November 2010 Archives
If Tennessee Williams depended upon the kindness of strangers, I have relied upon their forthrightness. Caroline Coon, who was she, why do I remember her name and where is she now? Then, around 1970, she had founded something called Release, a program for recovering drug addicts. Hers was a small program, in a small house, in a small country. In London where socioeconomic districts drifted about like tectonic plates, my part of North Kensington, just off Holland Park Avenue, jammed upper middle-class affluence right against seediness filtering into poverty. And Release? What did this have to do with me? Absolutely nothing, except that I was newly arrived, wanted to get involved...and this was what the neighborhood had to offer. I hobbled over there, that is almost certain. Release was only a couple of streets away, maybe ten minutes by crutch. And I must have turned up there one day, presented myself as a volunteer and gone, in a manner of speaking, to work.
The problem was that there was not much work I could do. This essential fact had not occurred to me. Certainly, it was dawning on me. But I was only nine months out of the Los Angeles rehabilitation Hospital where I had spent half a year. After a final term at Berkeley, some travel, and this period of settling into life in Britain, the problem of work had not hit home. Not yet.
Nor had it quite occurred to me that I lived in something called a neighborhood. Up at the top of the road, and virtually every London road had a top and a bottom, on the corner there was a grocer's. This was what everyone called it, and this was what it was. Wills & Sons, Grocers, so read the sign above the door. Inside, a few things sat on shelves, but most resided behind the counter, along with Mr. and Mrs. Wills. Some tea? You asked for it. Milk? Same. Biscuits, a can of soup, whatever. A spoken request to one of the Wills, and generally both were behind the counter, was all it took. That and a little money placed by the till, then out the door. The Wills' establishment was hard by the Prince of Wales, the neighborhood pub, center of the local scene. In fact, the pub's reputation extended well beyond. Why, I could not fathom. Pubs were loud places, full of smoke and extroverts, and they exhausted me. This one was no exception. Still, my cousins and I turned up there from time to time. But not this time, this particular afternoon, when I turned up at Release.
If I wasn't quite dealing with the challenges of employment, plenty of distractions kept me busy. Just getting used to day-to-day life in another country, for example. Marveling at the differences. The narrowness of houses. The 18th century townhouse occupied by Release, and I may not have appreciated its age at the time, seemed about five meters wide. The ground floor was occupied by...who could say? Probably tenants. Release was upstairs, that was the point. The steps were narrow as a ladder, and almost as steep. At the top, there was always tea. Someone invariably offered me a cup when I arrived to volunteer. There was never any rush. The young people who worked there did not appear to work, more to hang out. Everyone seemed to just be, the atmosphere domestic, the rhythm homelike. Once the tea and chat had extended unimaginably, I felt obliged to shift gears, to ask what might be done. Well, said whoever was nominally in charge, let's see. This meant seeing Malcolm.
He was my first exposure to a sort of British type. My own cousins had emerged from public schools, but with baggage, German Jewish baggage, which gave them a certain flavor. Malcolm had none of this. His public schooling seemed to have goosed him into extroversion. Two things operated in parallel, a private core and an explicit, very public, exterior. Malcolm's words were all about getting things done, but his eyes were all about keeping things private and within. Outwardly, he was sardonic in the most natural way. My 'job' was to handle correspondence, after a fashion, typing one key at a time on a small manual typewriter. 'Send a chatty little note thanking her for her donation,' he would observe. I had a go at a letter, assuring the person who had written that Release valued her interest and would make good use of her £5. Concluded, I tried to show Malcolm what I had done. He waved off my typewritten draft, assuring me it was fine. Did he not want to have a look for, after all, I was an American? He shook his head, adding 'fancy more tea?'
Release was assembling a brochure, and the project, perhaps because of its expense, had everyone's attention. Here, a certain line was drawn. I had nothing to do with the brochure. There was talk of writing copy, printing expenses, photographs, but this chatter went on around me. Meanwhile, I was encouraged to talk to the addicts. The latter dropped in at all hours, for this was what was supposed to happen here. This was a drop-in center, a place the drug exhausted called home. My job, the only conceivable one, was to listen. I could not offer even the smallest sliver of practical advice, and even listening with any credibility proved a stretch. Problems with the British welfare system figured prominently in most drug addicts' daily chitchat. I didn't understand any of it. I didn't understand anything, including why I was there. Except that I had nowhere else useful to go. Particularly during the day, the so-called workday. So I was there.
Release needed a photographer. I asked my landlord, who lived next door to me, if he knew one. Yes, a photographer lived next to him, Martin. London was proving to be both scaled down and intense, this person two doors away, less than 20 meters, being a photojournalist for the Sunday Times of London. I knocked on Martin's door, if not trembling, then on the verge. He ushered me in. A domestic scene was in full flower, one toddler and one baby variously romping and crying. This is my wife Anthea, Martin said. He introduced the kids. Anthea went in search of tea. Martin offered me a seat and somehow talked to everyone else while also talking to me. The kids had his full attention, but so did I. He would begin a sentence addressed to three-year-old Sophie, then finish it talking to me.
With so much family life under way, my presence could only be a distraction, if not a burden. I came to the point. Release. Martin had heard of it, more than heard, in fact. He knew all about it, particularly its socialite founder, Caroline Coon. I had only seen her on one occasion, but Martin saw her all the time. In this or that sports car with this or that bloke, he said all twinkly. James, seated on the carpet, knocked over his orange juice with the back of his one-year-old hand. He seemed not to notice. Martin barely noticed himself, still talking to Sophie as he lunged for a tea towel hanging off the back of the sofa. He mopped up the juice, picked up James and placed him on his knee. 'This is Paul,' Martin said. 'James is not much of a conversationalist,' he added. Not yet, I thought.
Anthea arrived with three steaming cups of tea. It was evening, 7:30 or so, the time I had chosen to minimize the bother. But it was tea time, clearly. Not that any time wasn't in Britain. Anthea had the bleary smile of someone under emotional strain. I checked my watch. Things had dragged on for half an hour and we still hadn't reached the point of my visit. 'That's it, James,' Martin said, 'grab his glasses.' True enough, the infant was reaching for my sparkling specs. 'Paul knows Caroline Coon,' Martin added, 'and could be having it off with her, for all we know.' Anthea smiled apologetically. There was no need. I was 'having it off' with no one those days, and Martin's remark might have stung, but for his lightness. He seemed pleasantly distracted by everything, everywhere at once, nowhere in particular. And now it was 8:15, we hadn't gotten to volunteer photography. It was time. I stated my case, making it clear that he was an eminent professional, this brochure hardly worthy of his time....
Martin was up on his feet, snatching albums from a bookcase. He opened them up on the carpet, his oeuvre, his life's work. Portraits, Martin specialized in them, giving Sunday Times readers a look at the cultural luminaries of the day. Here was Michelangelo Antonioni, the trendy film director, and here were his skin pores, the shadows under his eyes, his dark and dissolute cast. Here was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a.k.a., Tony, his familiar politician's face rendered angular and uncertain, a stalwart liberal looking shady and on the verge of a drug deal. Such was Martin's merciless, high-contrast treatment. Now Twiggy, the model. Followed by an actress. Next a minor member of the royal family. Another politician. The Sunday Times gallery.
'Shouldn't bother,' said Martin. He quietly closed his albums. His remark was one of the most natural, yet culturally British expressions, its meaning opaque to any newcomer. I asked him to explain. Release, he said. They wouldn't want him. Just look at his work. Anthea says it's cruel, Martin added. He seemed utterly at home in this assessment. Just as he was at home in his own home, chaos or not. I had failed in my mission. Anthea was looking strained. I thanked him. I thanked her. Good night, and we would see each other around. Which, living a few meters apart, was understating it.
Outside, the streetlights lit the bare tree branches of Norland Square. The incessant traffic ground and hooted along the avenue. I found my cold November keys, opened the door to my rooming house and headed up the long stone staircase. Switching on the electric heater, its orange glow feeble against the autumn chill, I settled into my wicker armchair. Someone knocked on the door. Martin. How had he gotten in the front door downstairs? The landlord, he told me, our neighbor, his friend. Could he come in? Of course, of course, and I indicated the one available wooden chair. Martin sat down, took a breath, placed both hands on his knees. Anthea and I, he said, really like you. We were concerned, thought you might have felt uncomfortable with us. A pause. At this stage in my emotional development, frank exchanges left me speechless. I tried to assure Martin that I was not uncomfortable, then sensed the dishonesty in this. And finally settled on yes, things were difficult these days. And thanks for coming over. We will keep in touch, I added. When can you come for dinner, he asked?
We settled on some date. It was all too much. He said good night. And after Martin closed the door of my bedsit, I tried to piece things together. How the evening had shifted from abandoned to buoyant. How I tried to minimize my needs. Reduce my interpersonal footprint. Shrink. Whereas Martin was all about expanding. And who were the British? Supposedly aloof. Hardly. And who was I? What was happening here, in this place? And where was home?
The problem was that there was not much work I could do. This essential fact had not occurred to me. Certainly, it was dawning on me. But I was only nine months out of the Los Angeles rehabilitation Hospital where I had spent half a year. After a final term at Berkeley, some travel, and this period of settling into life in Britain, the problem of work had not hit home. Not yet.
Nor had it quite occurred to me that I lived in something called a neighborhood. Up at the top of the road, and virtually every London road had a top and a bottom, on the corner there was a grocer's. This was what everyone called it, and this was what it was. Wills & Sons, Grocers, so read the sign above the door. Inside, a few things sat on shelves, but most resided behind the counter, along with Mr. and Mrs. Wills. Some tea? You asked for it. Milk? Same. Biscuits, a can of soup, whatever. A spoken request to one of the Wills, and generally both were behind the counter, was all it took. That and a little money placed by the till, then out the door. The Wills' establishment was hard by the Prince of Wales, the neighborhood pub, center of the local scene. In fact, the pub's reputation extended well beyond. Why, I could not fathom. Pubs were loud places, full of smoke and extroverts, and they exhausted me. This one was no exception. Still, my cousins and I turned up there from time to time. But not this time, this particular afternoon, when I turned up at Release.
If I wasn't quite dealing with the challenges of employment, plenty of distractions kept me busy. Just getting used to day-to-day life in another country, for example. Marveling at the differences. The narrowness of houses. The 18th century townhouse occupied by Release, and I may not have appreciated its age at the time, seemed about five meters wide. The ground floor was occupied by...who could say? Probably tenants. Release was upstairs, that was the point. The steps were narrow as a ladder, and almost as steep. At the top, there was always tea. Someone invariably offered me a cup when I arrived to volunteer. There was never any rush. The young people who worked there did not appear to work, more to hang out. Everyone seemed to just be, the atmosphere domestic, the rhythm homelike. Once the tea and chat had extended unimaginably, I felt obliged to shift gears, to ask what might be done. Well, said whoever was nominally in charge, let's see. This meant seeing Malcolm.
He was my first exposure to a sort of British type. My own cousins had emerged from public schools, but with baggage, German Jewish baggage, which gave them a certain flavor. Malcolm had none of this. His public schooling seemed to have goosed him into extroversion. Two things operated in parallel, a private core and an explicit, very public, exterior. Malcolm's words were all about getting things done, but his eyes were all about keeping things private and within. Outwardly, he was sardonic in the most natural way. My 'job' was to handle correspondence, after a fashion, typing one key at a time on a small manual typewriter. 'Send a chatty little note thanking her for her donation,' he would observe. I had a go at a letter, assuring the person who had written that Release valued her interest and would make good use of her £5. Concluded, I tried to show Malcolm what I had done. He waved off my typewritten draft, assuring me it was fine. Did he not want to have a look for, after all, I was an American? He shook his head, adding 'fancy more tea?'
Release was assembling a brochure, and the project, perhaps because of its expense, had everyone's attention. Here, a certain line was drawn. I had nothing to do with the brochure. There was talk of writing copy, printing expenses, photographs, but this chatter went on around me. Meanwhile, I was encouraged to talk to the addicts. The latter dropped in at all hours, for this was what was supposed to happen here. This was a drop-in center, a place the drug exhausted called home. My job, the only conceivable one, was to listen. I could not offer even the smallest sliver of practical advice, and even listening with any credibility proved a stretch. Problems with the British welfare system figured prominently in most drug addicts' daily chitchat. I didn't understand any of it. I didn't understand anything, including why I was there. Except that I had nowhere else useful to go. Particularly during the day, the so-called workday. So I was there.
Release needed a photographer. I asked my landlord, who lived next door to me, if he knew one. Yes, a photographer lived next to him, Martin. London was proving to be both scaled down and intense, this person two doors away, less than 20 meters, being a photojournalist for the Sunday Times of London. I knocked on Martin's door, if not trembling, then on the verge. He ushered me in. A domestic scene was in full flower, one toddler and one baby variously romping and crying. This is my wife Anthea, Martin said. He introduced the kids. Anthea went in search of tea. Martin offered me a seat and somehow talked to everyone else while also talking to me. The kids had his full attention, but so did I. He would begin a sentence addressed to three-year-old Sophie, then finish it talking to me.
With so much family life under way, my presence could only be a distraction, if not a burden. I came to the point. Release. Martin had heard of it, more than heard, in fact. He knew all about it, particularly its socialite founder, Caroline Coon. I had only seen her on one occasion, but Martin saw her all the time. In this or that sports car with this or that bloke, he said all twinkly. James, seated on the carpet, knocked over his orange juice with the back of his one-year-old hand. He seemed not to notice. Martin barely noticed himself, still talking to Sophie as he lunged for a tea towel hanging off the back of the sofa. He mopped up the juice, picked up James and placed him on his knee. 'This is Paul,' Martin said. 'James is not much of a conversationalist,' he added. Not yet, I thought.
Anthea arrived with three steaming cups of tea. It was evening, 7:30 or so, the time I had chosen to minimize the bother. But it was tea time, clearly. Not that any time wasn't in Britain. Anthea had the bleary smile of someone under emotional strain. I checked my watch. Things had dragged on for half an hour and we still hadn't reached the point of my visit. 'That's it, James,' Martin said, 'grab his glasses.' True enough, the infant was reaching for my sparkling specs. 'Paul knows Caroline Coon,' Martin added, 'and could be having it off with her, for all we know.' Anthea smiled apologetically. There was no need. I was 'having it off' with no one those days, and Martin's remark might have stung, but for his lightness. He seemed pleasantly distracted by everything, everywhere at once, nowhere in particular. And now it was 8:15, we hadn't gotten to volunteer photography. It was time. I stated my case, making it clear that he was an eminent professional, this brochure hardly worthy of his time....
Martin was up on his feet, snatching albums from a bookcase. He opened them up on the carpet, his oeuvre, his life's work. Portraits, Martin specialized in them, giving Sunday Times readers a look at the cultural luminaries of the day. Here was Michelangelo Antonioni, the trendy film director, and here were his skin pores, the shadows under his eyes, his dark and dissolute cast. Here was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, a.k.a., Tony, his familiar politician's face rendered angular and uncertain, a stalwart liberal looking shady and on the verge of a drug deal. Such was Martin's merciless, high-contrast treatment. Now Twiggy, the model. Followed by an actress. Next a minor member of the royal family. Another politician. The Sunday Times gallery.
'Shouldn't bother,' said Martin. He quietly closed his albums. His remark was one of the most natural, yet culturally British expressions, its meaning opaque to any newcomer. I asked him to explain. Release, he said. They wouldn't want him. Just look at his work. Anthea says it's cruel, Martin added. He seemed utterly at home in this assessment. Just as he was at home in his own home, chaos or not. I had failed in my mission. Anthea was looking strained. I thanked him. I thanked her. Good night, and we would see each other around. Which, living a few meters apart, was understating it.
