid crush of cars as we all turn toward 280 South, tilting and barreling toward Daly City. Which appears in minutes, although they are long, dark and anxious minutes. I'm getting used to, it must be admitted, driving this van again. Last Sunday a van drive up and back to San Francisco for Marriage of Figaro. And now this. Which isn't much of anything, slipping off the highway at Daly City for night in a motel. Susie and I have a conference in the morning, Jane has a meeting, all of this happening in San Francisco, so rather than drive up and down the Peninsula, here we are at the Daly City Hampton Inn.
Why not? Something in me rebels at the motel experience this night, and I sleep very poorly. I do have some remarkably strong dreams, perhaps stimulated by the tragic tale of Butterfly. I don't know. In the morning Jane gets me, or what's left of me, up, dressed and in my wheelchair, while the day stretches on daunting and preposterous.
What am I doing? Why did I jam all this activity together? 'Are we still feeling old?' Jane asks, making me laugh in a way that is both deep and relieving. For I see this aching and fatigue as a sign of gerontological doom. And the not sleeping? Well, this morning, I'm too tired to think about being tired and the possible origins. For one thing, I have to drive again. Fortunately, all of about two miles. San Francisco State University, site of today's environmentalism conference, being just up the road. Jane sets off to her meeting, Susie and I head for ours, and although the day is clearly a disaster, it certainly doesn't feel like one.
San Francisco State. My alma mater, or one of them. Strangely, I have no feeling for the place. It is, as they say, a commuter campus. Which is good. I was in my mid-20s when beginning my MA, in my late 20s by the time the degree was completed. I was too old for residence halls by then, including these, the ones looming in the chilly fog. The campus looks in bad shape. Landscaping worse than ever. The one machine that takes money for parking outside the conference center is broken. But the signs that warn of that things happen to people who disobey them, these are still up and functioning. There will be consequences. Unnamed, parking fines. Perhaps getting towed. Not that I need to worry, for help, in the form of a campus cop, is not far away. Turns out that there have been threats against people featured at today's conference. Which says a lot about the gathering. And the presence of the police, says a lot of good about San Francisco, the state University, the future. And says even more about why the conference kept me wide awake, sleepless or not, the rest of the day.
Oh, I must go down to the sea again, but maybe not with Messrs. Cunard, at least until something in me or the world adjusts. A big ship is an indisputably magnificent thing, and it offers an eminently green way to get from American point A to British point B. Not to mention that other big thing, the ocean. Rolling and roiling and raising plankton and decomposing sailors and absorbing the occasional oil spill. It's not even what empty frivolity goes on inside the ship's steel walls. For everyone knows that extroverts are buoyant enough. No, it is the sense, something I accept reluctantly, that everyone on board wants to be as far away from the world as possible. And not the worldly world that distracts from our inner spiritual beauty. But the world that impinges upon our pleasure and makes us worry needlessly, fretting about things like the biological viability of the ocean spraying past our porthole and whether we are paying the Filipinos waiting on our tables a living wage.
Why should I care one way or the other? Only that Cunard keeps sending me these offers, its ships clearly wandering the seas with empty cabins, and there is a lure. I have sailed twice. Once with the living Marlou, and once, in a manner of speaking, with the dead one. One trip full of heartbreak, one full of emptiness. But there was always the sea and the steel arc slicing through it. And I imagine doing it again, this time with Jane. And who knows where this comes from or why. For the sea bobs with life and with death, not with joy or sadness. Just eternity. And the desire to voyage with Jane, while not practical, has taken hold. True, Jane works, and time off is limited. But the voyage of discovery in a relationship, we are already finding that. Even without a bon voyage party, we have set sail.
Optimism makes me suspicious. But one can be too suspicious. Waiting for Caltrain in the October heat, greenhouse gases angrily massed over Menlo Park, I stare up the tracks and get the usual spiritual illumination. That life compresses us into shape, like some industrial process that flattens one edge, chops off another, until we are sufficiently skewed and formed. Which could be viewed as screwed up, but generally means pared down. Everyone goes through a life with this altered form.
And here comes the train. Which I am riding the one mile to Palo Alto, because the atmospheric powers that be describe this as a 'spare the air day.' And I am a model citizen. And when I began riding this train 30 years ago the impersonal workings of Southern Pacific baffled me. Now the company no longer exists. And I am on the train's public advisory board. Which means that although progress is illusory, deepening may be real enough. And what triggers my re-encounters with grief is hard to say. These feelings do not peter out like results on a graph. Perhaps they are not even triggered. Perhaps they just well up from the depths, and there's nothing to do but sail off and remember to get off in Palo Alto.
Is it my propensity to worry or a genuine fact of disabled life that when I approach the morning sink, an elaborate and rather terrifying scenario unfolds? It goes like this. The fingers of my right hand chronically curve in a crude imitation of a clasp, and they are deprived of effective feeling. Put together, the curving and the numbing add up to this frightening possibility. That I will wedge my fingers into the overflow drain, concealed just under the lip of the sink, and will not be able to get them out. With my hand stuck there, and me standing on one leg, how long could I last? I could not stand there forever, that is certain. And if my fingers could not be freed, eventually fatigue would send me sinking to my knees on the bathroom floor. And since I have not used my knees for such a purpose in 40 years, my musculature being what it is, I would further slip, left or right to reclining on my side. All this with my fingers still caught in the rough porcelain overflow, resulting in the cessation of blood flow to my hand, perhaps my arm, with the resulting loss of all or part of the limb. All this, and it's not even 7 AM.
Thing is, although it sounds excessive in its degree of elaboration, this paranoid scenario is not without its reality base. I have slipped my curved, paralyzed right fingers over the safety bar to one side of the sink. This gives me the feeling, real or imagined, of having a bit more stability when I am shaving or brushing my teeth. And I have found that my hand has gotten stuck there, briefly wedged, knuckles jammed between metal bar and wooden cabinet. Undoing this situation wasn't that big a deal, though it was somewhat counterintuitive. I had to force the fingers down, because yanking the hand up only seemed to jam the knuckles in further. Only momentarily alarming, the whole thing. But enough to give pause. And so it is with the sink's rough edged opening where the overflow waits unseen. I have rested my deadened fingers on the lip of the porcelain, only to feel them slip into the hidden gap.
Keep going, this is all I know. For if it's not fear of finger trapping, it will be fear of something else. These days, I try to remain conscious. I speak out loud the thing I fear, trying to make the thought tangible, thereby robbing it of its voodoo power.