Outside, the streetlights lit the bare tree branches of Norland Square. The incessant traffic ground and hooted along the avenue. I found my cold November keys, opened the door to my rooming house and headed up the long stone staircase. Switching on the electric heater, its orange glow feeble against the autumn chill, I settled into my wicker armchair. Someone knocked on the door. Martin. How had he gotten in the front door downstairs? The landlord, he told me, our neighbor, his friend. Could he come in? Of course, of course, and I indicated the one available wooden chair. Martin sat down, took a breath, placed both hands on his knees. Anthea and I, he said, really like you. We were concerned, thought you might have felt uncomfortable with us. A pause. At this stage in my emotional development, frank exchanges left me speechless. I tried to assure Martin that I was not uncomfortable, then sensed the dishonesty in this. And finally settled on yes, things were difficult these days. And thanks for coming over. We will keep in touch, I added. When can you come for dinner, he asked?
We settled on some date. It was all too much. He said good night. And after Martin closed the door of my bedsit, I tried to piece things together. How the evening had shifted from abandoned to buoyant. How I tried to minimize my needs. Reduce my interpersonal footprint. Shrink. Whereas Martin was all about expanding. And who were the British? Supposedly aloof. Hardly. And who was I? What was happening here, in this place? And where was home?
My first wife...I now call her that without remorse, only relief...had one final idea, also her best. Being isolated as a freelance corporate writer, why not join a men's group? Isolation being only the tip of a psychoemotional iceberg, the bit underwater sinking me with my marriage, spirits plummeting, self-esteem scraping bottom. So I set off in my aging white Dodge for a men's evening in Palo Alto.
It was hard not to notice the furniture. A night meeting in a Quaker primary school made all kinds of practical and economic sense. And along with this practicality came toddler chairs and tables. Giant blocks. Lots of bouncy balls. Plus about 40 of the mammalian kind, everyone seated on the floor...except me. I wanted a chair. A big person's chair. Someone found one in the office. What next transpired? I honestly can't recall but found nothing daunting in touchy-feely psychological groups. What I do recall was the excruciating conclusion. Men rose, greeted and hugged each other, stood about chatting...while I stood about. Waiting. Waiting for this painful echo of unwanted and unloved adolescence to end. I milled as best one could leaning on a crutch. The wheelchair was still a couple of years away. Dinner was supposedly next. This group went out to eat after its Friday meetings. More backslapping and laughing and hugging, for everyone knew everyone, and I was just hanging on for...whatever I was hanging on for, this being my principal life skill.
And then the old guy, sporting masses of gray hair, stood beside me. He was glad I had come, he said. He hoped I would join everyone at Thai City. I asked him where this Thai restaurant was, and his face darkened slightly. Better make sure, he said. Sometimes it was Chicago Pizza. Hard to tell with this group, he added. I could already sense his concern for me, his awareness of what it took to get me to a restaurant, and the importance of knowing which restaurant it was. Clint.
He sat beside me at Chicago Pizza, inclining his face slightly to say how nice it was to have me there. During the ordering process Clint interpreted. A war of words was under way, one contingent favoring a meaty pizza with pepperoni and sausage dominant, others stressing vegetables, with a third pushing anchovies, and a waitress trying to take orders for beer. 'I don't want this pizza,' Clint said. 'It doesn't appeal to me.' I was already his confidant. His face was open, artless. From one end of the table someone asked Clint about beer. He said he didn't want any pizza, and washed his hands of the whole affair. Clint, I would learn, was short on hearing and not exactly long on patience when it came to the men's group's decision-making process. He had the slightly feral air of the Bohemian about him. I wondered about his story. What did he do? Retired, he said, now occupying himself with watercolors, sculptures and the burgeoning art of computer graphics. Oh, I said, and what was your day job? I liked the feel of my own question, digging at the history, but in a offhand and offbeat way. Nuclear engineer, he said. Surely this was his little joke...but his no-nonsense gaze said the opposite. He had been, and was, all these things.
A year or two later at a men's group meeting I announced my divorce and found myself in a flood of tears. Later, Clint made much of our parting hug in front of Thai City Restaurant. The group had done the same, all of us standing in a circle, arms around shoulders. Now it was Clint, imparting a solo hug with the simplest and most penetrating of observations. 'You show your vulnerability,' he said. And was this good or bad? The hug said it all.
And after another year or two, after my accountant had led me through the process, it was time for a public, official appointment with destiny: bankruptcy. The US Bankruptcy Court of the Ninth District, or some such, requires your presence, and sworn testimony, in San Francisco, on this date.... Whatever had led me there, principally the emotional falling apart around my marriage, not to mention a worsening neuromusculature, whatever had come before, well, it was all coalescing and sharpening, reaching some sort of fearsome peak. An awful thing to be pilloried, but my own doing, and could I face this alone? I stared at the phone long and hard before lifting it to phone Clint.
On the day of the hearing, Clint rode his bicycle to my apartment. I heard his footfall on my plywood wheelchair ramp. For, yes, paralysis had brought me to this point now. I rolled my wheelchair to the door, opened it and found Clint there, removing the bicycle clips from his trousers. I gaped at the latter. They were of a loud reddish plaid, woolen and ample. The trousers had a clownish look to them, an effect heightened by what held them up. Was it a belt? Or a strap? Perhaps a woman's belt. Silvery in color, slim in design. A bluish work shirt billowed from the top. What had I done? Surely this man, after years in respectable employ at General Electric Nuclear, knew how to dress for a legal proceeding. Clint was cheery as ever, praising me for my punctuality. It must take a lot of work, he said. It had, and it did, and now I wanted to cry. I loaded my wheelchair into the new Ford van, and we headed for San Francisco.
Right to the financial district, appropriately enough. I found a blue zone on the street. Montgomery Street. A meter maid paused on the sidewalk, eyeballing me openly. Imposters using free disabled parking spaces had recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. She would see my wheelchair in a moment, but it did not matter. She knew. She knew I was guilty. Guilty of bankruptcy, financial collapse, life failure. Perhaps she would watch, then give up, but the bankruptcy judge would know better. Clint and I headed for the federal building, a reception desk offered a clipboard where we signed in, both of us. A list of cases was pinned to the door. There was mine. My name complete, even my middle name, Alexander.
We entered the crowded courtroom. On the witness stand, someone was examining a Chinese-American woman. The interlocutor was relentless. When did she last see the gold? How much gold did she say there was? What did she think it was worth? And where did she last see it? Then it just disappeared, is that correct? First the gold was there, then it wasn't. Was that it? Did he have this right? How large a package of gold was it? And when did she last remember seeing it? The woman wrung her hands, kept saying more or less the same thing. I squirmed with her. Clint sat beside me, he smiled in a way that seemed mischievous. He opened a small package of mints and offered me one. I shook my head. He turned to the person on the other side of him, a woman, who took the mint and thanked him. My case was called. I was asked to approach the bench. A clerk asked for my driver's license. He opened and closed a file folder, making a quick notation. I waited. Thank you, he said. You can go.
Twenty years before I had nurtured a notion of becoming a newspaper writer of some sort. A reporter I knew from the San Francisco Examiner thought this was a splendid idea and kept telling me this over drinks after work. And where had those sessions occurred? I was certain the bar was just around the corner and up an alley. And there it was. The place was full of middle-aged people drinking heavily at 11:30 AM. The air seemed full of cigarette smoke, even though no one was actually smoking. I ordered a scotch. Clint did the same. I didn't know how I was going to drive home. I didn't care. Clint was already talking to the bartender, asking about food. He returned with menus. I had, it now came to me, described this journey up the alley as being a search for lunch.
Clint patted my hand. He told me I had comported myself well. Something had happened, a milestone passed, an ordeal behind me. This looks like your kind of place, Clint said. I looked around me. Actually, I had not been in this bar for almost 20 years. I wondered what Clint meant, but not for long, the scotch warming and filtering the capacity for thought. Still, the place felt like something I had never had, perhaps never would, but aspired to. Being here was okay, I could see that, see it in Clint's face. Aspiring was fine too, even failing...the latter being hard to define at this moment. Don't worry about the drink, Clint said, as though reading my mind. He had ordered lunch, he said. For both of us. What food, I demanded? Don't know, Clint said. He smiled, then laughed expansively. His eyes twinkled invitingly. I began laughing too, my drink sloshing as I involuntarily backhanded it. Someone at an adjoining table leaned into the merriment, asking about the joke. Don't know, Clint said, and now three of us were laughing. And maybe soon the whole bar. I downed my drink, for there was plenty left...there was always something left...I could see that now.
It was hard not to notice the furniture. A night meeting in a Quaker primary school made all kinds of practical and economic sense. And along with this practicality came toddler chairs and tables. Giant blocks. Lots of bouncy balls. Plus about 40 of the mammalian kind, everyone seated on the floor...except me. I wanted a chair. A big person's chair. Someone found one in the office. What next transpired? I honestly can't recall but found nothing daunting in touchy-feely psychological groups. What I do recall was the excruciating conclusion. Men rose, greeted and hugged each other, stood about chatting...while I stood about. Waiting. Waiting for this painful echo of unwanted and unloved adolescence to end. I milled as best one could leaning on a crutch. The wheelchair was still a couple of years away. Dinner was supposedly next. This group went out to eat after its Friday meetings. More backslapping and laughing and hugging, for everyone knew everyone, and I was just hanging on for...whatever I was hanging on for, this being my principal life skill.
And then the old guy, sporting masses of gray hair, stood beside me. He was glad I had come, he said. He hoped I would join everyone at Thai City. I asked him where this Thai restaurant was, and his face darkened slightly. Better make sure, he said. Sometimes it was Chicago Pizza. Hard to tell with this group, he added. I could already sense his concern for me, his awareness of what it took to get me to a restaurant, and the importance of knowing which restaurant it was. Clint.
He sat beside me at Chicago Pizza, inclining his face slightly to say how nice it was to have me there. During the ordering process Clint interpreted. A war of words was under way, one contingent favoring a meaty pizza with pepperoni and sausage dominant, others stressing vegetables, with a third pushing anchovies, and a waitress trying to take orders for beer. 'I don't want this pizza,' Clint said. 'It doesn't appeal to me.' I was already his confidant. His face was open, artless. From one end of the table someone asked Clint about beer. He said he didn't want any pizza, and washed his hands of the whole affair. Clint, I would learn, was short on hearing and not exactly long on patience when it came to the men's group's decision-making process. He had the slightly feral air of the Bohemian about him. I wondered about his story. What did he do? Retired, he said, now occupying himself with watercolors, sculptures and the burgeoning art of computer graphics. Oh, I said, and what was your day job? I liked the feel of my own question, digging at the history, but in a offhand and offbeat way. Nuclear engineer, he said. Surely this was his little joke...but his no-nonsense gaze said the opposite. He had been, and was, all these things.
A year or two later at a men's group meeting I announced my divorce and found myself in a flood of tears. Later, Clint made much of our parting hug in front of Thai City Restaurant. The group had done the same, all of us standing in a circle, arms around shoulders. Now it was Clint, imparting a solo hug with the simplest and most penetrating of observations. 'You show your vulnerability,' he said. And was this good or bad? The hug said it all.
And after another year or two, after my accountant had led me through the process, it was time for a public, official appointment with destiny: bankruptcy. The US Bankruptcy Court of the Ninth District, or some such, requires your presence, and sworn testimony, in San Francisco, on this date.... Whatever had led me there, principally the emotional falling apart around my marriage, not to mention a worsening neuromusculature, whatever had come before, well, it was all coalescing and sharpening, reaching some sort of fearsome peak. An awful thing to be pilloried, but my own doing, and could I face this alone? I stared at the phone long and hard before lifting it to phone Clint.
On the day of the hearing, Clint rode his bicycle to my apartment. I heard his footfall on my plywood wheelchair ramp. For, yes, paralysis had brought me to this point now. I rolled my wheelchair to the door, opened it and found Clint there, removing the bicycle clips from his trousers. I gaped at the latter. They were of a loud reddish plaid, woolen and ample. The trousers had a clownish look to them, an effect heightened by what held them up. Was it a belt? Or a strap? Perhaps a woman's belt. Silvery in color, slim in design. A bluish work shirt billowed from the top. What had I done? Surely this man, after years in respectable employ at General Electric Nuclear, knew how to dress for a legal proceeding. Clint was cheery as ever, praising me for my punctuality. It must take a lot of work, he said. It had, and it did, and now I wanted to cry. I loaded my wheelchair into the new Ford van, and we headed for San Francisco.
Right to the financial district, appropriately enough. I found a blue zone on the street. Montgomery Street. A meter maid paused on the sidewalk, eyeballing me openly. Imposters using free disabled parking spaces had recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. She would see my wheelchair in a moment, but it did not matter. She knew. She knew I was guilty. Guilty of bankruptcy, financial collapse, life failure. Perhaps she would watch, then give up, but the bankruptcy judge would know better. Clint and I headed for the federal building, a reception desk offered a clipboard where we signed in, both of us. A list of cases was pinned to the door. There was mine. My name complete, even my middle name, Alexander.
We entered the crowded courtroom. On the witness stand, someone was examining a Chinese-American woman. The interlocutor was relentless. When did she last see the gold? How much gold did she say there was? What did she think it was worth? And where did she last see it? Then it just disappeared, is that correct? First the gold was there, then it wasn't. Was that it? Did he have this right? How large a package of gold was it? And when did she last remember seeing it? The woman wrung her hands, kept saying more or less the same thing. I squirmed with her. Clint sat beside me, he smiled in a way that seemed mischievous. He opened a small package of mints and offered me one. I shook my head. He turned to the person on the other side of him, a woman, who took the mint and thanked him. My case was called. I was asked to approach the bench. A clerk asked for my driver's license. He opened and closed a file folder, making a quick notation. I waited. Thank you, he said. You can go.
Twenty years before I had nurtured a notion of becoming a newspaper writer of some sort. A reporter I knew from the San Francisco Examiner thought this was a splendid idea and kept telling me this over drinks after work. And where had those sessions occurred? I was certain the bar was just around the corner and up an alley. And there it was. The place was full of middle-aged people drinking heavily at 11:30 AM. The air seemed full of cigarette smoke, even though no one was actually smoking. I ordered a scotch. Clint did the same. I didn't know how I was going to drive home. I didn't care. Clint was already talking to the bartender, asking about food. He returned with menus. I had, it now came to me, described this journey up the alley as being a search for lunch.
Clint patted my hand. He told me I had comported myself well. Something had happened, a milestone passed, an ordeal behind me. This looks like your kind of place, Clint said. I looked around me. Actually, I had not been in this bar for almost 20 years. I wondered what Clint meant, but not for long, the scotch warming and filtering the capacity for thought. Still, the place felt like something I had never had, perhaps never would, but aspired to. Being here was okay, I could see that, see it in Clint's face. Aspiring was fine too, even failing...the latter being hard to define at this moment. Don't worry about the drink, Clint said, as though reading my mind. He had ordered lunch, he said. For both of us. What food, I demanded? Don't know, Clint said. He smiled, then laughed expansively. His eyes twinkled invitingly. I began laughing too, my drink sloshing as I involuntarily backhanded it. Someone at an adjoining table leaned into the merriment, asking about the joke. Don't know, Clint said, and now three of us were laughing. And maybe soon the whole bar. I downed my drink, for there was plenty left...there was always something left...I could see that now.
It's an ill wind that whips off the brick parking lot of the Sedona Motel. On Thanksgiving morning everything seems tenuous and transitional. The red rock buttes, emblematic of everything Southwest, still loom. We are saying goodbye to them, Jane and I, but we are not quite inside our hired Chevrolet. For now, I am tipping backwards in my wheelchair, carefully descending to the ground, slowly dropping the one big step from our motel room. The wind stings its cold into my pores. This is desert wind, 35°F, but the air velocity gives it the feel of the low 20s. And the sun shines bright, the red sandstone brilliant, glowing. Change is in the air. Cold air and cold change. Jane huddles in the bitter desiccating gale disassembling my portable wheelchair while I wait in the car. With a slam of the door, we are off in search of counter-cultural coffee, the post-60s Java Lovers Café, our farewell stop on this whirlwind tour of Sedona.