The outdoor café in the center of town is only half full at 7:30, making the acquisition of a bowl of oatmeal and a double cappuccino swift and uncomplicated. At first, this being one of those globally-warmed autumn mornings of a day forecasted to rise into the 80s Fahrenheit, I find a table outside. It's still cool, no one else is sitting out here, so I roll inside. After all, I did not leave my home in search of isolation. Actually, what brought me here remains elusive. It always does. Then I see someone a few tables away, a man who is on the board of our local chamber music operation. He is busy. Engaged in some sort of business discussion. Which is fine. I remember he exists. I recall that Menlo Park is not sinking in a sea of fear. It even occurs to me that the next time I run into this man I will introduce myself, tell him my name and have a word or two about the chamber music series. Like, why doesn't our weekly newspaper bother to cover it in any depth? Life is going on, that is the point. Fear may be driving the nation to loony and frightening extremes, but it's not happening everywhere. There is safety in the world. One can find it. And in the moments when one can't, it's important to believe that another moment will follow.
What follows is Sky Nails. The place is not quite open when I arrive. Mai and her team of Vietnamese manicurists are having a go at the carpets, shifting chairs about, preparing for the day. While outside the day beams down upon me. After a few minutes of sun exposure, I am ushered inside, my wheelchair positioned opposite a new young employee. She speaks French, it develops, somewhere into cuticle shoving. I try to converse, but what remains of my remnants of schoolboy French so embarrasses me that silence seems a better option. But she is so appealing, this young woman working over my fingers, that it is hard to avoid trying. Have I been to Paris? How many times? And her, how long here in California? Not long, and she has no work permit, and incredibly her husband and child are still in France. Very lonely, she says. Miss children, miss husband. Oy, it is a difficult world. And an easier one. She will make it back to them, it seems certain, or at least likely. And it won't be a three-month voyage around the horn. Still, what economic reality could separate a family this way? She is fast about the cuticles, this young Vietnamese woman, a hard worker. Who knows what's going on? One thing is for certain. She's not here for the healthcare. And according to this morning's Salon.com, the US now ranks 48th in infant mortality throughout the world. As for 'bank stability,' we are now 107, just behind Tanzania. Go, team!
These and other dark thoughts accompany me as I roll homeward. Passing Peet's, I briefly consider another time wasting avoidance measure, having a fizzy water while I finish off the New York Times. But the clamoring extroverts inside have claimed every table, and the whole scene is too much. Someone has thoughtfully opened the door for me. Thank you, I say, letting it shut, backing out of the place.
The rest of the journey puts a squeeze on things. Between home and this bouncing sidewalk moment there is illumination. Only yesterday in a casual recounting of Marlou's final weeks, I stumbled into unexpected tears. Quite surprising, how this known, oft-discussed experience can spring back to life. Grief, as Jane puts it, spirals around. Different in each rotation, but ever returning. Not corresponding to the American progress model, things improving, grief lessening. Just around and around. And as another friend put it, something about being in a loving relationship actually makes grief deepen. Does the joy of one love remind us of another? Or does it stimulate guilt for having replaced one love with another? As though both people, or more exactly, both loves, are still alive.
Grief, and its persistence, occupy some extreme and lawless realm of human experience. There's no fighting it. Efforts to get over it only backfire. The more one invests in the next relationship, the more the old one lives on. No wonder I keep rolling around my suburban haunts, unclear what to do, and more than a little lost.
Thing is, although it sounds excessive in its degree of elaboration, this paranoid scenario is not without its reality base. I have slipped my curved, paralyzed right fingers over the safety bar to one side of the sink. This gives me the feeling, real or imagined, of having a bit more stability when I am shaving or brushing my teeth. And I have found that my hand has gotten stuck there, briefly wedged, knuckles jammed between metal bar and wooden cabinet. Undoing this situation wasn't that big a deal, though it was somewhat counterintuitive. I had to force the fingers down, because yanking the hand up only seemed to jam the knuckles in further. Only momentarily alarming, the whole thing. But enough to give pause. And so it is with the sink's rough edged opening where the overflow waits unseen. I have rested my deadened fingers on the lip of the porcelain, only to feel them slip into the hidden gap.
Keep going, this is all I know. For if it's not fear of finger trapping, it will be fear of something else. These days, I try to remain conscious. I speak out loud the thing I fear, trying to make the thought tangible, thereby robbing it of its voodoo power.
The outdoor café in the center of town is only half full at 7:30, making the acquisition of a bowl of oatmeal and a double cappuccino swift and uncomplicated. At first, this being one of those globally-warmed autumn mornings of a day forecasted to rise into the 80s Fahrenheit, I find a table outside. It's still cool, no one else is sitting out here, so I roll inside. After all, I did not leave my home in search of isolation. Actually, what brought me here remains elusive. It always does. Then I see someone a few tables away, a man who is on the board of our local chamber music operation. He is busy. Engaged in some sort of business discussion. Which is fine. I remember he exists. I recall that Menlo Park is not sinking in a sea of fear. It even occurs to me that the next time I run into this man I will introduce myself, tell him my name and have a word or two about the chamber music series. Like, why doesn't our weekly newspaper bother to cover it in any depth? Life is going on, that is the point. Fear may be driving the nation to loony and frightening extremes, but it's not happening everywhere. There is safety in the world. One can find it. And in the moments when one can't, it's important to believe that another moment will follow.
What follows is Sky Nails. The place is not quite open when I arrive. Mai and her team of Vietnamese manicurists are having a go at the carpets, shifting chairs about, preparing for the day. While outside the day beams down upon me. After a few minutes of sun exposure, I am ushered inside, my wheelchair positioned opposite a new young employee. She speaks French, it develops, somewhere into cuticle shoving. I try to converse, but what remains of my remnants of schoolboy French so embarrasses me that silence seems a better option. But she is so appealing, this young woman working over my fingers, that it is hard to avoid trying. Have I been to Paris? How many times? And her, how long here in California? Not long, and she has no work permit, and incredibly her husband and child are still in France. Very lonely, she says. Miss children, miss husband. Oy, it is a difficult world. And an easier one. She will make it back to them, it seems certain, or at least likely. And it won't be a three-month voyage around the horn. Still, what economic reality could separate a family this way? She is fast about the cuticles, this young Vietnamese woman, a hard worker. Who knows what's going on? One thing is for certain. She's not here for the healthcare. And according to this morning's Salon.com, the US now ranks 48th in infant mortality throughout the world. As for 'bank stability,' we are now 107, just behind Tanzania. Go, team!
These and other dark thoughts accompany me as I roll homeward. Passing Peet's, I briefly consider another time wasting avoidance measure, having a fizzy water while I finish off the New York Times. But the clamoring extroverts inside have claimed every table, and the whole scene is too much. Someone has thoughtfully opened the door for me. Thank you, I say, letting it shut, backing out of the place.
The rest of the journey puts a squeeze on things. Between home and this bouncing sidewalk moment there is illumination. Only yesterday in a casual recounting of Marlou's final weeks, I stumbled into unexpected tears. Quite surprising, how this known, oft-discussed experience can spring back to life. Grief, as Jane puts it, spirals around. Different in each rotation, but ever returning. Not corresponding to the American progress model, things improving, grief lessening. Just around and around. And as another friend put it, something about being in a loving relationship actually makes grief deepen. Does the joy of one love remind us of another? Or does it stimulate guilt for having replaced one love with another? As though both people, or more exactly, both loves, are still alive.
Grief, and its persistence, occupy some extreme and lawless realm of human experience. There's no fighting it. Efforts to get over it only backfire. The more one invests in the next relationship, the more the old one lives on. No wonder I keep rolling around my suburban haunts, unclear what to do, and more than a little lost.
It is the season of staring. At walls, at the garden, at time. The garden is best. It has the undemanding quality of a wall, naturally encompasses time and is easy on the eye. For someone who is typically hard on the I, the very act of musing, aimless, even lost, suggests failure of some sort. Which only fans the flames, cranks up the psyche's internal search engine, makes time stand more still, ensuring that even less happens than before and absolutely stops progress.
Autumn is a dusty time in northern California. The urban air desperately needs a cleansing rain. My tomatoes, the ones that remain, are gritty from days and nights on the vine. Their ripening is over, almost, but they hang on. As do I. Propping my leg up against one end of the redwood support, I stare down a row of lettuce. The plants are doing amazingly well, considering the waning of days, lengthening of nights. The brussels sprout plant at the corner of the tomato patch waves its blooming yellow arms like a mad person. Botanically demented, it is. Heedless of my wishes, determined to crank out seeds instead of vegetables, it hangs on and on. It is time, almost time, to give up on the tomatoes, pull the green ones indoors for attempted ripening, then move into cover crop mode. The shift will be a gratifying one. There's something very frustrating about autumn, with days shortening, nights chilling, vegetables dying. I want it to be over, the days to resume their expansion, everything sprouting and greening.
Marlou pops up everywhere, of course, the past raining down like the atmospheric dust. My new screensaver, a function of the Windows operating system, plucks a random succession of images from my pictures folder. And there they are, drifting in their pixel-saving slideshow, shots of everything. Marlou and me in Italy. Marlou's photos of fabric samples in the living room. Zion National Park. Giant zinnias in my garden. The past life, our past life. I hadn't envisioned this screensaver trip down memory lane, but that's okay. The point is to let these accidents happen. Knowing that they are not accidents but blank spots in consciousness, something I might have realized but didn't. And it's all okay, I keep telling myself.
There is no cleaning out of anything without stumbling upon Marlou. Here she is, in photos on the bottom shelf of a desk organizer. A series of shots, women friends from Sacramento, each posing with my dying wife. They were all in a therapy group, these women. Which is to say, they had shared an ordeal, of whatever depth and intensity. And if 'ordeal' sounds too strong, for doubtless the experience encompassed some lighthearted strains...well, maybe another word will come to me someday. But there they are, women who had made some effort at facing life, now posing on our sofa where one was facing death. Which, I am trying to accept these days, is seasonal, like my garden. To everything there is....
Until now, Marlou's brave smiles in such photos have seemed poignant, heart wrenching in the reaching for life. But my interpretation has begun to shift. Who knows why she is smiling? Yes, she looks gaunt, signs of what is to come very much with her. And she was courageous in her capacity to say goodbye. Maybe that is all that needs to be said about the smile. Goodbye. Sad to say, I cannot recall which of Marlou's friends sent these photos. And it does not matter. They were friends, that is the point. They wanted to be present, and here is the evidence, in a succession of twosomes, one friend at a time. Goodbye.
The shock of death seems, upon reflection, puzzling. Dying deserves no shock value. Yet grief, the severing of human ties, has been shocking people for eons. Maybe life is largely about the routinization of trauma. The survival of the spirit amidst the death of everything else.
At the end of the day, any day, it's all happening in the garden. Every day is a garden-variety day. Stare straight down the allysum border of my vegetable bed, and you'll see a small cloud of beneficial wasps. They are there hovering at all times. Not that I would know, not being present at most times. Nor can one objectively call the wasps beneficial, particularly if one is say, a cabbage moth. It's a cruel, predatory world, my vegetable garden. And I am one of the predators, like it or not. Life is not pure, and it's short, extremely elusive and difficult enough to perceive in moments. And grief, like the garden, needs constant attention. It needs to be watered and nourished. And as it gets older and more crowded, it needs to be weeded.
Autumn is a dusty time in northern California. The urban air desperately needs a cleansing rain. My tomatoes, the ones that remain, are gritty from days and nights on the vine. Their ripening is over, almost, but they hang on. As do I. Propping my leg up against one end of the redwood support, I stare down a row of lettuce. The plants are doing amazingly well, considering the waning of days, lengthening of nights. The brussels sprout plant at the corner of the tomato patch waves its blooming yellow arms like a mad person. Botanically demented, it is. Heedless of my wishes, determined to crank out seeds instead of vegetables, it hangs on and on. It is time, almost time, to give up on the tomatoes, pull the green ones indoors for attempted ripening, then move into cover crop mode. The shift will be a gratifying one. There's something very frustrating about autumn, with days shortening, nights chilling, vegetables dying. I want it to be over, the days to resume their expansion, everything sprouting and greening.
Marlou pops up everywhere, of course, the past raining down like the atmospheric dust. My new screensaver, a function of the Windows operating system, plucks a random succession of images from my pictures folder. And there they are, drifting in their pixel-saving slideshow, shots of everything. Marlou and me in Italy. Marlou's photos of fabric samples in the living room. Zion National Park. Giant zinnias in my garden. The past life, our past life. I hadn't envisioned this screensaver trip down memory lane, but that's okay. The point is to let these accidents happen. Knowing that they are not accidents but blank spots in consciousness, something I might have realized but didn't. And it's all okay, I keep telling myself.
There is no cleaning out of anything without stumbling upon Marlou. Here she is, in photos on the bottom shelf of a desk organizer. A series of shots, women friends from Sacramento, each posing with my dying wife. They were all in a therapy group, these women. Which is to say, they had shared an ordeal, of whatever depth and intensity. And if 'ordeal' sounds too strong, for doubtless the experience encompassed some lighthearted strains...well, maybe another word will come to me someday. But there they are, women who had made some effort at facing life, now posing on our sofa where one was facing death. Which, I am trying to accept these days, is seasonal, like my garden. To everything there is....
Until now, Marlou's brave smiles in such photos have seemed poignant, heart wrenching in the reaching for life. But my interpretation has begun to shift. Who knows why she is smiling? Yes, she looks gaunt, signs of what is to come very much with her. And she was courageous in her capacity to say goodbye. Maybe that is all that needs to be said about the smile. Goodbye. Sad to say, I cannot recall which of Marlou's friends sent these photos. And it does not matter. They were friends, that is the point. They wanted to be present, and here is the evidence, in a succession of twosomes, one friend at a time. Goodbye.
The shock of death seems, upon reflection, puzzling. Dying deserves no shock value. Yet grief, the severing of human ties, has been shocking people for eons. Maybe life is largely about the routinization of trauma. The survival of the spirit amidst the death of everything else.