We have seen the snows atop Oak Creek Canyon, slight but real. Like true pioneers, we have carved our own route through the desert, Jane shifting a refrigerator so I could get into the motel's bathroom, the two of us forging a wheelchair route uptown through the steep pavement and cracked parking lot leading to Wildflower Bakery. Then a final drive through a red rock hiking area, and goodbye. Oddly, what lingers from the morning is the physical. The part I hate the most, the most strenuous, when I stand up, hold Jane's arm and hobble down a few steps, through a door and into the café. Keeping my balance, not tripping, all this requires concentration. People notice me, of course, several offering to help. I notice them too. Notice them, noticing me. Everything requires concentration, even choosing a chair. There is a nice black upholstered one. A hard chair the previous evening had me squirming in a restaurant. In short, the difficulty becomes memorable. And what I retained from the morning's vista of rock towers around Sedona is their coldness. That most physical, inhospitable, deathly feel.
Which returns Saturday evening, when back in my Menlo Park apartment, unpacked, even having exercised on my machine in the carport, November chill rising from the concrete...I hit the flashing button on my telephone answering machine get news of Clint's death. Which occurred that evening in Sedona while I squirmed in my hard restaurant chair. Jane had gone to her home. I was in mine. And for a long time I stared dazedly at things. E-mails on the computer screen. Missing pills not quite unpacked. I forgot to eat, quite uncharacteristic of me. More coldness and vacancy. I finally phoned my friend Tom and learned the details of Clint's death. Only a week and a half ago Tom and I and Mical, son of a deceased friend of ours, gathered at Clint's house for a small ceremony. It seemed mildly surprising to be in Clint's bedroom. But Clint had made it clear that he did not want to get out of bed. The effort was becoming too much...and I knew this meant something, but shrugged it off.
There are so many things to say about Clint, and most of them defy words. How he was 80 years old, but forget it, he simply wasn't...having never bothered with age...he had so much to do. How his kindness mattered greatly at several pivotal moments in my life. How he would say things that no one else would, and I could actually listen. Such as just last week when, during our bedside ritual with Mical, Clint being weak and speaking with difficulty, patted my hand and said of what had just transpired 'magical.'
And the perspective that comes to me now, the central heating desperately trying to blast the uninsulated chill out of my apartment...is bodily, physical. Only a few years ago, well into his mid-70s, Clint thought nothing of hopping on a bicycle and pedaling a couple of miles from his home to mine. I noticed the effort. He appeared not to. Still, I noticed. And I believe that in his final couple of weeks in bed, Clint had made a conscious decision. Something between the rewards of effort and the rewards of consciousness. And it is cold in my apartment. And I am keeping the heat on.
We have seen the snows atop Oak Creek Canyon, slight but real. Like true pioneers, we have carved our own route through the desert, Jane shifting a refrigerator so I could get into the motel's bathroom, the two of us forging a wheelchair route uptown through the steep pavement and cracked parking lot leading to Wildflower Bakery. Then a final drive through a red rock hiking area, and goodbye. Oddly, what lingers from the morning is the physical. The part I hate the most, the most strenuous, when I stand up, hold Jane's arm and hobble down a few steps, through a door and into the café. Keeping my balance, not tripping, all this requires concentration. People notice me, of course, several offering to help. I notice them too. Notice them, noticing me. Everything requires concentration, even choosing a chair. There is a nice black upholstered one. A hard chair the previous evening had me squirming in a restaurant. In short, the difficulty becomes memorable. And what I retained from the morning's vista of rock towers around Sedona is their coldness. That most physical, inhospitable, deathly feel.
Which returns Saturday evening, when back in my Menlo Park apartment, unpacked, even having exercised on my machine in the carport, November chill rising from the concrete...I hit the flashing button on my telephone answering machine get news of Clint's death. Which occurred that evening in Sedona while I squirmed in my hard restaurant chair. Jane had gone to her home. I was in mine. And for a long time I stared dazedly at things. E-mails on the computer screen. Missing pills not quite unpacked. I forgot to eat, quite uncharacteristic of me. More coldness and vacancy. I finally phoned my friend Tom and learned the details of Clint's death. Only a week and a half ago Tom and I and Mical, son of a deceased friend of ours, gathered at Clint's house for a small ceremony. It seemed mildly surprising to be in Clint's bedroom. But Clint had made it clear that he did not want to get out of bed. The effort was becoming too much...and I knew this meant something, but shrugged it off.
There are so many things to say about Clint, and most of them defy words. How he was 80 years old, but forget it, he simply wasn't...having never bothered with age...he had so much to do. How his kindness mattered greatly at several pivotal moments in my life. How he would say things that no one else would, and I could actually listen. Such as just last week when, during our bedside ritual with Mical, Clint being weak and speaking with difficulty, patted my hand and said of what had just transpired 'magical.'
And the perspective that comes to me now, the central heating desperately trying to blast the uninsulated chill out of my apartment...is bodily, physical. Only a few years ago, well into his mid-70s, Clint thought nothing of hopping on a bicycle and pedaling a couple of miles from his home to mine. I noticed the effort. He appeared not to. Still, I noticed. And I believe that in his final couple of weeks in bed, Clint had made a conscious decision. Something between the rewards of effort and the rewards of consciousness. And it is cold in my apartment. And I am keeping the heat on.
In my imaginings of death, word comes from an otherworldly messenger who dons a mask. How this figure arrives is not important. One would have moved beyond arrivals and departures, that is the point. Okay, so you probably don't hop out of your death-messenger vehicle with the mask on. You slip into it surreptitiously, perhaps as you're ringing the doorbell. Because while there may be a little joke in the considering of this transaction, the experiencing is bound to be more grim. The mask serving to obliterate personality, in fact, all things personal, not to mention connection and all things connected. No, one is headed for vast, cold anonymity. And did I get a whiff of this from the boyhood fields?
I begin by opening up to death, because that is the most dire of impressions. And it seems that all childhood profundities come by way of intimation. The fields themselves almost disappeared with my age. I came back there once, perhaps in the course of visiting the family that had moved into my childhood home. I was 12 years old when my father and I flew to New York during some family blowup. The six-day visit turned into a six-month stay with my aunt and uncle, during which time my parents divorced, and their house sold. So it most have been a couple of years later, when I was 14 or 15 years old, that I went out to the edge of town, had dinner with the new occupants of the old home and got the lay of the land.
It was shocking to see my sandbox turned into a cactus garden. The place where I had built miniature roads and lakes and kingdoms, seated at ground level, uniformly gray expanses in all directions...well, it was now a plot with rows of spiny succulents. But the fields. I must have either wandered into them or glanced over the fence at them. And this was even more startling. They had shrunk. Of course, I had put on enough height to see my boyhood environment from above, not below. Either way, it was an even bigger shock.
For years, practically every day after school, I headed into the fields of chaparral east of our house. Greasewood, everyone called the predominant plant. They grew maybe 4 feet tall, these shrubs, their woody branches peeling a gray bark. With a softer, almost chartreuse foliage, but not leaves. Even the green parts were protected from the desert sun and winds, a cluster of knobs at the end of each branch. And though they were shrubs, they might as well have been trees, the greasewood. As a boy, the chaparral was taller than I. It was a greasewood forest, in effect. I was usually accompanied by Frosty, the family dog. It was good to have a companion in these aimless afternoons. I was a solitary, lonely kid, increasingly taking on the parents' suffering. But not here. Not out in the fields, heading nowhere in particular, exploring, checking on things.
In the winter, when it rained occasionally, I checked for water. A dry stream bed swept down from the rock crusher. Near it, there rose an escarpment of sorts. The latter ascended to the height of one meter, certainly less than two, and constituted the one true geological feature of the chaparral fields. There was a man-made feature, one of those desert dirt roads that consist of two tire tracks with a strip of untrodden green down the middle. It started near our house and wandered across the desert, nameless and unsigned, its destination unknown. The dirt road was too long for me to follow. It also frightened me.
I was wary in the chaparral acres. Actually, in all the years I wandered there, I don't recall seeing another person. Perhaps a kid or two. But no adults, except for those witnessed walking down the dirt track away from our house. Ike and Mamie were the most prominent, an old couple from the Morongo Indian reservation, who reputedly drank in a Banning bar, then walked home. How they came to be named for the president and his wife, whether or not they actually drank, and why they did not have a car...these remain mysteries. But they were old and poor, walked badly, headed across the fields to the reservation weighed down by sacks of stuff, and were the only poor people I saw on a regular basis. They frightened me. I did not want to run into them by accident in the chaparral forest.
Now and then I saw how greasewood got its name. The tough desert plant can exist on almost no water, storing its living necessities in a greasy sap. Although our fields did not ignite in my time there, others close by did. The greasewood-covered slopes of the lower San Bernardino Mountains rose from the San Gorgonio River wash just a mile or so from our house. These burned every few years, the dry, oily chaparral going off like a bomb. Brush exploded into orange flames that raced in a wall up or down the steep hills. The incinerated greasewood turned the slopes black. But only until the next rain, being made to burn, to die back, but not to die. When I looked carefully, the gnarled bases of greasewood plants in our fields were mostly black. They were there to burn, like most California flora.
And so there was death in the fields, and there was life. I absorbed this evidence of regeneration without understanding it. The empty chaparral fields were full of the frightening unknown. But in the end there was not much to fear, except from the humans who lived at their edge. My father burned the chaparral at regular intervals. Small grass fires he set to clear the ground, to create a firebreak, had a way of getting out of control. The volunteer fire department bailed him out a time or two. Still, the making of this firebreak occupied hours of my father's pensive time, wandering the desert acreage around our house, tossing matches here and there. True, no brush fires ever got close to our home, for there was no brush very close. What seems odd to me, and mostly sad, is that my father with all his intellectual curiosity probably knew very little about desert plants. He knew they burned, of course. He did not know how they survived.
I begin by opening up to death, because that is the most dire of impressions. And it seems that all childhood profundities come by way of intimation. The fields themselves almost disappeared with my age. I came back there once, perhaps in the course of visiting the family that had moved into my childhood home. I was 12 years old when my father and I flew to New York during some family blowup. The six-day visit turned into a six-month stay with my aunt and uncle, during which time my parents divorced, and their house sold. So it most have been a couple of years later, when I was 14 or 15 years old, that I went out to the edge of town, had dinner with the new occupants of the old home and got the lay of the land.
It was shocking to see my sandbox turned into a cactus garden. The place where I had built miniature roads and lakes and kingdoms, seated at ground level, uniformly gray expanses in all directions...well, it was now a plot with rows of spiny succulents. But the fields. I must have either wandered into them or glanced over the fence at them. And this was even more startling. They had shrunk. Of course, I had put on enough height to see my boyhood environment from above, not below. Either way, it was an even bigger shock.
For years, practically every day after school, I headed into the fields of chaparral east of our house. Greasewood, everyone called the predominant plant. They grew maybe 4 feet tall, these shrubs, their woody branches peeling a gray bark. With a softer, almost chartreuse foliage, but not leaves. Even the green parts were protected from the desert sun and winds, a cluster of knobs at the end of each branch. And though they were shrubs, they might as well have been trees, the greasewood. As a boy, the chaparral was taller than I. It was a greasewood forest, in effect. I was usually accompanied by Frosty, the family dog. It was good to have a companion in these aimless afternoons. I was a solitary, lonely kid, increasingly taking on the parents' suffering. But not here. Not out in the fields, heading nowhere in particular, exploring, checking on things.
In the winter, when it rained occasionally, I checked for water. A dry stream bed swept down from the rock crusher. Near it, there rose an escarpment of sorts. The latter ascended to the height of one meter, certainly less than two, and constituted the one true geological feature of the chaparral fields. There was a man-made feature, one of those desert dirt roads that consist of two tire tracks with a strip of untrodden green down the middle. It started near our house and wandered across the desert, nameless and unsigned, its destination unknown. The dirt road was too long for me to follow. It also frightened me.
I was wary in the chaparral acres. Actually, in all the years I wandered there, I don't recall seeing another person. Perhaps a kid or two. But no adults, except for those witnessed walking down the dirt track away from our house. Ike and Mamie were the most prominent, an old couple from the Morongo Indian reservation, who reputedly drank in a Banning bar, then walked home. How they came to be named for the president and his wife, whether or not they actually drank, and why they did not have a car...these remain mysteries. But they were old and poor, walked badly, headed across the fields to the reservation weighed down by sacks of stuff, and were the only poor people I saw on a regular basis. They frightened me. I did not want to run into them by accident in the chaparral forest.
Now and then I saw how greasewood got its name. The tough desert plant can exist on almost no water, storing its living necessities in a greasy sap. Although our fields did not ignite in my time there, others close by did. The greasewood-covered slopes of the lower San Bernardino Mountains rose from the San Gorgonio River wash just a mile or so from our house. These burned every few years, the dry, oily chaparral going off like a bomb. Brush exploded into orange flames that raced in a wall up or down the steep hills. The incinerated greasewood turned the slopes black. But only until the next rain, being made to burn, to die back, but not to die. When I looked carefully, the gnarled bases of greasewood plants in our fields were mostly black. They were there to burn, like most California flora.
And so there was death in the fields, and there was life. I absorbed this evidence of regeneration without understanding it. The empty chaparral fields were full of the frightening unknown. But in the end there was not much to fear, except from the humans who lived at their edge. My father burned the chaparral at regular intervals. Small grass fires he set to clear the ground, to create a firebreak, had a way of getting out of control. The volunteer fire department bailed him out a time or two. Still, the making of this firebreak occupied hours of my father's pensive time, wandering the desert acreage around our house, tossing matches here and there. True, no brush fires ever got close to our home, for there was no brush very close. What seems odd to me, and mostly sad, is that my father with all his intellectual curiosity probably knew very little about desert plants. He knew they burned, of course. He did not know how they survived.
The autumn rains have come to Menlo Park, and in a serious way. And in an even more serious way, this is slightly ridiculous. For there are no autumn rains, no reliable ones anyway. It is entirely possible for there to be little or no rain before 21 December, virtually the entire season dry. I tell myself this to face things soberly. For it is my responsibility, the rain. As soon as things flip into September, I cock an eye. My peripheral vision attunes to the sky and its doings. Will the rains come? Because, yes, there have to be several, after all. And one must be vigilant, yet open to variety. The rains may come in the spring, even the late spring. And, once the precipitation does get under way, one must remember that it is precisely that. Rainfall doesn't matter, not really. Even snowfall. It is very specifically the water content of the snows in the higher elevations of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains that translates into full or empty reservoirs. Which makes these guys schlepping about white fields in snowshoes, while a photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle gets a boringly predictable picture of them shoving a pole down through the pack, at the very center of the meteorological action. How many meters thick? Yes, that's part of it. But the real truth comes when the packed snow gets extracted from the bore hole, melted and measured, revealing how much it contains of...you guessed it...water.
When it rained around our desert home, the surest sign of anything happening of real import occurred just across our dirt road. There, where the road-graded gravel of our street ended, the barbed wire fence of the rock crusher began, and in between a ditch ran east, downhill, toward the Morongo Indian Reservation a couple of miles distant. Was it really called the rock crusher? Probably not. Actually, I vaguely recall a name like the Banning Sand and Gravel Company. A quarry, that's what it was. A place where gravel and rocks got lifted, shifted and smashed into something smaller. Sand for mixing with cement. Gravel for covering areas like our road. And cement, did the place makes cement? Perhaps. Whatever went on there was big, impressively industrial, urban in its ambitions.
The closest and most familiar thing about the rock crusher was its pond. As gravel was turned into gravel, it got washed, rinsing the dust off it. The muddy water went into the pond not far from our house. The pond was surrounded by great piles of sand, the property was fenced, and there was no keeping me away from it. Water. Water in the desert. The pull of this could not be resisted. Authentic, primal, boyish, all at once, I was drawn to any sign of life-giving water in the arid lands. A primordial echo of my northern European roots? An expression of the aridity of my family life? Whatever. The pond. As soon as I was old enough to get through the barbed wire, it had to be seen. Even more alluring, it was described as dangerous. There was supposedly quicksand there, which may even have been true. The fine rock dust washed off the gravel ended up here, endlessly settling and making some very squishy mud expanses. I never ventured into them, well not very far. Actually I do recall stepping into the deep mud, just to see what would happen, my brother looking on impressed, perhaps fearful. A man had to do what a man had to do.
Water flowed into one end of the rock crusher pond from a very unimpressive pipe. I didn't like this. In my mind, the place was somewhat akin to a lake. Remember that this was the Upper Sonoran Desert, not exactly Switzerland, bodies of water being in chronically short supply. Still, this was my imagined sense of the pond, that it should feel more natural than it did. The pipe was a definite insult. Still, it was an invitation. For where did the pipe begin? Where did the water flow start?
At some point, when I got a bit older than some other point, I walked into the heart of the place, the spot where the big mechanical crusher did its thing. The place was full of dump trucks. Some hauled rocks and gravel from the nearby quarry. Others transported the sand or gravel to...who knew where? And there were the cement trucks, the ones with the rotating cones of liquid concrete. Whether made their or mixed there, I can't recall. And where it all went? For some reason the simplest adult explanation never made sense. The big interstate freeway gradually making its roadway through Banning, then on to Phoenix and points beyond, took a lot of sand and gravel and concrete. The quarry supplied it. I didn't buy it.
Perhaps because the road construction was invisible, occurring south of town, and how much concrete and stuff could the silly thing take, anyway? Besides, the question of use and destination seemed irrelevant. As a boy, it never even occurred to me that Mr. Beckett, owner of the quarry, might be making some money off the place. The fact that he kept a private plane at the local airport made no impression at all, except that I wanted to go for a ride. No, the rock crusher was exciting because of its industrial mysteries and its forbidden nature. I was always told not to go there, never, in fact. So daylight sorties into the heart of the plant were rare, somewhat frightening, and involved secret vows between my brother and me. The place was dusty, loud and chaotic. Trucks came careening up from the quarry, driven as though by madmen. This was private property, after all, the course of traffic defined by the way the gray, dusty rock had gotten crushed under thousands of rolling tires. There were no real roads. Certainly no speed limits. Standing at the edge of the trucks' path, the grinding of rocks, gears and conveyor belts obliterating the sounds of the traffic, I felt dwarfed, even smaller than a boy.
But impressed. Enough to make a person wander further, into the very heart of the rock crusher, into the wash. Everyone called it that, but I considered this a sacrilege. It was the San Gorgonio River. It was more than 100 meters wide in places, a good 10 meters deep, and, okay, dry. This was one of life's inconsistencies. A river did not necessarily contain water, at least, not much. A small stream ran through the wash part of the year. Then it disappeared. It ran underground, I knew. And I suspected that part of it somehow resurfaced to rinse the gravel and sand of the rock crusher. But how this happened, it was hard to say.
The wash, the vast dry riverbed, contained a man-made canyon, deep and sheer and almost biblical in the way it opened out from the terrain. I stood at the edge of this, the actual quarry, staring down 100 feet or more into the hole in the desert earth. At the bottom of the pit were several levels, places where digging was under way, where it was beginning, where it had stopped. A road snaked out from the sides, huge trucks carrying rocky loads up to the crusher. At the very lowest tier of the pit, an apparition, a steam shovel, probably the biggest mechanical object I had ever encountered. The thing swung its levered maw at the sides of the deepening gray canyon, scooping up tons of desert. Rotating, it positioned over a waiting truck, opened the bottom of its levered mouth and let the rocks fly. The waiting truck bounced and swung as the load hit its springs, then gears grinding, labored its way up the steep incline to the surface.
The steam shovel would take its next swing at another part of the canyon wall. Huge cables snaked out of the back of it and up the sides of the quarry. It was an electric shovel, this thing. Enormous and deep into the desert, and digging itself lower and lower. How had it gotten there? Had the steam shovel started on the surface and dug its way deeper and deeper, making its own canyon, lowering its own floor? This appeared to be the baffling, mesmerizing truth. And how would the thing ever get out? Would it die there? The metal tractor treads seemed able to maneuver the steam shovel around the bottom, but up the road...with those cables trailing behind? No way. This thing had sealed its own doom. Dug its own hole.
The other question, the most interesting one, had to do with the San Gorgonio River. There was a reason why it was so wide, albeit dry. In 1939, only seven years before my birth, the rains had come, and come and come. Things began to flood. The San Gorgonio River remembered its name. Banning had been inundated, everyone said. A skeleton discovered in the low desert near the freeway around 1960 was, locals were certain, the body of a truck driver washed out of his cab more than 20 years before. The Banning of my boyhood was crisscrossed by storm drains. They must have been constructed after the flood. Lined with concrete and rocks, the deep drainage channels always looked attractive, well fashioned and well angled of natural materials. They were a reminder of the rains that had come and the rains that might follow. And when the big rains came again what would happen to the quarry? Would the deep rock-crusher canyon fill to the brim? Would it become a lake? And wouldn't the steam shovel prove irretrievable, drowning in the bottom?
And now the rains are falling in Menlo Park. Yes, I checked on the pile of post-garden debris on my raised beds. And the rains are doing their thing, cover crop sprouting through the botanical wreckage, winter green on its way. And the question in the back of my mind: how did I do it?
When it rained around our desert home, the surest sign of anything happening of real import occurred just across our dirt road. There, where the road-graded gravel of our street ended, the barbed wire fence of the rock crusher began, and in between a ditch ran east, downhill, toward the Morongo Indian Reservation a couple of miles distant. Was it really called the rock crusher? Probably not. Actually, I vaguely recall a name like the Banning Sand and Gravel Company. A quarry, that's what it was. A place where gravel and rocks got lifted, shifted and smashed into something smaller. Sand for mixing with cement. Gravel for covering areas like our road. And cement, did the place makes cement? Perhaps. Whatever went on there was big, impressively industrial, urban in its ambitions.
The closest and most familiar thing about the rock crusher was its pond. As gravel was turned into gravel, it got washed, rinsing the dust off it. The muddy water went into the pond not far from our house. The pond was surrounded by great piles of sand, the property was fenced, and there was no keeping me away from it. Water. Water in the desert. The pull of this could not be resisted. Authentic, primal, boyish, all at once, I was drawn to any sign of life-giving water in the arid lands. A primordial echo of my northern European roots? An expression of the aridity of my family life? Whatever. The pond. As soon as I was old enough to get through the barbed wire, it had to be seen. Even more alluring, it was described as dangerous. There was supposedly quicksand there, which may even have been true. The fine rock dust washed off the gravel ended up here, endlessly settling and making some very squishy mud expanses. I never ventured into them, well not very far. Actually I do recall stepping into the deep mud, just to see what would happen, my brother looking on impressed, perhaps fearful. A man had to do what a man had to do.
Water flowed into one end of the rock crusher pond from a very unimpressive pipe. I didn't like this. In my mind, the place was somewhat akin to a lake. Remember that this was the Upper Sonoran Desert, not exactly Switzerland, bodies of water being in chronically short supply. Still, this was my imagined sense of the pond, that it should feel more natural than it did. The pipe was a definite insult. Still, it was an invitation. For where did the pipe begin? Where did the water flow start?
At some point, when I got a bit older than some other point, I walked into the heart of the place, the spot where the big mechanical crusher did its thing. The place was full of dump trucks. Some hauled rocks and gravel from the nearby quarry. Others transported the sand or gravel to...who knew where? And there were the cement trucks, the ones with the rotating cones of liquid concrete. Whether made their or mixed there, I can't recall. And where it all went? For some reason the simplest adult explanation never made sense. The big interstate freeway gradually making its roadway through Banning, then on to Phoenix and points beyond, took a lot of sand and gravel and concrete. The quarry supplied it. I didn't buy it.
Perhaps because the road construction was invisible, occurring south of town, and how much concrete and stuff could the silly thing take, anyway? Besides, the question of use and destination seemed irrelevant. As a boy, it never even occurred to me that Mr. Beckett, owner of the quarry, might be making some money off the place. The fact that he kept a private plane at the local airport made no impression at all, except that I wanted to go for a ride. No, the rock crusher was exciting because of its industrial mysteries and its forbidden nature. I was always told not to go there, never, in fact. So daylight sorties into the heart of the plant were rare, somewhat frightening, and involved secret vows between my brother and me. The place was dusty, loud and chaotic. Trucks came careening up from the quarry, driven as though by madmen. This was private property, after all, the course of traffic defined by the way the gray, dusty rock had gotten crushed under thousands of rolling tires. There were no real roads. Certainly no speed limits. Standing at the edge of the trucks' path, the grinding of rocks, gears and conveyor belts obliterating the sounds of the traffic, I felt dwarfed, even smaller than a boy.
But impressed. Enough to make a person wander further, into the very heart of the rock crusher, into the wash. Everyone called it that, but I considered this a sacrilege. It was the San Gorgonio River. It was more than 100 meters wide in places, a good 10 meters deep, and, okay, dry. This was one of life's inconsistencies. A river did not necessarily contain water, at least, not much. A small stream ran through the wash part of the year. Then it disappeared. It ran underground, I knew. And I suspected that part of it somehow resurfaced to rinse the gravel and sand of the rock crusher. But how this happened, it was hard to say.
The wash, the vast dry riverbed, contained a man-made canyon, deep and sheer and almost biblical in the way it opened out from the terrain. I stood at the edge of this, the actual quarry, staring down 100 feet or more into the hole in the desert earth. At the bottom of the pit were several levels, places where digging was under way, where it was beginning, where it had stopped. A road snaked out from the sides, huge trucks carrying rocky loads up to the crusher. At the very lowest tier of the pit, an apparition, a steam shovel, probably the biggest mechanical object I had ever encountered. The thing swung its levered maw at the sides of the deepening gray canyon, scooping up tons of desert. Rotating, it positioned over a waiting truck, opened the bottom of its levered mouth and let the rocks fly. The waiting truck bounced and swung as the load hit its springs, then gears grinding, labored its way up the steep incline to the surface.
The steam shovel would take its next swing at another part of the canyon wall. Huge cables snaked out of the back of it and up the sides of the quarry. It was an electric shovel, this thing. Enormous and deep into the desert, and digging itself lower and lower. How had it gotten there? Had the steam shovel started on the surface and dug its way deeper and deeper, making its own canyon, lowering its own floor? This appeared to be the baffling, mesmerizing truth. And how would the thing ever get out? Would it die there? The metal tractor treads seemed able to maneuver the steam shovel around the bottom, but up the road...with those cables trailing behind? No way. This thing had sealed its own doom. Dug its own hole.
The other question, the most interesting one, had to do with the San Gorgonio River. There was a reason why it was so wide, albeit dry. In 1939, only seven years before my birth, the rains had come, and come and come. Things began to flood. The San Gorgonio River remembered its name. Banning had been inundated, everyone said. A skeleton discovered in the low desert near the freeway around 1960 was, locals were certain, the body of a truck driver washed out of his cab more than 20 years before. The Banning of my boyhood was crisscrossed by storm drains. They must have been constructed after the flood. Lined with concrete and rocks, the deep drainage channels always looked attractive, well fashioned and well angled of natural materials. They were a reminder of the rains that had come and the rains that might follow. And when the big rains came again what would happen to the quarry? Would the deep rock-crusher canyon fill to the brim? Would it become a lake? And wouldn't the steam shovel prove irretrievable, drowning in the bottom?
And now the rains are falling in Menlo Park. Yes, I checked on the pile of post-garden debris on my raised beds. And the rains are doing their thing, cover crop sprouting through the botanical wreckage, winter green on its way. And the question in the back of my mind: how did I do it?
I don't want to go there, it must be admitted. Having gone there day after day, for more years than I care to recall. It's the book. The one I wrote, and kept writing, on and on until very recently. All my friends knew about it. One wife and one girlfriend have endured it. And now, since it's gone into a sort of limbo, the time has come to reflect.
Actually, the picture is even larger than the one I describe. For I set out to write about my life...maybe 20 years ago. Frankly, I have lost count. Those drafts, fortunately, are lost in time, or more precisely, lost in a series of discarded computers. Never mind. I must have decided about 10 or 12 years ago that my series of Amtrak trips to Seattle formed, or framed, a better sort of narrative about my life. Actually, and this is the other awkward admission, the 'about' part was a bit vague. My wish was to show growth, development, in this series of overnight journeys. They were, after all, physically challenging, trips I made independently, a chance to meet people, encounter aspects of myself. It all made sense, a series of journeys, suggesting one journey to a more mature, or complete, me.
So the writing began. And continued. I refined one draft. I went to work on another. There were four journeys, so four sections of the book. When I thought one wasn't working in some way, I rewrote it. Then another part looked bad, so I redid that. Then as Marlou became more important in my life, I included her. And so on and so on. At various points, I seemed to have a complete narrative, a full draft. But not the right draft, something that was good enough to show to an exalted professional, like an editor. No sense in embarrassing oneself, so the logic went. So I went back to work on whatever I thought needed work, working and reworking, polishing, trying to make the thing shine...always staring down the barrel of the world's withering judgment.
Finally, I sent excerpts to an editor at a Bay Area branch of a national publisher. Liking what he saw, he asked for a full draft. Well, did I have a full draft? Yes, but not a perfect full draft, so I went back to writing or rewriting. And during that time Marlou got sicker and sicker. So a year later, yes, a full 12 months later, I mailed the editor the draft. I heard nothing. Another entire year transpired, so I wrote the editor again and asked a question that had a Monty Python ring about it: what do you think of my manuscript? A few days later, apparently having handed the thing off to a lackey, the editor conveyed his verdict: unrelentingly bleak, emotionally opaque.
What now? The sting of such words may be bad, but it is bad in a time-honored way, which makes it easy to professionally shrug off. 'All writers go through this,' being what one tells oneself. And this is objectively true, one has to admit. The part that has never been admitted, not fully, as someone recently pointed out, is how this hurt. After which another year passed, yes, all four seasons, and I got back into more rewriting. This time the editor was a friend and supporter of my work, so the experience was bound to be different one. It was, and it wasn't. Eric said very simply that something about the train book did not work. The very thing that propels my blog pieces just wasn't there in the longer narrative. Writers have a sense of time, Eric was saying, and one can't mess about with this. Doing things differently isn't that easy or that simple. You write well what you write well, what you don't you don't.... And as for the train book, not now. Turn the attention elsewhere. Make the short pieces into a book.
So I did this, and rather enjoyed the initial process, stringing blog entries together in a way I thought imaginative, even invigorating. And that's where things stand. One writing effort unrewarded, one looking successful. But things don't stand, or they don't stand still, particularly the matter of one's life's work. And it was that, my train book. That writing project took years, occupied me morning after morning, day after day, in a disciplined fashion. I pinned my hopes as a writer on it. Recognition, were I to get any, would come from this work. Hard, hard work. And if the whole thing failed, well, that would be a life disappointment. But I had had many and, so, could endure another. Or so I told myself. And now the train book has been derailed. Or at least gone into a siding. All those years down the drain. All that work wasted. This, I tell myself by way of solace, is what writers do.
Fortunately, I have also been tossing off blogs at regular intervals. Marlou told me, in her timid way, that she liked these better than my book. Jane told me, less timidly, that my blog efforts are stronger. So I count myself lucky being only a partially failed writer. And what are the lessons to be learned here?