At the end of the day, any day, it's all happening in the garden. Every day is a garden-variety day. Stare straight down the allysum border of my vegetable bed, and you'll see a small cloud of beneficial wasps. They are there hovering at all times. Not that I would know, not being present at most times. Nor can one objectively call the wasps beneficial, particularly if one is say, a cabbage moth. It's a cruel, predatory world, my vegetable garden. And I am one of the predators, like it or not. Life is not pure, and it's short, extremely elusive and difficult enough to perceive in moments. And grief, like the garden, needs constant attention. It needs to be watered and nourished. And as it gets older and more crowded, it needs to be weeded.
Marlou knows where it is, will always know, just as I will not, and so my entanglement with the Regional Transit Connection Card intensifies. No, I cannot find the receipt that came with my disabled parking placard. Already a flurry of faxes and phone calls has gone back and forth this morning. My hope, and it is a dim one, rests on the out of date version. The one that expired in 2009. That is the one I faxed. And while the fax wires were singing, a memory of yesterday at the San Francisco Muni offices.... I could see it clearly. More precisely, I could feel it clearly. The other applicant for the disabled transit card.
He was sitting on a bench across from me. We were there for the same purpose, to get our cards. To get our pictures taken, our status verified, discount IDs issued. There is something slightly embarrassing about the 'discount' part. And this embarrassment may be appropriate. Do I really need a discount? What about my disability necessitates a lower fare? For that matter, why should my age translate into cheaper transit? All that is important here is the embarrassment, the discomfort. Very likely we shared it, this man and I.
He must have been somewhere in his 30s, even his early 30s. A trim guy, and he had bike shoes. He also had a red blotch on one cheek. Perhaps from an abrasion. But my sense was no, this was a sort of flush. The working out of some bodily process. Taking his ID photo took no time at all. Afterwards, the disabled transit card guy accompanied him to the bench, handing him a brochure. Customer service for the transit-needy, this is a splendid thing to behold, something I take to be particularly San Franciscan. In any case, the man got his photo taken, discount car explained, and he was done. I waited for my ID photo while the man on the bench prepared for departure.
He had a backpack. It was new, it was stuffed and it looked heavy, 20 or 30 pounds of whatever. The man was trying to open it. Here, the disabled observer falters. Routine tasks, such as opening a zipper, have challenged me for so long that I no longer have perspective. Something about unzipping the front compartment of his backpack took too much time, did not go smoothly. But I cannot precisely say why. Something was happening with his feet. While his hands worked the zipper, the man's feet pointed inward, pigeon toed. The zipper seem to slide open in the usual fashion, but the man's stance complicated everything. His toe work could only have made the whole project awkward, unbalancing things, making him the opposite of surefooted.
I recognize this sort of thing, pick it up through the gut. The faint oddity of his physical movements could almost have been an athetosis, the way things go askew with conditions such as cerebral palsy. But my hunch was that things had gone askew with prescription pharmaceuticals. The sort people take when they have schizophrenia, for example. I believe this young man was hammered by demons, then hammered by the drugs enlisted to chase the demons. And here he was, now clutching his backpack like a physical being. With both arms around it, he was trying to do something. And I, observing from only a few feet away, could not say what he was after. Embarrassed? Was he embarrassed? What else could one be in the prime of life going after transit discount cards in the middle of the workday, wrestling with backpacks, doing one's best to keep the smallest of things together?
Not that a life is the smallest of things. And in this way having a disability can enlarge the human perspective. Compassion, being meager in my childhood, now seems to be the major lesson of my adulthood. The point is not to breeze by the life experience.
I was in a hurry after the process of transit discount card acquisition. My need was to get out of there, leave the realm of the lame, halt and blind, say goodbye to the poor of San Francisco, and rush for the suburban commuter train that would take me safely home. At the elevator, I pushed the down button, saw the doors open, and caught something out of the corner of my eye. It was the man with the backpack. He was wrestling with his pack on a different bench, and now rushing for the elevator just like me. Now inside, I looked for the hold-the-door-open button, but too late. The doors slid closed between us, and for reasons that are unclear, I regretted this.
He was sitting on a bench across from me. We were there for the same purpose, to get our cards. To get our pictures taken, our status verified, discount IDs issued. There is something slightly embarrassing about the 'discount' part. And this embarrassment may be appropriate. Do I really need a discount? What about my disability necessitates a lower fare? For that matter, why should my age translate into cheaper transit? All that is important here is the embarrassment, the discomfort. Very likely we shared it, this man and I.
He must have been somewhere in his 30s, even his early 30s. A trim guy, and he had bike shoes. He also had a red blotch on one cheek. Perhaps from an abrasion. But my sense was no, this was a sort of flush. The working out of some bodily process. Taking his ID photo took no time at all. Afterwards, the disabled transit card guy accompanied him to the bench, handing him a brochure. Customer service for the transit-needy, this is a splendid thing to behold, something I take to be particularly San Franciscan. In any case, the man got his photo taken, discount car explained, and he was done. I waited for my ID photo while the man on the bench prepared for departure.
He had a backpack. It was new, it was stuffed and it looked heavy, 20 or 30 pounds of whatever. The man was trying to open it. Here, the disabled observer falters. Routine tasks, such as opening a zipper, have challenged me for so long that I no longer have perspective. Something about unzipping the front compartment of his backpack took too much time, did not go smoothly. But I cannot precisely say why. Something was happening with his feet. While his hands worked the zipper, the man's feet pointed inward, pigeon toed. The zipper seem to slide open in the usual fashion, but the man's stance complicated everything. His toe work could only have made the whole project awkward, unbalancing things, making him the opposite of surefooted.
I recognize this sort of thing, pick it up through the gut. The faint oddity of his physical movements could almost have been an athetosis, the way things go askew with conditions such as cerebral palsy. But my hunch was that things had gone askew with prescription pharmaceuticals. The sort people take when they have schizophrenia, for example. I believe this young man was hammered by demons, then hammered by the drugs enlisted to chase the demons. And here he was, now clutching his backpack like a physical being. With both arms around it, he was trying to do something. And I, observing from only a few feet away, could not say what he was after. Embarrassed? Was he embarrassed? What else could one be in the prime of life going after transit discount cards in the middle of the workday, wrestling with backpacks, doing one's best to keep the smallest of things together?
Not that a life is the smallest of things. And in this way having a disability can enlarge the human perspective. Compassion, being meager in my childhood, now seems to be the major lesson of my adulthood. The point is not to breeze by the life experience.
I was in a hurry after the process of transit discount card acquisition. My need was to get out of there, leave the realm of the lame, halt and blind, say goodbye to the poor of San Francisco, and rush for the suburban commuter train that would take me safely home. At the elevator, I pushed the down button, saw the doors open, and caught something out of the corner of my eye. It was the man with the backpack. He was wrestling with his pack on a different bench, and now rushing for the elevator just like me. Now inside, I looked for the hold-the-door-open button, but too late. The doors slid closed between us, and for reasons that are unclear, I regretted this.