The latter are coming into focus. The 'tossing off' of blogs represents a lighter hand, a more playful approach to the writing task. In fact, in contrast to the book, blogging hardly feels like a task at all. It does represent a form of play. And the latter does not easily occupy much of a place in my life. What I recall of childhood play was that it was very private, beyond the prying eyes of parents and, therefore, neither the object of scorn or of praise. Child's play, mine, largely occurred in a big sandbox in the corner of our property. Periodically, a truck from the local rock crushing company would dump a huge pile of clean, gray sand in the box, renewing my creative energies, keeping me going for weeks and months. Occasionally, I would dig out a dried cat turd from my working medium. But most of the time the sand was pure, a place where I designed lakes and roads and all sorts of worlds. As for praise, that came for homework, school performance. General precocity. I have never outgrown my need for approval, and that desire worked its way into the train book. This much I can already see. By contrast, blogging feels like scattering words to the wind. I barely correct or revise my blog entries. I like some, dislike others, and get the oddest range of feedback from readers. Pieces that seem trivial to me ring as profound to others. The serious seems funny, the funny serious. Good is bad and bad is good. I can't make sense of it, frequently don't understand what people see and don't see in it. So I let go of it. I hit 'publish' in my blog software, the thing sails off to a screen, and I sail off to the next.
Laboring for approval, my childhood experience. Laboring for adult publication and approval seems remarkably similar. Life is hard, the price of success enormous, so work and work. Don't expect to play, frolicking here, experimenting there. Work is work, and work is grim. Meanwhile, as over the years the train book saga unfolded, I did have some nagging doubts about the project. I could not feel my own flow. Nor did it come alive, my emotional state at the beginning of the book, with some different feel at the end. Good writing, the conventional wisdom goes, reveals a character's development in actions. Emotional descriptors, saying 'I feel' this or that, tend to fall flat and rob words of energy. So the book was all action. Still, these nagging doubts. What were the emotions I was trying to get at? Why not just go with them, follow where they beckoned? Because I was writing a train book. There were four train trips, four supposedly meaningful experiences, their meaning already established. I knew what I was writing about, or thought I did. So, dreamy meanderings, following feelings back to their impulse and the memories and fantasies they evoked...well, such digressions hardly occurred to me. My Germanic genes must have been in control. Achtung.
All those years, all that effort, all to be jettisoned. Can there be a worse failure than this, to have poured a decade or more of my efforts down the literary drain? Yes, yes, writers go through this. Do they? Maybe not. I suppose I like lives in which one novel after the next gets written, goes into a drawer. And each is better than its predecessor. Until success. I like narratives in which the writer's imagination and self exploration reign supreme, efforts at polishing, grinding away, having a much smaller part.
Were the years at the train book wasted? I have to accept that they may have been. Although I probably did learn something about discipline, craft, style. Simply sticking to things. And what's there may spring to life in some new and better way. Maybe in time the stories of the train rides will stand on their separate legs, each of them. Maybe they will find a different place in a different form. But at this stage, the whole project is tinged with loss and disappointment. More failure. And the sense that I did not have what it takes, try hard enough. When what's working in my writing life is much lighter, less burdensome in tone...and where past and current and future efforts lead...so far, I cannot say.
Actually, the picture is even larger than the one I describe. For I set out to write about my life...maybe 20 years ago. Frankly, I have lost count. Those drafts, fortunately, are lost in time, or more precisely, lost in a series of discarded computers. Never mind. I must have decided about 10 or 12 years ago that my series of Amtrak trips to Seattle formed, or framed, a better sort of narrative about my life. Actually, and this is the other awkward admission, the 'about' part was a bit vague. My wish was to show growth, development, in this series of overnight journeys. They were, after all, physically challenging, trips I made independently, a chance to meet people, encounter aspects of myself. It all made sense, a series of journeys, suggesting one journey to a more mature, or complete, me.
So the writing began. And continued. I refined one draft. I went to work on another. There were four journeys, so four sections of the book. When I thought one wasn't working in some way, I rewrote it. Then another part looked bad, so I redid that. Then as Marlou became more important in my life, I included her. And so on and so on. At various points, I seemed to have a complete narrative, a full draft. But not the right draft, something that was good enough to show to an exalted professional, like an editor. No sense in embarrassing oneself, so the logic went. So I went back to work on whatever I thought needed work, working and reworking, polishing, trying to make the thing shine...always staring down the barrel of the world's withering judgment.
Finally, I sent excerpts to an editor at a Bay Area branch of a national publisher. Liking what he saw, he asked for a full draft. Well, did I have a full draft? Yes, but not a perfect full draft, so I went back to writing or rewriting. And during that time Marlou got sicker and sicker. So a year later, yes, a full 12 months later, I mailed the editor the draft. I heard nothing. Another entire year transpired, so I wrote the editor again and asked a question that had a Monty Python ring about it: what do you think of my manuscript? A few days later, apparently having handed the thing off to a lackey, the editor conveyed his verdict: unrelentingly bleak, emotionally opaque.
What now? The sting of such words may be bad, but it is bad in a time-honored way, which makes it easy to professionally shrug off. 'All writers go through this,' being what one tells oneself. And this is objectively true, one has to admit. The part that has never been admitted, not fully, as someone recently pointed out, is how this hurt. After which another year passed, yes, all four seasons, and I got back into more rewriting. This time the editor was a friend and supporter of my work, so the experience was bound to be different one. It was, and it wasn't. Eric said very simply that something about the train book did not work. The very thing that propels my blog pieces just wasn't there in the longer narrative. Writers have a sense of time, Eric was saying, and one can't mess about with this. Doing things differently isn't that easy or that simple. You write well what you write well, what you don't you don't.... And as for the train book, not now. Turn the attention elsewhere. Make the short pieces into a book.
So I did this, and rather enjoyed the initial process, stringing blog entries together in a way I thought imaginative, even invigorating. And that's where things stand. One writing effort unrewarded, one looking successful. But things don't stand, or they don't stand still, particularly the matter of one's life's work. And it was that, my train book. That writing project took years, occupied me morning after morning, day after day, in a disciplined fashion. I pinned my hopes as a writer on it. Recognition, were I to get any, would come from this work. Hard, hard work. And if the whole thing failed, well, that would be a life disappointment. But I had had many and, so, could endure another. Or so I told myself. And now the train book has been derailed. Or at least gone into a siding. All those years down the drain. All that work wasted. This, I tell myself by way of solace, is what writers do.
Fortunately, I have also been tossing off blogs at regular intervals. Marlou told me, in her timid way, that she liked these better than my book. Jane told me, less timidly, that my blog efforts are stronger. So I count myself lucky being only a partially failed writer. And what are the lessons to be learned here?
The latter are coming into focus. The 'tossing off' of blogs represents a lighter hand, a more playful approach to the writing task. In fact, in contrast to the book, blogging hardly feels like a task at all. It does represent a form of play. And the latter does not easily occupy much of a place in my life. What I recall of childhood play was that it was very private, beyond the prying eyes of parents and, therefore, neither the object of scorn or of praise. Child's play, mine, largely occurred in a big sandbox in the corner of our property. Periodically, a truck from the local rock crushing company would dump a huge pile of clean, gray sand in the box, renewing my creative energies, keeping me going for weeks and months. Occasionally, I would dig out a dried cat turd from my working medium. But most of the time the sand was pure, a place where I designed lakes and roads and all sorts of worlds. As for praise, that came for homework, school performance. General precocity. I have never outgrown my need for approval, and that desire worked its way into the train book. This much I can already see. By contrast, blogging feels like scattering words to the wind. I barely correct or revise my blog entries. I like some, dislike others, and get the oddest range of feedback from readers. Pieces that seem trivial to me ring as profound to others. The serious seems funny, the funny serious. Good is bad and bad is good. I can't make sense of it, frequently don't understand what people see and don't see in it. So I let go of it. I hit 'publish' in my blog software, the thing sails off to a screen, and I sail off to the next.
Laboring for approval, my childhood experience. Laboring for adult publication and approval seems remarkably similar. Life is hard, the price of success enormous, so work and work. Don't expect to play, frolicking here, experimenting there. Work is work, and work is grim. Meanwhile, as over the years the train book saga unfolded, I did have some nagging doubts about the project. I could not feel my own flow. Nor did it come alive, my emotional state at the beginning of the book, with some different feel at the end. Good writing, the conventional wisdom goes, reveals a character's development in actions. Emotional descriptors, saying 'I feel' this or that, tend to fall flat and rob words of energy. So the book was all action. Still, these nagging doubts. What were the emotions I was trying to get at? Why not just go with them, follow where they beckoned? Because I was writing a train book. There were four train trips, four supposedly meaningful experiences, their meaning already established. I knew what I was writing about, or thought I did. So, dreamy meanderings, following feelings back to their impulse and the memories and fantasies they evoked...well, such digressions hardly occurred to me. My Germanic genes must have been in control. Achtung.
All those years, all that effort, all to be jettisoned. Can there be a worse failure than this, to have poured a decade or more of my efforts down the literary drain? Yes, yes, writers go through this. Do they? Maybe not. I suppose I like lives in which one novel after the next gets written, goes into a drawer. And each is better than its predecessor. Until success. I like narratives in which the writer's imagination and self exploration reign supreme, efforts at polishing, grinding away, having a much smaller part.
Were the years at the train book wasted? I have to accept that they may have been. Although I probably did learn something about discipline, craft, style. Simply sticking to things. And what's there may spring to life in some new and better way. Maybe in time the stories of the train rides will stand on their separate legs, each of them. Maybe they will find a different place in a different form. But at this stage, the whole project is tinged with loss and disappointment. More failure. And the sense that I did not have what it takes, try hard enough. When what's working in my writing life is much lighter, less burdensome in tone...and where past and current and future efforts lead...so far, I cannot say.
What I liked about Kip's was the way they piled on the grated cheese atop their grilling hamburgers. The cooking part of the operation had an authentic, barbecue look about it. The staff slapped beef patties onto an actual metal grate, flames welling up from underneath. As the cheese melted, the hamburger buns toasted on the open fire, then perched briefly atop the almost-done burger. I was newly arrived in Berkeley, a product of small-town, then suburban life. So the Kip's experience was big city stuff, particularly the impersonal air of the cooks. There were two of them, maybe three, old women, which meant they were probably in their late 30s. The flood of students wandering off the Berkeley campus one block away gave the Telegraph Avenue area an intense urban feel, and Kip's cooks probably saw nothing but an endless wash of kids all looking the same. Hungry kids, like me, loaded up on iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes, onions when the sizzling, melting food was ready for its final dressing.
I cannot have gone there very often. I was living on a student's budget and watched pennies. What I didn't watch was my diet. I never thought of it, in fact. In particular, I never thought of cooking. There was a kitchen in my rooming house. Presumably I could have bought ingredients, prepared a meal or two. And yet I don't recall the thought even occurring to me. At mealtime...whenever that was, and my suspicion is that there was no clock involved, just an occasional metabolic nudge...I ate wherever I was and whatever happened to be around. At lunchtime I dashed across Bancroft Avenue, dodging traffic, and joined the Mongol hordes inside a place with a generic name like 'Sandwich Express' or some such. Inside, two middle-aged women stood guard over a bin. Except that it could not have really been a bin. Surely it was a refrigerated container of some kind. I don't know. In any case, the thing was full of sandwiches. Prepared, wrapped in plastic, always dry, mayonnaise and mustard having been applied to a minimum, and cheap. What lay behind the latter was simple enough, an extremely high bread-to-contents ratio. I vaguely recall seeing the sandwich-making operation under way on the counter behind the bin. This amounted to not very much. Bread, slap, stuff, slap. Done. What I really recall was the process of sandwich selection, the piling in of hundreds of campus riffraff to a tiny hole in the wall shop, the place stuffed in the way that young people of the era used to fill phone booths or Volkswagens. And everyone rooting around in the same container for lunch. Elbows jostling, hands colliding, all of it probably more stimulating than a horny young man could acknowledge.
Did I eat in the main campus cafeteria now and then or regularly? I can't remember. I do recall Val's pizza. Mexican food here and there. Buying the odd warm pretzel off a stand. And for the months I lived in a North Oakland rooming house, sandwiches from a Swedish delicatessen. Food. In one way or another I got plenty of it. Without thinking about any of it. Diet, metabolic impact, none of this entered a single brain cell. This contrasts mightily with today. Now everything is glycemic index, fiber content, lipids...and do I dare to eat a peach? Probably not. Certainly never a dried one, the sugar concentration being what it supposedly is. Food, glorious food.
Coupled with that other thing, what is loosely termed 'the body,' probably more accurately the musculoskeletal system. It's hard to say what it needs, let alone what would improve it. If improvement can even be considered in a badly crippled person pushing 64. My physical maintenance is like a treadmill, and I would actually be on one were it possible. Of course it isn't, so I simply get the feeling of one, the sense of the inexorable demand, endless effort, and Sisyphean result. Which is to get up the next day and start the whole thing all over again. Variety? A bit. Today Jane walked me up and down the grand apartment concourse, all fifty meters of it. Yes, we brushed past the dead shrubs. As well as the living ones encroaching on the concrete. Then back. Me collapsing into my wheelchair. Then up again in the late afternoon for another walk with my neighbor Buffie. This is how I am supposed to do things, but rarely do. Not a good idea, my physical therapy assistant says, getting exercise in a single dose, one big cardiovascular event of the day.
So much to worry about. So many things that can go wrong. Which reminds me of a moment outside the meeting hall of the annual men's conference I attend in the Midwest...the guest shaman smoking outside. Someone remarked that he shouldn't do this. Something's going to get you, man, he said.
So at lunch I steer a careful course through the menu of the Educated Palate, the San Francisco City College training restaurant. It's my fave, somehow. I note that our waiter is white and in his 40s, educated clearly, and what he's doing in a trade school may be unclear...except that it isn't. These are our times. This is what's happening to the nation, and its prospects, 'the economy,' whatever that is, sliding downhill. While I pursue noontime wretched excess in the form of salmon, lentils, broccoli rabe. Good in the glycemic index department, bursting with bio concentrated fish oil...okay, along with a condensed dose of mercury, PCBs and a soupçon of dioxin. Healthy I am sure. And riding home on the train, the Peninsula towns drifting by, one familiar station after the next, something feels very sad. One can derive some meaning from routine, a pleasing sense of regularity, a structure. Or the whole thing can be a reminder of the limits inherent in a lifespan, particularly a crippled lifespan. Exercising and diet managing, all for what? For now. For tomorrow. But, it feels, for no good or solid purpose. This being the reality of living in a society, not a culture. For body maintenance may occupy time, but it deserves little of our consciousness. Which is not a sad thing, but a realization, an opening.
I cannot have gone there very often. I was living on a student's budget and watched pennies. What I didn't watch was my diet. I never thought of it, in fact. In particular, I never thought of cooking. There was a kitchen in my rooming house. Presumably I could have bought ingredients, prepared a meal or two. And yet I don't recall the thought even occurring to me. At mealtime...whenever that was, and my suspicion is that there was no clock involved, just an occasional metabolic nudge...I ate wherever I was and whatever happened to be around. At lunchtime I dashed across Bancroft Avenue, dodging traffic, and joined the Mongol hordes inside a place with a generic name like 'Sandwich Express' or some such. Inside, two middle-aged women stood guard over a bin. Except that it could not have really been a bin. Surely it was a refrigerated container of some kind. I don't know. In any case, the thing was full of sandwiches. Prepared, wrapped in plastic, always dry, mayonnaise and mustard having been applied to a minimum, and cheap. What lay behind the latter was simple enough, an extremely high bread-to-contents ratio. I vaguely recall seeing the sandwich-making operation under way on the counter behind the bin. This amounted to not very much. Bread, slap, stuff, slap. Done. What I really recall was the process of sandwich selection, the piling in of hundreds of campus riffraff to a tiny hole in the wall shop, the place stuffed in the way that young people of the era used to fill phone booths or Volkswagens. And everyone rooting around in the same container for lunch. Elbows jostling, hands colliding, all of it probably more stimulating than a horny young man could acknowledge.
Did I eat in the main campus cafeteria now and then or regularly? I can't remember. I do recall Val's pizza. Mexican food here and there. Buying the odd warm pretzel off a stand. And for the months I lived in a North Oakland rooming house, sandwiches from a Swedish delicatessen. Food. In one way or another I got plenty of it. Without thinking about any of it. Diet, metabolic impact, none of this entered a single brain cell. This contrasts mightily with today. Now everything is glycemic index, fiber content, lipids...and do I dare to eat a peach? Probably not. Certainly never a dried one, the sugar concentration being what it supposedly is. Food, glorious food.
Coupled with that other thing, what is loosely termed 'the body,' probably more accurately the musculoskeletal system. It's hard to say what it needs, let alone what would improve it. If improvement can even be considered in a badly crippled person pushing 64. My physical maintenance is like a treadmill, and I would actually be on one were it possible. Of course it isn't, so I simply get the feeling of one, the sense of the inexorable demand, endless effort, and Sisyphean result. Which is to get up the next day and start the whole thing all over again. Variety? A bit. Today Jane walked me up and down the grand apartment concourse, all fifty meters of it. Yes, we brushed past the dead shrubs. As well as the living ones encroaching on the concrete. Then back. Me collapsing into my wheelchair. Then up again in the late afternoon for another walk with my neighbor Buffie. This is how I am supposed to do things, but rarely do. Not a good idea, my physical therapy assistant says, getting exercise in a single dose, one big cardiovascular event of the day.
So much to worry about. So many things that can go wrong. Which reminds me of a moment outside the meeting hall of the annual men's conference I attend in the Midwest...the guest shaman smoking outside. Someone remarked that he shouldn't do this. Something's going to get you, man, he said.
So at lunch I steer a careful course through the menu of the Educated Palate, the San Francisco City College training restaurant. It's my fave, somehow. I note that our waiter is white and in his 40s, educated clearly, and what he's doing in a trade school may be unclear...except that it isn't. These are our times. This is what's happening to the nation, and its prospects, 'the economy,' whatever that is, sliding downhill. While I pursue noontime wretched excess in the form of salmon, lentils, broccoli rabe. Good in the glycemic index department, bursting with bio concentrated fish oil...okay, along with a condensed dose of mercury, PCBs and a soupçon of dioxin. Healthy I am sure. And riding home on the train, the Peninsula towns drifting by, one familiar station after the next, something feels very sad. One can derive some meaning from routine, a pleasing sense of regularity, a structure. Or the whole thing can be a reminder of the limits inherent in a lifespan, particularly a crippled lifespan. Exercising and diet managing, all for what? For now. For tomorrow. But, it feels, for no good or solid purpose. This being the reality of living in a society, not a culture. For body maintenance may occupy time, but it deserves little of our consciousness. Which is not a sad thing, but a realization, an opening.
If I try to explain to people why I never had children, a topic tinged with regret, my honest answer is simple. I was the child. I required so much raising that my life's energy went there, to my own upbringing. Now in my dotage, there is time to be a mentor, support, or just a friend to younger people. A gratifying outlet for parental impulses. Meanwhile, the raising of myself seems to be a daily project. I wonder if I am odd in this way or if everyone faces more or less the same challenge.
Morning. I don't like sleeping alone. I don't like waking alone. In truth, of course, I have done plenty in my time. Most of my life, if I add things up. Never mind, for I don't like it now. And on this particular morning something worse is happening. I drop things, lose things, a series of small events burning up time until the arrival of Menchu, of Team Filipina, who has let me know that she is in a particular hurry today. And somehow this combination of a deadline, being slightly squeezed by someone else's schedule, and losing, knocking and scattering objects of the morning, all this has me furious.
Yes, superficially this problem amounts to Jane being gone. But not really. Women are gone in the best of lives. And whatever the morning's anger is about, well, it's unwise to ignore. With my physical balance wonky, concentration is everything. I can't afford to get distracted, or worse, undermined, by my own fury. In the end, it's simple. There is a hole in my personality. Some need for mothering that cannot be filled. It's just there. To be acknowledged, accepted...maybe even used. For drainage. A finger grip. Who knows? All that is certain is the perennial nature of this hurt. And even if Jane wasn't working this morning, her presence would not be the answer. For the answer is simple, but hard to acknowledge. My need for care and nurturance is bigger, more selfish, more impatient, more demanding than I care to admit. More enraged, more withering in its judgments and more unforgiving too. And the day has barely begun.
Since the antidote to a legacy of bad mothering is self-mothering, what to do? Peet's, of course, the traditional solution. Or seemingly. Consciousness is everything. And in this very moment that other deficit, the sense of things undone, is mounting. So, do the one thing that must be done. Never mind that it's actually trivial. It is weighing on my mind, for whatever reason, and mental weight counts.
I need to replace the plastic lens on my wheelchair light. The one I smashed the other day in a careening exit from a supermarket toilet. I have e-mailed the wheelchair repair guy. That should do. But it won't, the world's incompetence being what it is. And phoning Benton Medical is like x-ray astronomy studies of black holes. So I will send a fax. Should be simple, and in one sense it is, but not in the current sense, the middle-aged one. Maybe I haven't quite used my all-in-one HP printer often enough, but it's tricky, sending faxes. All the more reason to have a go. The first time, my PC screen erupts with all sorts of fax-sending fields and buttons. Not a fucking thing happens. The next time I rise from my wheelchair...an event that inspires groans and curses...and lean over the actual machine, insert the message, press the buttons. Mission apparently accomplished. I head for caffeination.
Illumination from any source always welcome. And it is the movement, or the bouncing of wheelchair tires over the earthquake-cracked expanse of my driveway that loosens the brain cells...toxic mental assets floating upward like all that DDT on the floor of Los Angeles Harbor...with the simple message that Jane is busier this week than usual. She is not around as much. Not as available. And this knowledge is comforting. It was the simple thing I was blocking...and my current agitation, it's not just about me. That is the important part. As for the rest, surely there is a difference between the infantile and the passionate...but the distinction eludes me. Everything seems to get stirred up from the same pot. And this morning it's simmering. I'll see Jane tonight. I will see my friend Arnie this afternoon. As for effectiveness, let's not discount tonight's Caltrain meeting. Emotions hit us however they hit us. Patience, compassion never go out of style. But contrary to Elizabethan PR, the quality of mercy has been strained this morning. Just not to the breaking point.
Morning. I don't like sleeping alone. I don't like waking alone. In truth, of course, I have done plenty in my time. Most of my life, if I add things up. Never mind, for I don't like it now. And on this particular morning something worse is happening. I drop things, lose things, a series of small events burning up time until the arrival of Menchu, of Team Filipina, who has let me know that she is in a particular hurry today. And somehow this combination of a deadline, being slightly squeezed by someone else's schedule, and losing, knocking and scattering objects of the morning, all this has me furious.
Yes, superficially this problem amounts to Jane being gone. But not really. Women are gone in the best of lives. And whatever the morning's anger is about, well, it's unwise to ignore. With my physical balance wonky, concentration is everything. I can't afford to get distracted, or worse, undermined, by my own fury. In the end, it's simple. There is a hole in my personality. Some need for mothering that cannot be filled. It's just there. To be acknowledged, accepted...maybe even used. For drainage. A finger grip. Who knows? All that is certain is the perennial nature of this hurt. And even if Jane wasn't working this morning, her presence would not be the answer. For the answer is simple, but hard to acknowledge. My need for care and nurturance is bigger, more selfish, more impatient, more demanding than I care to admit. More enraged, more withering in its judgments and more unforgiving too. And the day has barely begun.
Since the antidote to a legacy of bad mothering is self-mothering, what to do? Peet's, of course, the traditional solution. Or seemingly. Consciousness is everything. And in this very moment that other deficit, the sense of things undone, is mounting. So, do the one thing that must be done. Never mind that it's actually trivial. It is weighing on my mind, for whatever reason, and mental weight counts.
I need to replace the plastic lens on my wheelchair light. The one I smashed the other day in a careening exit from a supermarket toilet. I have e-mailed the wheelchair repair guy. That should do. But it won't, the world's incompetence being what it is. And phoning Benton Medical is like x-ray astronomy studies of black holes. So I will send a fax. Should be simple, and in one sense it is, but not in the current sense, the middle-aged one. Maybe I haven't quite used my all-in-one HP printer often enough, but it's tricky, sending faxes. All the more reason to have a go. The first time, my PC screen erupts with all sorts of fax-sending fields and buttons. Not a fucking thing happens. The next time I rise from my wheelchair...an event that inspires groans and curses...and lean over the actual machine, insert the message, press the buttons. Mission apparently accomplished. I head for caffeination.
Illumination from any source always welcome. And it is the movement, or the bouncing of wheelchair tires over the earthquake-cracked expanse of my driveway that loosens the brain cells...toxic mental assets floating upward like all that DDT on the floor of Los Angeles Harbor...with the simple message that Jane is busier this week than usual. She is not around as much. Not as available. And this knowledge is comforting. It was the simple thing I was blocking...and my current agitation, it's not just about me. That is the important part. As for the rest, surely there is a difference between the infantile and the passionate...but the distinction eludes me. Everything seems to get stirred up from the same pot. And this morning it's simmering. I'll see Jane tonight. I will see my friend Arnie this afternoon. As for effectiveness, let's not discount tonight's Caltrain meeting. Emotions hit us however they hit us. Patience, compassion never go out of style. But contrary to Elizabethan PR, the quality of mercy has been strained this morning. Just not to the breaking point.
If you ask Mical why his name is spelled this way, he will sigh and explain that his parents were hippies. I know, or have known, both of them, and this description does not accord precisely with my own perception. Probably because I saw enough of Berkeley in the late 1960s to form my own, acute sense of hippiedom. And Mical's parents being people I have only known here in the Peninsula suburbs, I just can't see the wild eruption that occurred in and around San Francisco's Golden Gate Park happening in these parts. Not that it matters, since it is the private parts and what we get up to with them, that ensures the march of generations. Or starts the march. No, I lie, for all that ensures an orderly and successful march...well, that is another matter. One for others to ponder. Such as me.
I hardly know Mical, so many years passing between our meetings that I almost, but not quite, need to be reintroduced. And there he was at a party in early autumn, a gathering of his mother's generation, and yes, his father's...though this is the point, or almost, that his father died. Almost two decades ago. Shocking everyone, leaving all of us in his men's group...a marvelously unofficial and enduring coterie...reeling with mortality. And leaving Mical without a father. And since we are all without deeply rooted tradition, not very much at any rate, what substitutes for indigenous practice in my uprooted life as much to do with ideas learned and acquired. So, a case in point, Mical at the autumn party. He lightly mentioned something serious in his life, and being there under crutch power, my maneuverings limited, there wasn't much chance to pursue this topic. But the topic pursued me. For one of those rules, the tradition substitutes, I have picked up in years at the Minnesota Men's Conference goes like this: when a younger man reaches out, never turn your back.
So it haunted me, this casual remark at a party. Something Mical had said about a personal crisis. So what to do? But actually get proactive, track him down, with e-mail and phone whereabouts supplied by his mother. Which I did. Most unusually, for all the time I kept thinking 'what does a urban young guy want to do with an old and out-of-it guy like me?' But being one of those times when we have to simply turn up, the only way forward is to turn off the usual background chatter. The task is simple: be present at roll call. Be inadequate, if you must, just be on time.
So, we met Mical, and I, and to make a private story short, he has been through a thing or two without his dad. I pondered all this, taking in the details one sunny afternoon in South Park, San Francisco. And mulling it all over, the only conclusion. Initiation. No, to put a fine point on it, the Minnesota conference crowd being all about fine points...post-initiation. Acknowledgment for what he had been through. Praise and an official return to the community.
Of course, there is no tradition behind any of this. I am inventing my own. While not quite inventing, more assembling from eclectic sources. Some sort of ceremony. I e-mailed, even phoned Mical's uncle in Berkeley...bold action for an introvert...discussed plans with him. Then thought of Clint. He is getting sicker. He should be part of this. Sacred space? Clint's ordeal is sacred space. How do I know this? How do I know anything? Because this wasn't about me, this wasn't as small as my inadequacy, or feelings thereof, and there wasn't time to quibble. I decided. Clint's place, Tom, practically family, the person who introduced me to the Minnesota gathering, all of us there with Mical...and sooner rather than later.
Followed by nagging thoughts about what to do, what to say. Help from Tom, of course. He tracked down the words from a Mayan initiation blessing. How would I begin? A poem. Which one? I did not rack my brain excessively, for the Minnesota mentors have their own poetry anthology. There it was, something by William Stafford. And the rest? Have Mical tell his story, describe the father's death ordeal. And then? I will say what I think of him. How his father would admire his path in life. How emotionally complete Mical seems, how in touch. How I can only see and envy this quality. How the road ahead is hard. How it was hard for his father. And how we plan to stand by him. I, Tom and even Clint. We will stand by in whatever form we can...if Mical can stand us. Which, of course, he can, the latter being one of those self-deprecating bits I feel obliged to include.
And, needless to say, our small ceremony concluded, I depart with a sense of accomplishment. After all, we all need a purpose. A mission, something that obliges us to follow others. Deadlines are good for this. I have met mine. I know what I'm doing. And that's why, later that very afternoon, when I see those familiar folding signs lining the route to Trader Joe's, I grant no quarter. These notices proclaim street painting on Thursday. They originate with the Valley Slurry Company, and any firm willingly taking on such an inelegant title deserves what it gets. What I'm giving it, in fact. Right now, for these signs may be aimed at drivers, but they are blocking the sidewalk. Particularly, they are obstructing wheelchair access. But not now, since I have knocked over all three, sending them sprawling across neighborhood lawns. I know what I am doing.
I hardly know Mical, so many years passing between our meetings that I almost, but not quite, need to be reintroduced. And there he was at a party in early autumn, a gathering of his mother's generation, and yes, his father's...though this is the point, or almost, that his father died. Almost two decades ago. Shocking everyone, leaving all of us in his men's group...a marvelously unofficial and enduring coterie...reeling with mortality. And leaving Mical without a father. And since we are all without deeply rooted tradition, not very much at any rate, what substitutes for indigenous practice in my uprooted life as much to do with ideas learned and acquired. So, a case in point, Mical at the autumn party. He lightly mentioned something serious in his life, and being there under crutch power, my maneuverings limited, there wasn't much chance to pursue this topic. But the topic pursued me. For one of those rules, the tradition substitutes, I have picked up in years at the Minnesota Men's Conference goes like this: when a younger man reaches out, never turn your back.
So it haunted me, this casual remark at a party. Something Mical had said about a personal crisis. So what to do? But actually get proactive, track him down, with e-mail and phone whereabouts supplied by his mother. Which I did. Most unusually, for all the time I kept thinking 'what does a urban young guy want to do with an old and out-of-it guy like me?' But being one of those times when we have to simply turn up, the only way forward is to turn off the usual background chatter. The task is simple: be present at roll call. Be inadequate, if you must, just be on time.
So, we met Mical, and I, and to make a private story short, he has been through a thing or two without his dad. I pondered all this, taking in the details one sunny afternoon in South Park, San Francisco. And mulling it all over, the only conclusion. Initiation. No, to put a fine point on it, the Minnesota conference crowd being all about fine points...post-initiation. Acknowledgment for what he had been through. Praise and an official return to the community.