It's a big retired person's day, a journey all the way to San Francisco, including lunch with a cousin and business with the powers that be. Only one way to prepare for such an epic journey: gather the newspapers. They have been building up again, unread, but not unnoticed. Their presence in my life weighs heavily, particularly my penchant for ignoring them. For things are happening, particularly the November elections, with Texas oil barons poised to pull a fast one on California voters. Which is why one must read the papers. And is why one doesn't.
But this is a transit day, things are in transit and transition, and it takes absolutely no time at all to sweep up various iterations of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times for quick, intensive and efficient reading on the road. The railroad, of course. Gather ye newsprints while ye may, with time running short for the departure for the 10:14 AM northbound.
Oh, and there was that piece in The New Yorker about the New Zealand psychiatrist murderer. Which I thought was in the bedroom. But wasn't. And must be lurking under the pile of other unread New Yorkers on my living room table. And damned if I'm not out of time, and here it is, the very article I wanted, which has me stuffing one last publication into my little black bag. Which includes not only publications, but an actual file, for I have business, do I not? Rendering the bag too heavy for any human lap. Stupid, I am stupid, overburdened with sufficient newspapers to cover a cage big enough for every condor in California. Never mind. I grab a few things out of the bag, only about six newspapers, and set off. Rolling to Caltrain at maximum warp, that is to say, not much, in my new Swedish wheelchair, safety being paramount at all times. Must be a very safe place, Sweden.
I see signs of the apocalypse everywhere these days, and one awaits me just outside the San Francisco Caltrain station. All the ticket machines for Muni, the city transit system, are broken. I tell myself this doesn't matter but know it is a sign.
Another sign pops up at lunch, although this one only occurs to me after my cousin and I have made our separate ways from the Powell Street station. It was what we did not talk about. The possibility that, using a different approach, I could get my writing published. Writers invest enormous amounts of ego in this matter of publication. So, there's no way around it, this news is good news, and should be affecting me in a good way. And one of those ways, mentioning this development to my cousin Gregg, just did not happen. Which is itself significant. But it's a work in progress, this psychological anomaly. It's burning up more energy than I can quite understand.
It's business time. I have an appointment to get myself officially certified as a disabled transit user. This is a silly exercise, and I would not bother going through these bureaucratic motions. But technology is changing. The new proximity card, dubbed Clipper in the Bay Area, will soon predominate. And it's the perfect thing for a disabled transit rider. Forgiving, designed to be imprecise, just a credit card sort of thing that one waves at a device on boarding and departing. Furthermore, I tell myself, this is part of my transit research, something I can tell my fellow advisory board members at the next Caltrain meeting. Which explains why I am coming out of the Van Ness Muni station and heading for the large proletariat building across the street.
Never doubt the social fracturing of America. The Muni offices are full of poor people, that is to say, ordinary folks. They are here in search of special fares, like me. They are here to pay bills. And those of the disabled persuasion gather on the sixth floor. The entire staff is of one minority persuasion or another, Filipino, black, Chinese and Hispanic being most popular. And if their manner is a bit unpolished, they are also quite friendly. They are certainly working hard. And I, it seems, am hard work.
I don't have the right documentation. What I need is my Department of Motor Vehicles disabled parking permit. In other words, bureaucratic logic being what it is, in order to take advantage of a public organization designed to lure people from cars, I must prove that I have a car and the right to park it.
To their credit, the people in this office are scrambling all over the place trying to not send me back to Menlo Park, 30 miles south, without their disabled transit discount card. In the end, what the hell, they take my photo, give me a fax number and ask me to send in the DMV document. I am most grateful. I let them know it. These people are beleaguered, and so are their customers, and they need all the encouragement one can provide.
Naturally, I miss the 2:37 PM southbound. It's a quasi-express, the sort of train I believe in. I have to settle for the stop-at-every-tree train departing at 3:07. Not to worry. In the course of the day I have shed more newspapers than Johnny Appleseed shed apples. Admittedly his apples turned into trees and my newsprint has done the opposite. Still, I feel lighter. There's the 'problem' with having a shot at publication. But I'm working on it.
The other problem involves Marlou. Naturally, I have no idea where this DMV disabled parking permit is. There's one in my van, but it expired in 2009. And the other? Well, it would have arrived in June, 2008. Marlou and I were just returning from our last trip. Her prognosis was not good. There is a lot from that time that I do not recall. Particularly DMV documents. I may have to let go, give up, and contact the DMV myself. There will be a fee. And I will pay it. I will pay it gladly.
But this is a transit day, things are in transit and transition, and it takes absolutely no time at all to sweep up various iterations of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times for quick, intensive and efficient reading on the road. The railroad, of course. Gather ye newsprints while ye may, with time running short for the departure for the 10:14 AM northbound.
Oh, and there was that piece in The New Yorker about the New Zealand psychiatrist murderer. Which I thought was in the bedroom. But wasn't. And must be lurking under the pile of other unread New Yorkers on my living room table. And damned if I'm not out of time, and here it is, the very article I wanted, which has me stuffing one last publication into my little black bag. Which includes not only publications, but an actual file, for I have business, do I not? Rendering the bag too heavy for any human lap. Stupid, I am stupid, overburdened with sufficient newspapers to cover a cage big enough for every condor in California. Never mind. I grab a few things out of the bag, only about six newspapers, and set off. Rolling to Caltrain at maximum warp, that is to say, not much, in my new Swedish wheelchair, safety being paramount at all times. Must be a very safe place, Sweden.
I see signs of the apocalypse everywhere these days, and one awaits me just outside the San Francisco Caltrain station. All the ticket machines for Muni, the city transit system, are broken. I tell myself this doesn't matter but know it is a sign.
Another sign pops up at lunch, although this one only occurs to me after my cousin and I have made our separate ways from the Powell Street station. It was what we did not talk about. The possibility that, using a different approach, I could get my writing published. Writers invest enormous amounts of ego in this matter of publication. So, there's no way around it, this news is good news, and should be affecting me in a good way. And one of those ways, mentioning this development to my cousin Gregg, just did not happen. Which is itself significant. But it's a work in progress, this psychological anomaly. It's burning up more energy than I can quite understand.
It's business time. I have an appointment to get myself officially certified as a disabled transit user. This is a silly exercise, and I would not bother going through these bureaucratic motions. But technology is changing. The new proximity card, dubbed Clipper in the Bay Area, will soon predominate. And it's the perfect thing for a disabled transit rider. Forgiving, designed to be imprecise, just a credit card sort of thing that one waves at a device on boarding and departing. Furthermore, I tell myself, this is part of my transit research, something I can tell my fellow advisory board members at the next Caltrain meeting. Which explains why I am coming out of the Van Ness Muni station and heading for the large proletariat building across the street.
Never doubt the social fracturing of America. The Muni offices are full of poor people, that is to say, ordinary folks. They are here in search of special fares, like me. They are here to pay bills. And those of the disabled persuasion gather on the sixth floor. The entire staff is of one minority persuasion or another, Filipino, black, Chinese and Hispanic being most popular. And if their manner is a bit unpolished, they are also quite friendly. They are certainly working hard. And I, it seems, am hard work.
I don't have the right documentation. What I need is my Department of Motor Vehicles disabled parking permit. In other words, bureaucratic logic being what it is, in order to take advantage of a public organization designed to lure people from cars, I must prove that I have a car and the right to park it.
To their credit, the people in this office are scrambling all over the place trying to not send me back to Menlo Park, 30 miles south, without their disabled transit discount card. In the end, what the hell, they take my photo, give me a fax number and ask me to send in the DMV document. I am most grateful. I let them know it. These people are beleaguered, and so are their customers, and they need all the encouragement one can provide.
Naturally, I miss the 2:37 PM southbound. It's a quasi-express, the sort of train I believe in. I have to settle for the stop-at-every-tree train departing at 3:07. Not to worry. In the course of the day I have shed more newspapers than Johnny Appleseed shed apples. Admittedly his apples turned into trees and my newsprint has done the opposite. Still, I feel lighter. There's the 'problem' with having a shot at publication. But I'm working on it.
The other problem involves Marlou. Naturally, I have no idea where this DMV disabled parking permit is. There's one in my van, but it expired in 2009. And the other? Well, it would have arrived in June, 2008. Marlou and I were just returning from our last trip. Her prognosis was not good. There is a lot from that time that I do not recall. Particularly DMV documents. I may have to let go, give up, and contact the DMV myself. There will be a fee. And I will pay it. I will pay it gladly.
It's like Willy Loman planting his vegetable garden at midnight. It's like Liberace buying his last Rolls-Royce. It's also lettuce, in the form of 12 seedlings, two sixpacks in the glib vernacular. Paul, stalwart volunteer on loan from the Catholic Worker's House, has purchased them. And now he is planting them while I watch. So reassuring. Like Willy Loman, I have come to the end of some road, cannot face another moment of consciousness without knowing there are salad vegetables in the ground. This will live after me. This romaine. This butterhead. This knot of pain that sits in my chest.
Which hasn't quite made its nature or origins known. Grief? A good guess. I keep thinking it has gone away, perhaps departed forever. This is not the wisest assumption. It's been a year and a half, I tell myself. So what? I had a fair amount of grief before Marlou's death. It's just there, sitting around. And I like to say sitting 'in' my chest, but more accurately, it is 'on' my chest, weighing an awful lot, and not doing much for my respiration.
It is not tragedy, they said of Death of a Salesman. I am trying to remember why. If I recall correctly, the critical point was that Willy Loman met his end not through the classical formulation of overreaching, blind human pride bringing him down. But through something of a lower order, done in by social conditions, contemporary American mores.
And then the truth popped right out of Paul's 30-year-old mouth. The soul is a torpid thing, he said, quoting Carl Jung. It resists change. That is to say, it changes only under pain of death. So reassuring to know that all those miniature lettuces are infiltrating my dark fertile soil with their insistent white roots. It's enough to give a man some grounding while everything around gets chopped and composted.
An editor said the nicest thing about my work. It needs, well, work. But not much. It needs another form, because one serves me better than another. Aside from that, it's good work. There is a lot there. One can feel sunny, let the sense of possibilities expand.
And yet when this e-mail popped up on my screen this morning, my editor friend's thoughts were more than I could absorb. A few phrases suggesting my current effort wasn't working, this gist of things, sailed right at me. And then I gave up. Time for a shower, and maybe Jane would read the rest. She did. And later gave me the not-so-bad news. I know how to write, do good stuff, but don't always do good stuff in any format. It was beginning to feel okay.
And what was feeling okay was that I was feeling okay. I have been facing this sort of thing recently, this challenge of things being good. It certainly is daunting. I don't trust it, that is the problem. Or is it? Maybe I don't even know what the problem is.
Jane and I are getting closer, staying in touch through difficult times. We consistently respect each other. We face unpleasantness, however long it takes. What's to complain? It's fine to prepare for the bad times, not to be foolishly optimistic. Unless one half believes that all optimism is foolish. Or more precisely, that appreciating what is good in the present moment somehow will backfire. As I say, receiving positive comments from the editor was a lot of work.
And maybe the most positive thing with Jane is just what happened this morning. She read the e-mail. I showered. We divided up the work. Jane got the good news first, then I did my best to absorb it.
It has been hard for me to accept one of Marlou's last gifts. On her deathbed she told me that her life had been a lamp that had shone through me. Her words seemed very sad, as though her existence was terribly muted and only found expression through another. But when I look at my own muting, the verdict changes. Sometimes, and some lifetimes, this is the best one can do. If joy is hard and the upbeat challenging, join hands. Dionysus liked company. It was a rare event, the solo bacchanal.
For me, there seems nothing more threatening than love.
Which hasn't quite made its nature or origins known. Grief? A good guess. I keep thinking it has gone away, perhaps departed forever. This is not the wisest assumption. It's been a year and a half, I tell myself. So what? I had a fair amount of grief before Marlou's death. It's just there, sitting around. And I like to say sitting 'in' my chest, but more accurately, it is 'on' my chest, weighing an awful lot, and not doing much for my respiration.
It is not tragedy, they said of Death of a Salesman. I am trying to remember why. If I recall correctly, the critical point was that Willy Loman met his end not through the classical formulation of overreaching, blind human pride bringing him down. But through something of a lower order, done in by social conditions, contemporary American mores.
And then the truth popped right out of Paul's 30-year-old mouth. The soul is a torpid thing, he said, quoting Carl Jung. It resists change. That is to say, it changes only under pain of death. So reassuring to know that all those miniature lettuces are infiltrating my dark fertile soil with their insistent white roots. It's enough to give a man some grounding while everything around gets chopped and composted.
An editor said the nicest thing about my work. It needs, well, work. But not much. It needs another form, because one serves me better than another. Aside from that, it's good work. There is a lot there. One can feel sunny, let the sense of possibilities expand.
And yet when this e-mail popped up on my screen this morning, my editor friend's thoughts were more than I could absorb. A few phrases suggesting my current effort wasn't working, this gist of things, sailed right at me. And then I gave up. Time for a shower, and maybe Jane would read the rest. She did. And later gave me the not-so-bad news. I know how to write, do good stuff, but don't always do good stuff in any format. It was beginning to feel okay.
And what was feeling okay was that I was feeling okay. I have been facing this sort of thing recently, this challenge of things being good. It certainly is daunting. I don't trust it, that is the problem. Or is it? Maybe I don't even know what the problem is.