Of course, there is no tradition behind any of this. I am inventing my own. While not quite inventing, more assembling from eclectic sources. Some sort of ceremony. I e-mailed, even phoned Mical's uncle in Berkeley...bold action for an introvert...discussed plans with him. Then thought of Clint. He is getting sicker. He should be part of this. Sacred space? Clint's ordeal is sacred space. How do I know this? How do I know anything? Because this wasn't about me, this wasn't as small as my inadequacy, or feelings thereof, and there wasn't time to quibble. I decided. Clint's place, Tom, practically family, the person who introduced me to the Minnesota gathering, all of us there with Mical...and sooner rather than later.
Followed by nagging thoughts about what to do, what to say. Help from Tom, of course. He tracked down the words from a Mayan initiation blessing. How would I begin? A poem. Which one? I did not rack my brain excessively, for the Minnesota mentors have their own poetry anthology. There it was, something by William Stafford. And the rest? Have Mical tell his story, describe the father's death ordeal. And then? I will say what I think of him. How his father would admire his path in life. How emotionally complete Mical seems, how in touch. How I can only see and envy this quality. How the road ahead is hard. How it was hard for his father. And how we plan to stand by him. I, Tom and even Clint. We will stand by in whatever form we can...if Mical can stand us. Which, of course, he can, the latter being one of those self-deprecating bits I feel obliged to include.
And, needless to say, our small ceremony concluded, I depart with a sense of accomplishment. After all, we all need a purpose. A mission, something that obliges us to follow others. Deadlines are good for this. I have met mine. I know what I'm doing. And that's why, later that very afternoon, when I see those familiar folding signs lining the route to Trader Joe's, I grant no quarter. These notices proclaim street painting on Thursday. They originate with the Valley Slurry Company, and any firm willingly taking on such an inelegant title deserves what it gets. What I'm giving it, in fact. Right now, for these signs may be aimed at drivers, but they are blocking the sidewalk. Particularly, they are obstructing wheelchair access. But not now, since I have knocked over all three, sending them sprawling across neighborhood lawns. I know what I am doing.
Is it the era of accepting imperfections, coming to grips with loss, incorporating death into the general scenario? I am wondering and trying to get to the bottom of it, seeing loss or whatever it is, in the simplest, smallest acts. And growing rather tired of the sheer repetition involved, as though I am a rat in a maze. Amazed to be in the maze. And always spurning the simplest way out.
So there I am, body crunching away on its daily quest for immortality, vis-à-vis, aerobic immortality...which means that your hyper-exercised body will continue inflating its lungs and pumping its heart long after neurological mission control upstairs has ceased all meaningful function. Naturally, while on the exercycle I am listening to the BBC. 'In Our Time,' Radio 4's history program, is going on about the Volga Vikings. Naturally, all I can think of is the Volga Boatmen, at least their yo-heave-ho song. Which has absolutely nothing to do with this. Vikings? Aren't they all blond and raping and plundering and scaring the Baltic/Atlantic hoi polloi with their dragon-headed ships? Sort of. Turns out they were unstoppable these guys, the true extent of their journeys barely known. The Volga, not to mention the Dnieper, led them to Istanbul and, with a bit of an overland schlep, Baghdad. How does anyone know, the number of Viking blogs being rather limited? Coins. A quarter of a million Arab and Byzantine nickels and quarters and so on having been strewn up and down the river system. So say the British historians holding forth, and I must tell my coin-expert friend Joe.
So I'm doing my best to follow all this stuff about the Russian rivers. Matching this up with accounts of a gruesome Viking burial recounted by one Arab scholar. Which causes me to adjust my glasses, which turns out to be a big mistake while on the exercycle. For the raising of one hand to my eyes greatly exceeds my proprioceptive capacity, which has become nil with the general aging and waning of my neuromusculature. So I knock my glasses off my face, having snagged my hand on the iPod cords. And precisely how all these things are interconnected makes little sense in the description. But it all has to do with having earphones on, the dangling wires from my ears easily catching on my glasses frames. So they're off, off and running through the air, my blended trifocals. Landing on my lap, that is the fortunate part. The unfortunate part is that the glasses removal, compounded with the earphones being askew, sparks a major recrimination fest. 'How do I do these things?' being the general theme.
Followed half an hour later by the dicey process of one-legged stepping off the exercycle, particularly getting over its frame. During which I vaguely note the cordless phone sitting in its cubbyhole...a telephonic link to the medical world always being a good idea when pushing the cardiovascular envelope and also pushing 64. And, sure enough, in the course of leaning, straining and nervously balancing myself to get off the bike, I do raise my mostly paralyzed right arm sufficiently to send the handset flying. The phone skitters off its perch on the exercycle and under Marlou's parked PT Cruiser. And there is symbolism here, even if it eludes me at the present moment. For everything contains a lesson. Doesn't it?
And only an hour later when I am preparing to leave Peet's, my mobile phone slips out of the outer pocket of my purse/wallet and skitters under the adjoining table. So, this is a day of phone dropping. There is a symmetry, consistency, a thread. And I take it as a positive omen that in this particular instance I am trying to follow the plot, make sense of fate. And be grateful that a Peet's patron has happily picked up my phone, handed it to me, smiled her winsome twentysomething smile. And I'm not alone. Better, I am not even dead. Not yet, I always hasten to add.
And when it happens, the real thing, what then?
I can't cite any special circumstances, not really. It was on Friday, a bit later than I usually retire, pushing midnight. And I was pushing what I frequently push. The temporary grab bar in the bathroom. Something Jane spotted at Target, a compact rail that mounts with very strong, mechanically adjusted suction cups. So that without screws or bolts a safety bar can attach to, say, a tile wall. Note that the grabrail has been in place for weeks, perhaps a couple of months. I have been leaning against it, particularly when standing at the toilet. And I was doing that, or something similar, late on that evening when...slam, my arm crashed free, I crashed forward, pinned against a window ledge, face smashed into the cold tile. Righting myself, correcting all this, none of it even occurred to me. 'Jane,' I called. She was there an instant, pulling me back into the vertical. The suction-cup grabrail had come free, of course. Jane got ice from the kitchen freezer. The body bruises, she was saying, out of proportion to necessity...and a bit of early intervention on the hematoma front could not hurt. While I was thinking this must be a metaphor for life, this excessive bruising. While also thinking 'why did she get me into this?' After all, my life had functioned quite smoothly without safety devices that prove to be perilous. It's her fault.
It's her presence that made this event the minimal thing it was. The slightest bruise, nothing more. It is also her shopping and generally being out in the world that put a new grabrail where I needed one. The latter having worked quite splendidly for a considerable time. Not that I had considered the time, having completely lost track of it. And the time for suction cups, as for everything, is limited. But fear, and its antidote, blame, are limitless. Unless you go through fear, get to the other side. And find there does appear to be a limit after all.
So there I am, body crunching away on its daily quest for immortality, vis-à-vis, aerobic immortality...which means that your hyper-exercised body will continue inflating its lungs and pumping its heart long after neurological mission control upstairs has ceased all meaningful function. Naturally, while on the exercycle I am listening to the BBC. 'In Our Time,' Radio 4's history program, is going on about the Volga Vikings. Naturally, all I can think of is the Volga Boatmen, at least their yo-heave-ho song. Which has absolutely nothing to do with this. Vikings? Aren't they all blond and raping and plundering and scaring the Baltic/Atlantic hoi polloi with their dragon-headed ships? Sort of. Turns out they were unstoppable these guys, the true extent of their journeys barely known. The Volga, not to mention the Dnieper, led them to Istanbul and, with a bit of an overland schlep, Baghdad. How does anyone know, the number of Viking blogs being rather limited? Coins. A quarter of a million Arab and Byzantine nickels and quarters and so on having been strewn up and down the river system. So say the British historians holding forth, and I must tell my coin-expert friend Joe.
So I'm doing my best to follow all this stuff about the Russian rivers. Matching this up with accounts of a gruesome Viking burial recounted by one Arab scholar. Which causes me to adjust my glasses, which turns out to be a big mistake while on the exercycle. For the raising of one hand to my eyes greatly exceeds my proprioceptive capacity, which has become nil with the general aging and waning of my neuromusculature. So I knock my glasses off my face, having snagged my hand on the iPod cords. And precisely how all these things are interconnected makes little sense in the description. But it all has to do with having earphones on, the dangling wires from my ears easily catching on my glasses frames. So they're off, off and running through the air, my blended trifocals. Landing on my lap, that is the fortunate part. The unfortunate part is that the glasses removal, compounded with the earphones being askew, sparks a major recrimination fest. 'How do I do these things?' being the general theme.
Followed half an hour later by the dicey process of one-legged stepping off the exercycle, particularly getting over its frame. During which I vaguely note the cordless phone sitting in its cubbyhole...a telephonic link to the medical world always being a good idea when pushing the cardiovascular envelope and also pushing 64. And, sure enough, in the course of leaning, straining and nervously balancing myself to get off the bike, I do raise my mostly paralyzed right arm sufficiently to send the handset flying. The phone skitters off its perch on the exercycle and under Marlou's parked PT Cruiser. And there is symbolism here, even if it eludes me at the present moment. For everything contains a lesson. Doesn't it?
And only an hour later when I am preparing to leave Peet's, my mobile phone slips out of the outer pocket of my purse/wallet and skitters under the adjoining table. So, this is a day of phone dropping. There is a symmetry, consistency, a thread. And I take it as a positive omen that in this particular instance I am trying to follow the plot, make sense of fate. And be grateful that a Peet's patron has happily picked up my phone, handed it to me, smiled her winsome twentysomething smile. And I'm not alone. Better, I am not even dead. Not yet, I always hasten to add.
And when it happens, the real thing, what then?
I can't cite any special circumstances, not really. It was on Friday, a bit later than I usually retire, pushing midnight. And I was pushing what I frequently push. The temporary grab bar in the bathroom. Something Jane spotted at Target, a compact rail that mounts with very strong, mechanically adjusted suction cups. So that without screws or bolts a safety bar can attach to, say, a tile wall. Note that the grabrail has been in place for weeks, perhaps a couple of months. I have been leaning against it, particularly when standing at the toilet. And I was doing that, or something similar, late on that evening when...slam, my arm crashed free, I crashed forward, pinned against a window ledge, face smashed into the cold tile. Righting myself, correcting all this, none of it even occurred to me. 'Jane,' I called. She was there an instant, pulling me back into the vertical. The suction-cup grabrail had come free, of course. Jane got ice from the kitchen freezer. The body bruises, she was saying, out of proportion to necessity...and a bit of early intervention on the hematoma front could not hurt. While I was thinking this must be a metaphor for life, this excessive bruising. While also thinking 'why did she get me into this?' After all, my life had functioned quite smoothly without safety devices that prove to be perilous. It's her fault.
It's her presence that made this event the minimal thing it was. The slightest bruise, nothing more. It is also her shopping and generally being out in the world that put a new grabrail where I needed one. The latter having worked quite splendidly for a considerable time. Not that I had considered the time, having completely lost track of it. And the time for suction cups, as for everything, is limited. But fear, and its antidote, blame, are limitless. Unless you go through fear, get to the other side. And find there does appear to be a limit after all.
We have had a pleasant Saturday morning brunch, and now in the face of pressing business at church, Jane is taking leave. And I am taking leave of my senses. In outward form, we are both scurrying off to our day's activities. And while rolling homeward through the drowsy affluence of Menlo Park, I find myself sinking. Definitely descending, in a panicky moment, self and the boundaries of self unpleasantly dissolving into my wheelchair. I shall die. Fall into a coma. Terrified and obliterated as I lose control of first the wheelchair, then everything. Panic. And by now it must be admitted that this is not unfamiliar territory. In fact, it is one of my responses to intimacy. Jane has been back in my life for a few days, we have gotten closer, bringing me closer to something like hysteria. Never mind that humans want and fear the same thing, running to it and running from it. My question: what do I do with the next five minutes?
This effect is doubtless heightened by the previous evening's poetry in San Francisco with the Anglo-Irish David Whyte. It's the kind of writing, his and others', that takes one to the struggling edge of consciousness, pulling things into better but still imperfect focus. A disturbing place. Or exhilarating. But threatening to those of us who are struggling to keep it together. While wondering what the 'it' is. Which sparks the maddening quest that drives one to seek such poems. The sum message of which couldn't be clearer or simpler. Be present in all things. The difficulty of which also couldn't be clearer. I don't like this. I don't like free-floating anxiety, as the psychologists call it. Nor do I like their interpretation of my particular state...bad mothering, infantile abandonment. Being left to cry. I'm just trying to be an adult person, steer my wheelchair home, live a normal life.
But these panicky feelings, or fear of them, can be harnessed effectively. Take my word for it. Didn't I come home and get to work on reviving the Panasonic pencil sharpener? After all, the thing is 25 years old. At least. And the last time I replaced the batteries? Hard to say. Good thing to find an unopened package of batteries on one of my office supply shelves...the reassuring feel of items in their place suffusing and calming me. The batteries had a price label from an unfamiliar shop. Not Costco. Not Walgreens. Not of the present era, this is what I'm thinking. Not to worry, opening the bubblewrap, extracting the batteries and sticking them in the sharpener. Voilà. Nothing. True, upon closer inspection, the batteries have all this white powdery stuff about. Corrosion would be the unkind word. I prefer to think of the stuff along the lines of a patina...graceful aging. As I like to think of myself.
Present in all things. Panic being one of them. Which means, come back. Never mind the search for batteries. True, this does yield some surprising reserves. One desk drawer contains a lifetime supply of paper clips. Five bulging boxes of them. In fact, they are arrayed as though once bundled in a sixpack. What was I thinking? What unbounded vistas of papers clipped to other papers did I envision? What went wrong with this vision? The advent of computers? No, surely there were plenty of computers about. The prospect of endless work, that was probably more to the point. Now there is not much to clip.
But there's something to find. A mentor, an important one, once gave me a token. Physically, it was a round silver container with a lid that flipped open. Probably a pillbox, upon reflection. But on the level it was given, something that was round, empty and capable of holding. At times, I have placed this memento beside my keyboard. Sometimes it just sits on the desk. Unfortunately, like all things in and around my office, it drifts. Now it has drifted out of sight. I want to find it. For as I get older the importance of such tokens grows. As does the meaning behind things. Maybe I will put my weekly volunteer helper Paul on the task of finding it. Maybe he will find it, and maybe he won't. My sense is that the silver pillbox might have dropped off the keyboard stand and right into the trash. This would be sad, and a loss. If the gift becomes a loss, so be it. Many do, that is clear. And that, the lesson for this day, is life.
This effect is doubtless heightened by the previous evening's poetry in San Francisco with the Anglo-Irish David Whyte. It's the kind of writing, his and others', that takes one to the struggling edge of consciousness, pulling things into better but still imperfect focus. A disturbing place. Or exhilarating. But threatening to those of us who are struggling to keep it together. While wondering what the 'it' is. Which sparks the maddening quest that drives one to seek such poems. The sum message of which couldn't be clearer or simpler. Be present in all things. The difficulty of which also couldn't be clearer. I don't like this. I don't like free-floating anxiety, as the psychologists call it. Nor do I like their interpretation of my particular state...bad mothering, infantile abandonment. Being left to cry. I'm just trying to be an adult person, steer my wheelchair home, live a normal life.
But these panicky feelings, or fear of them, can be harnessed effectively. Take my word for it. Didn't I come home and get to work on reviving the Panasonic pencil sharpener? After all, the thing is 25 years old. At least. And the last time I replaced the batteries? Hard to say. Good thing to find an unopened package of batteries on one of my office supply shelves...the reassuring feel of items in their place suffusing and calming me. The batteries had a price label from an unfamiliar shop. Not Costco. Not Walgreens. Not of the present era, this is what I'm thinking. Not to worry, opening the bubblewrap, extracting the batteries and sticking them in the sharpener. Voilà. Nothing. True, upon closer inspection, the batteries have all this white powdery stuff about. Corrosion would be the unkind word. I prefer to think of the stuff along the lines of a patina...graceful aging. As I like to think of myself.