Jane and I are getting closer, staying in touch through difficult times. We consistently respect each other. We face unpleasantness, however long it takes. What's to complain? It's fine to prepare for the bad times, not to be foolishly optimistic. Unless one half believes that all optimism is foolish. Or more precisely, that appreciating what is good in the present moment somehow will backfire. As I say, receiving positive comments from the editor was a lot of work.
And maybe the most positive thing with Jane is just what happened this morning. She read the e-mail. I showered. We divided up the work. Jane got the good news first, then I did my best to absorb it.
It has been hard for me to accept one of Marlou's last gifts. On her deathbed she told me that her life had been a lamp that had shone through me. Her words seemed very sad, as though her existence was terribly muted and only found expression through another. But when I look at my own muting, the verdict changes. Sometimes, and some lifetimes, this is the best one can do. If joy is hard and the upbeat challenging, join hands. Dionysus liked company. It was a rare event, the solo bacchanal.
For me, there seems nothing more threatening than love.
He is much on my mind, my father, so one might as well clear of bit of space, psychic, that is, and let him wander about. I suppose men inevitably compare themselves to their dads. I say this only to normalize the frequent drifts down paternal memory lane. And to explain why he is forever standing in my mind, regarding the action with a critical eye, while not looking very happy.
Was he a joyless person? Certainly he had a lot of unhappiness in his life. But misery and delight easily cycle in and out of some lives. And my father? When did he have moments of joy? What comes to mind? Well, there was this very odd restaurant, De Palma's Italian Village, perhaps a half-hour drive from home. The place occupied a scruffy desert canyon, a ramshackle collection of buildings in an Italian kitsch style festooned with strings of colored lights. People ate indoors and out of doors, if my memory serves me. There was a small chapel. And, this is the point, peacocks wandered about the property.
I recall that one evening, when I was probably 13 or 14 years of age, my father rose from his plate of De Palma's spaghetti and glass of Chianti to head home. And there among the cars in the dirt parking lot were a couple of peacocks. My father ran after one. The peacock eluded him. My father tried again, and this went on, this bird chasing, doubtless Chianti-enhanced. My brother observed the goings-on with wry detachment. I needed his perspective. My father was a source of constant worry to me, his behavior always verging on the out-of-control. And without my brother's amusement, I might have missed the lighthearted play of the moment.
My father was playing, simply playing. Maybe this is what separates the generations, the matter of play. Adults play with adults, kids with kids. I don't know. It was strange to see my father at play. He chased a peacock down a desert trail some distance, his suit jacket flapping like the bird he pursued.
This is part of my recollection, my father's lack of casual attire. He seemed to have no wardrobe for fun times. I recall the suit. I recall khaki shorts on the weekends around home. But for going out in public and being a bit sporty, my father seemed to have nothing to wear. Perhaps his persona matched the attire. He presented himself as a doctor to the outside world, nothing else. After his divorce, my father had virtually no social life. He was either working, making the occasional trip to a supermarket, or at home. Unless we went out to dinner. And he had had a little wine. Enough to make any man chase after peacocks.
What is burdensome about my father and his sadness? That is the question. My sense of guilt for having been endlessly annoyed with him? Doubtless. As for the future, however much there is, I would like to take my father out for some fun. Some recreational outings. Since the two of us have a way of going around town together, why not get playful?
'You have many of your father's gestures, his expressions,' my Great Aunt Eva told me roughly around the same time as the peacock chase. Surely what she said was true. And even truer, I have inherited my father's contemplative nature. There may be some melancholy inherent in the latter. But I'm not sure. My father was not a happy man, so many things having gone wrong in his life. Particularly where women were concerned, few things seemed to go right. And in this way we are so different. He did not, after all, have Jane.
Was he a joyless person? Certainly he had a lot of unhappiness in his life. But misery and delight easily cycle in and out of some lives. And my father? When did he have moments of joy? What comes to mind? Well, there was this very odd restaurant, De Palma's Italian Village, perhaps a half-hour drive from home. The place occupied a scruffy desert canyon, a ramshackle collection of buildings in an Italian kitsch style festooned with strings of colored lights. People ate indoors and out of doors, if my memory serves me. There was a small chapel. And, this is the point, peacocks wandered about the property.
I recall that one evening, when I was probably 13 or 14 years of age, my father rose from his plate of De Palma's spaghetti and glass of Chianti to head home. And there among the cars in the dirt parking lot were a couple of peacocks. My father ran after one. The peacock eluded him. My father tried again, and this went on, this bird chasing, doubtless Chianti-enhanced. My brother observed the goings-on with wry detachment. I needed his perspective. My father was a source of constant worry to me, his behavior always verging on the out-of-control. And without my brother's amusement, I might have missed the lighthearted play of the moment.
My father was playing, simply playing. Maybe this is what separates the generations, the matter of play. Adults play with adults, kids with kids. I don't know. It was strange to see my father at play. He chased a peacock down a desert trail some distance, his suit jacket flapping like the bird he pursued.
This is part of my recollection, my father's lack of casual attire. He seemed to have no wardrobe for fun times. I recall the suit. I recall khaki shorts on the weekends around home. But for going out in public and being a bit sporty, my father seemed to have nothing to wear. Perhaps his persona matched the attire. He presented himself as a doctor to the outside world, nothing else. After his divorce, my father had virtually no social life. He was either working, making the occasional trip to a supermarket, or at home. Unless we went out to dinner. And he had had a little wine. Enough to make any man chase after peacocks.
What is burdensome about my father and his sadness? That is the question. My sense of guilt for having been endlessly annoyed with him? Doubtless. As for the future, however much there is, I would like to take my father out for some fun. Some recreational outings. Since the two of us have a way of going around town together, why not get playful?
'You have many of your father's gestures, his expressions,' my Great Aunt Eva told me roughly around the same time as the peacock chase. Surely what she said was true. And even truer, I have inherited my father's contemplative nature. There may be some melancholy inherent in the latter. But I'm not sure. My father was not a happy man, so many things having gone wrong in his life. Particularly where women were concerned, few things seemed to go right. And in this way we are so different. He did not, after all, have Jane.
Jane has sent me a poem about the impossibility of completing anything in a lifetime, the fact that the best ideas tend to come before or after their time, and the reality of trying to do anything alone...and armed with this perspective, it can be said that I finally get myself in gear. Inaction frustrates me enormously, at times. So much that can be done, so many possibilities, the restrictions of job and commitments, certainly marriage, not impinging in the slightest way. So I can burst into social action on a day like this one, breakfasting with a friend at 7:30 AM - some exercise, a few chores around the house with one of Team Filipina - then what?
Very troubling that I can still be asking this question at almost one in the afternoon. Not good. Or not bad, if one adopts a different perspective, something lightheartedly Zen, for example. Giggling over time or the lack of it. Sorry, this just isn't me. Too many Jewish genes, perhaps. Not me.
Even when my writing does get under way, I have to stop for the occasional swoon. The latter, some sort of emotional overload, sends me outside to nap in the sun. Nice that we have much of the latter on 1 October. In any case, there I am, waiting for something to reset before having another go at the screen. At least I am at it now, copy rolling. Illusion of progress or production or things not standing still.
What got all this going was the Emerson Quartet. Not their sound, their upcoming concert. It galls me in some private way that the local weekly rag seems destined to ignore it. Did I not send a helpful e-mail to the editor of the Menlo Park Almanac suggesting someone get their journalistic butts over to the new civic theater on Sunday afternoon? We will see what turns up in print next week. Me with my helpful e-mails, pearls before swine.
In any case, knowing the Almanac was likely to ignore this cultural watershed, I was prepared to volunteer my own review. I have done this in the past. But the prospect stuck in my craw, to mix metaphors. I could not quite do it. And for good reason, I believe. The concert is sold out. The people that will hear it will hear it. The situation does not need me.
The larger situation does, I decided. Better talk to the young woman in charge of the hall. I gave her a phone call. If the latter sounds like nothing, you're not an introvert. All kinds of obstacles reared, the search for Katrina's phone number, for example. But I persevered, and damned if there she wasn't, in recorded voicemail tones, and me replying. Deed done, and something like gear kicking accomplished.
Still, things were dragging. Nothing like a little burst of NPR's Fresh Air to while away the time. And damned if it wasn't a posthumous burst from Arthur Penn, vintage film director, responsible for Bonnie and Clyde. A scary film frightened him early, he was saying. Little kid, five years old, sitting in some cinema on New York's east side. Scared. And he can't recall the name of the film. Penn went on to bemoan the thin plots and gratuitous violence of contemporary cinema. While I rolled my eyes.
I recall Bonnie and Clyde. I must have seen the film in the late summer or early autumn of 1967. In fact, I even recall my old friend Lynda Mankin being with me. We sat in some large old movie theater in downtown Berkeley, then I went home to my room in North Oakland. And could not sleep.
It was the final scene, of course. The slow-motion shot of the hero and heroine acquiring multiple gunshot wounds, to use the law-enforcement parlance. Red holes opening up and down their convulsing bodies. And, as Lynda observed on our way out of the theater, 'did you see their faces?' It was a look of mutual recognition, a moment between lovers. Certainly, the exchange made them all the more human. Before the faceless firing squad hidden in the bushes went to work.
Human energy can loop such powerful currents forward and back in time. The five-year-old Penn, terrified by a film, goes on to terrify with his own. And what can terrify a five-year-old? So much. It does not take very much, that is the point. Penn mentioned that he grew up apart from his famous photographer brother, a divorce having intervened. He grew up with 'various people' not his family, he added.
A lot was to happen to me in the next nine months or so after that 1967 night in the movie theater. On the surface, I recall acquiring some calm. I seemed to be finding my way. But calm can be dangerous. The pain and terror of my own childhood were writhing inside me. I would learn this later, of course. Did I see the look in their faces, of Bonnie and of Clyde? Yes, I did. What I saw was love. Pure and simple. Then violence tearing people apart, tearing into people. It was too much with me, the family sadness. Although displaced by much warmer experiences, it is still there. And on a day when nothing happens, and I cannot accomplish much, the past happens instead.
Very troubling that I can still be asking this question at almost one in the afternoon. Not good. Or not bad, if one adopts a different perspective, something lightheartedly Zen, for example. Giggling over time or the lack of it. Sorry, this just isn't me. Too many Jewish genes, perhaps. Not me.
Even when my writing does get under way, I have to stop for the occasional swoon. The latter, some sort of emotional overload, sends me outside to nap in the sun. Nice that we have much of the latter on 1 October. In any case, there I am, waiting for something to reset before having another go at the screen. At least I am at it now, copy rolling. Illusion of progress or production or things not standing still.
What got all this going was the Emerson Quartet. Not their sound, their upcoming concert. It galls me in some private way that the local weekly rag seems destined to ignore it. Did I not send a helpful e-mail to the editor of the Menlo Park Almanac suggesting someone get their journalistic butts over to the new civic theater on Sunday afternoon? We will see what turns up in print next week. Me with my helpful e-mails, pearls before swine.
In any case, knowing the Almanac was likely to ignore this cultural watershed, I was prepared to volunteer my own review. I have done this in the past. But the prospect stuck in my craw, to mix metaphors. I could not quite do it. And for good reason, I believe. The concert is sold out. The people that will hear it will hear it. The situation does not need me.
The larger situation does, I decided. Better talk to the young woman in charge of the hall. I gave her a phone call. If the latter sounds like nothing, you're not an introvert. All kinds of obstacles reared, the search for Katrina's phone number, for example. But I persevered, and damned if there she wasn't, in recorded voicemail tones, and me replying. Deed done, and something like gear kicking accomplished.
Still, things were dragging. Nothing like a little burst of NPR's Fresh Air to while away the time. And damned if it wasn't a posthumous burst from Arthur Penn, vintage film director, responsible for Bonnie and Clyde. A scary film frightened him early, he was saying. Little kid, five years old, sitting in some cinema on New York's east side. Scared. And he can't recall the name of the film. Penn went on to bemoan the thin plots and gratuitous violence of contemporary cinema. While I rolled my eyes.
I recall Bonnie and Clyde. I must have seen the film in the late summer or early autumn of 1967. In fact, I even recall my old friend Lynda Mankin being with me. We sat in some large old movie theater in downtown Berkeley, then I went home to my room in North Oakland. And could not sleep.
It was the final scene, of course. The slow-motion shot of the hero and heroine acquiring multiple gunshot wounds, to use the law-enforcement parlance. Red holes opening up and down their convulsing bodies. And, as Lynda observed on our way out of the theater, 'did you see their faces?' It was a look of mutual recognition, a moment between lovers. Certainly, the exchange made them all the more human. Before the faceless firing squad hidden in the bushes went to work.
Human energy can loop such powerful currents forward and back in time. The five-year-old Penn, terrified by a film, goes on to terrify with his own. And what can terrify a five-year-old? So much. It does not take very much, that is the point. Penn mentioned that he grew up apart from his famous photographer brother, a divorce having intervened. He grew up with 'various people' not his family, he added.
A lot was to happen to me in the next nine months or so after that 1967 night in the movie theater. On the surface, I recall acquiring some calm. I seemed to be finding my way. But calm can be dangerous. The pain and terror of my own childhood were writhing inside me. I would learn this later, of course. Did I see the look in their faces, of Bonnie and of Clyde? Yes, I did. What I saw was love. Pure and simple. Then violence tearing people apart, tearing into people. It was too much with me, the family sadness. Although displaced by much warmer experiences, it is still there. And on a day when nothing happens, and I cannot accomplish much, the past happens instead.