Present in all things. Panic being one of them. Which means, come back. Never mind the search for batteries. True, this does yield some surprising reserves. One desk drawer contains a lifetime supply of paper clips. Five bulging boxes of them. In fact, they are arrayed as though once bundled in a sixpack. What was I thinking? What unbounded vistas of papers clipped to other papers did I envision? What went wrong with this vision? The advent of computers? No, surely there were plenty of computers about. The prospect of endless work, that was probably more to the point. Now there is not much to clip.
But there's something to find. A mentor, an important one, once gave me a token. Physically, it was a round silver container with a lid that flipped open. Probably a pillbox, upon reflection. But on the level it was given, something that was round, empty and capable of holding. At times, I have placed this memento beside my keyboard. Sometimes it just sits on the desk. Unfortunately, like all things in and around my office, it drifts. Now it has drifted out of sight. I want to find it. For as I get older the importance of such tokens grows. As does the meaning behind things. Maybe I will put my weekly volunteer helper Paul on the task of finding it. Maybe he will find it, and maybe he won't. My sense is that the silver pillbox might have dropped off the keyboard stand and right into the trash. This would be sad, and a loss. If the gift becomes a loss, so be it. Many do, that is clear. And that, the lesson for this day, is life.
We Americans have this thing about being up front, but it's all a bunch of crap - just ask the Swedes. They are responsible for my current wheelchair and must know, better than anyone else, what it is to steer this thing. For the power drive wheels are up front, right in front, that is to say, in front of my butt but behind my ankles. Nothing secret about them. There they are, pulling several hundred pounds of metal frame, tibia, batteries, stomach contents and so on, all of it indistinguishable to the drive wheels, just a bunch of weight. And in the year I have owned this front-wheel-drive chair, while controlling the thing has gotten easier, I doubt that the California Department of Motorized Wheelchair Vehicles would give me a license. I still have trouble steering. I even have trouble steering when everything seems out front, up front...affronts seemingly far away. Which means one is headed your way.
I was just congratulating myself on a deft exit from the men's toilet at Draegers Supermarket. Being there frequently, after all, and the urinary experience a constant one, I see all too much of this particular facility. The door would not be a serious challenge if the janitorial crew did not feel obliged to place a waste bin right beside it. The latter makes it hard to get close to the doorknob, maneuver the door open, then turn my wheelchair in the general exit direction - all while steering with one hand. In fact, doing almost everything with one hand, bracing the door open with my functional left foot. My left foot, indeed. Nonetheless, despite the obstacles, I managed to get the door open, wheelchair positioned for departure and was rolling out when things went smash. Transparent pieces of plastic rained down about my feet. It was clear enough when it happened. For the same thing has almost happened before. I had cracked, actually, obliterated, the plastic lens cover on my left headlight. And there it was in shards, a helpful woman offering to pick up the pieces on her way into the women's. Sure, I said. Really thinking, no, and let me out of here, for I want to leave all this behind.
Next best thing to leaving the wreckage behind being a quick e-mail to the wheelchair repair guys. Could I order a new lens cover? Will the cover cover my tracks? Cover up my ineptitude...provide cover when the board of inquiry convenes...cover my butt. God, it's only 10:30 AM, and surely there must be a way to lighten up. Surely.
For strangely, although the battle-hardened quadriplegic should naturally shrug off a minor skirmish with a light lens, it doesn't seem to work that way. The failure of things physical seems to spur a hunger for perfection. My epitaph, were it possible to enjoy the thing, should read 'where did I go wrong?' Logic is out the window. Never mind what I can do with a good chunk of my spinal cord shot away...I want the chunk back. Now. And nothing must go wrong. And where are those tickets to the Berkeley Rep, missing since yesterday?
I was just congratulating myself on a deft exit from the men's toilet at Draegers Supermarket. Being there frequently, after all, and the urinary experience a constant one, I see all too much of this particular facility. The door would not be a serious challenge if the janitorial crew did not feel obliged to place a waste bin right beside it. The latter makes it hard to get close to the doorknob, maneuver the door open, then turn my wheelchair in the general exit direction - all while steering with one hand. In fact, doing almost everything with one hand, bracing the door open with my functional left foot. My left foot, indeed. Nonetheless, despite the obstacles, I managed to get the door open, wheelchair positioned for departure and was rolling out when things went smash. Transparent pieces of plastic rained down about my feet. It was clear enough when it happened. For the same thing has almost happened before. I had cracked, actually, obliterated, the plastic lens cover on my left headlight. And there it was in shards, a helpful woman offering to pick up the pieces on her way into the women's. Sure, I said. Really thinking, no, and let me out of here, for I want to leave all this behind.
Next best thing to leaving the wreckage behind being a quick e-mail to the wheelchair repair guys. Could I order a new lens cover? Will the cover cover my tracks? Cover up my ineptitude...provide cover when the board of inquiry convenes...cover my butt. God, it's only 10:30 AM, and surely there must be a way to lighten up. Surely.
For strangely, although the battle-hardened quadriplegic should naturally shrug off a minor skirmish with a light lens, it doesn't seem to work that way. The failure of things physical seems to spur a hunger for perfection. My epitaph, were it possible to enjoy the thing, should read 'where did I go wrong?' Logic is out the window. Never mind what I can do with a good chunk of my spinal cord shot away...I want the chunk back. Now. And nothing must go wrong. And where are those tickets to the Berkeley Rep, missing since yesterday?
By 11 AM there's no avoiding the Rest of the Day, looming as it does above the New York Times' revelations of environmental issues in the Norwegian fjords, bipartisan thrashings on budget cuts, a review of a book on cancer that purports to be a biography, but isn't, the reason the reviewer has bothered at all unclear by the end of the piece.... Meaning that it's time to leave Peet's, return to the keyboard and produce this very result. Interrupted, of course, by a trip down Charcuterie Lane, vis-à-vis Draegers Market, where I get sliced this and sliced that, another stalling tactic. Followed by the well-known Writing Avoidance gambit known as restaurant research.
Jane and I are headed for poetry tomorrow night in San Francisco and damned if we know where were going to eat. God forbid we should just wander the streets of a hostile city, one bereft of eateries, and foolishly stumble into this or that unreliable restaurant. God knows what might happen. Which has me wandering about the websites of assorted restaurants and reviewers, information which will be tossed out the practicality window, our time being terribly short pre-poetry. And once we place our order in one of these critically-acclaimed cafés on and around Van Ness Avenue, the slow service is bound to sour us on the whole hunt for good food...making my screen time particularly useless. Except in its stunning ability to put off the writing task in favor of the perennial favorite, the useless worrying task, a.k.a., planning.
My old friend Joe launched an early career as subtle provocateur with the frequent, overt announcement that he was worrying about this or that pimple, ache or other physical anomaly. In the early days one could take him literally, then half literally and half humorously, until now when time and distance have left me uncertain about the state of his anxieties. What I notice is that my own propensity to worry is hardly any more evolved. Our targets are different, Joe's and mine, but the essence is the same. Most recently, having gotten the dermatological thumbs down on the matter of the red spot on my back, I launched into a major anxiety, not to mention self-flagellation, campaign in the matter of Losing Things. Never mind that I am losing memory, losing my once 20/20 vision, now it's those fucking tickets to the Berkeley Rep for mid-December. Why precisely I need to find them right now in mid-November is unclear. How the matter arose at this particular junction is shrouded in psychological mystery. What's clear is that on one night, not a dark and stormy one, I looked about my desk, then looked in the ticket drawer (yes, there is one) in the living room, and they were nowhere to be found. I had lost the tickets. I had lost the way.
I lost it, flying about my apartment in a fit of self-incrimination, personal denunciation and general lamentation regarding my waning competence. For everyone knows that I cannot manage papers. Anything remotely made of paper. Just look at the way the many months of The Nation pile up like driftwood on various surfaces. Tables, principally, but the occasional chair as well. The New Yorker running a close second in terms of accumulating around me. And, more to the point, the mail. Never mind that the day's post undergoes a first sorting out of doors, within immediate wheelchair range of the recycling bin in the carport. Too much of what's left is ambiguous. For example, Western Rail Passenger Review. Of course I'm going to read it. I'm also going to learn French, walk more frequently and finally read War and Peace. Meanwhile, they build up, these publications. The review of the National Association of Railway Passengers is particularly sneaky, arriving in a letter-sized format that makes it easily lost on my desk. And my excuse for the misplaced tickets to the Berkeley Repertory Theater? More or less the same. They came in an envelope. All envelopes being square and right angled and made of paper, not to mention, frequently, white.
Having enough gray matter to pluck one thing out of my mind is useful, however. That's the e-mail receipt from the Berkeley Rep. In the end, after hours of flagellation, I e-mailed the box office. Mr. Woo responded. Being Berkeley, academic home of the Woo who provided legal sanction for waterboarding, I was naturally suspicious. Still, not to worry. Which was Mr. Woo's message. And the reason not to worry is that the tickets had just been mailed, and perhaps one should give them some time to bounce about the U.S. Postal Service. I considered this. Mostly, I considered the hours spent combing through papers, throwing them away, tomorrow and tomorrow rolling on and on. All to bring me to this juncture with Mr. Woo. Sometimes I regret that I barely drink.
Jane and I are headed for poetry tomorrow night in San Francisco and damned if we know where were going to eat. God forbid we should just wander the streets of a hostile city, one bereft of eateries, and foolishly stumble into this or that unreliable restaurant. God knows what might happen. Which has me wandering about the websites of assorted restaurants and reviewers, information which will be tossed out the practicality window, our time being terribly short pre-poetry. And once we place our order in one of these critically-acclaimed cafés on and around Van Ness Avenue, the slow service is bound to sour us on the whole hunt for good food...making my screen time particularly useless. Except in its stunning ability to put off the writing task in favor of the perennial favorite, the useless worrying task, a.k.a., planning.
My old friend Joe launched an early career as subtle provocateur with the frequent, overt announcement that he was worrying about this or that pimple, ache or other physical anomaly. In the early days one could take him literally, then half literally and half humorously, until now when time and distance have left me uncertain about the state of his anxieties. What I notice is that my own propensity to worry is hardly any more evolved. Our targets are different, Joe's and mine, but the essence is the same. Most recently, having gotten the dermatological thumbs down on the matter of the red spot on my back, I launched into a major anxiety, not to mention self-flagellation, campaign in the matter of Losing Things. Never mind that I am losing memory, losing my once 20/20 vision, now it's those fucking tickets to the Berkeley Rep for mid-December. Why precisely I need to find them right now in mid-November is unclear. How the matter arose at this particular junction is shrouded in psychological mystery. What's clear is that on one night, not a dark and stormy one, I looked about my desk, then looked in the ticket drawer (yes, there is one) in the living room, and they were nowhere to be found. I had lost the tickets. I had lost the way.
I lost it, flying about my apartment in a fit of self-incrimination, personal denunciation and general lamentation regarding my waning competence. For everyone knows that I cannot manage papers. Anything remotely made of paper. Just look at the way the many months of The Nation pile up like driftwood on various surfaces. Tables, principally, but the occasional chair as well. The New Yorker running a close second in terms of accumulating around me. And, more to the point, the mail. Never mind that the day's post undergoes a first sorting out of doors, within immediate wheelchair range of the recycling bin in the carport. Too much of what's left is ambiguous. For example, Western Rail Passenger Review. Of course I'm going to read it. I'm also going to learn French, walk more frequently and finally read War and Peace. Meanwhile, they build up, these publications. The review of the National Association of Railway Passengers is particularly sneaky, arriving in a letter-sized format that makes it easily lost on my desk. And my excuse for the misplaced tickets to the Berkeley Repertory Theater? More or less the same. They came in an envelope. All envelopes being square and right angled and made of paper, not to mention, frequently, white.
Having enough gray matter to pluck one thing out of my mind is useful, however. That's the e-mail receipt from the Berkeley Rep. In the end, after hours of flagellation, I e-mailed the box office. Mr. Woo responded. Being Berkeley, academic home of the Woo who provided legal sanction for waterboarding, I was naturally suspicious. Still, not to worry. Which was Mr. Woo's message. And the reason not to worry is that the tickets had just been mailed, and perhaps one should give them some time to bounce about the U.S. Postal Service. I considered this. Mostly, I considered the hours spent combing through papers, throwing them away, tomorrow and tomorrow rolling on and on. All to bring me to this juncture with Mr. Woo. Sometimes I regret that I barely drink.
One of the homeless habitués of Menlo Park's commercial center has turned up in my life in the strangest of ways. Smiling. I was sharing some lunchtime sushi with a friend in the small park across from Peet's a year or so ago when this same constituent wandered into our orbit. He's a bearded guy, short, disheveled, severely unkempt, his jacket more stains than plaid. And frequently about. It must have been Clint, my generous hearted and extroverted friend, who was sushi-ing with me that day. Clint has no compunctions, or few reservations, about giving a bit of money to homeless passersby. What I recall was that the bearded, disheveled tramp did not say thank you. In fact, he took Clint's money and seemed angrier than before. Which made a lasting impression. I guess I want my homeless people grateful. Or, at least, not frowning.
And so, a year later, on this morning, gazing over my pre-writing latte, I was surprised to see this man shuffle into view, aimless and slow and stopping at Peet's window. Just opposite me. In fact, looking at me. Which I found disturbing enough to try to ignore. After a moment, his gaze turned to the newspaper open on my table. As though this was his purpose, stopping outside a plateglass window to peer at someone's Times. He had a go at the business section, or tried to, being outside and reading what's inside on a café table being a challenge. It's disconcerting being stared at by anyone, particularly while behind plateglass as though part of a store display. Not to mention while one of the ruling class, more or less, or at least the more fortunate.
The lines. The boundaries. Guilt and its legitimate, versus illegitimate, uses. All these waver, in flux, when a society is in upheaval, I suppose. And when one's own moral capacities are under challenge. But at this point in life, it's like seeing the highway ahead through shimmering waves of heat. There is a distortion, but one keeps going, driving very carefully because the territory is unknown. No, I will not get sucked into feeling sorry for this bearded man of the streets. Nor will I get sucked into feeling oblivious to him. I'm curious, above all. Just uncertain how to explore his territory. And when I go to retrieve a paper napkin by the front door, guess who has seated himself right there? The bearded homeless guy. Hi, I say to him, giving the man a smile. He gives me a large grin. If I think about it, having watched this man trudge about the town, eyes downcast, apparently angry, seemingly disdainful of those around him, this moment appears to be the first. The first time I have seen him smile. Ever.
And why me? And why now? And why worry, or even think about any of this?
Because while I watch the larger, protracted drama of America eating its young, equally powerful vignettes are playing themselves out right before my eyes every day. And this matter of healing and saving what one can of humanity and Mother Earth, it's happening on a hands-on basis. And I do have hands. And I am on. And I'm here, in Peet's, and proceeding cautiously, but proceeding.
'Hi,' I say to the guy, as though he's an old buddy, 'it's cold out there.' This is mildly ridiculous, with the temperature in the 60s Fahrenheit, but never mind. I am actually afraid of this character, afraid of getting sucked into a losing conversation. Something demented, in which I have to smile nicely and pretend things are okay and normal. Or I have to endure the kvetching of a victim. Or I have to deal with a request for money, having my guilt buttons pushed, fearing and resenting manipulation. So to short-circuit all these imagined scenarios, I bolt. After all, I had come here to grab a napkin. So, with my wheelchair speed control on high, I complete my mission, head back to the table and get to work on finishing my latte.
So what had I done? Broken the ice, one might say. Which would be putting a too adult gloss on it. I had made tentative contact, acknowledging the man the way anxious teenage boys say hello to girls. Hi and bye. Or even younger schoolkids approach a classmate who is foreign, has a limp or a speech defect. Hello, and who are you?
Saving people seems foolish, overly idealized and ambitious. Understanding them, that's another matter. God only knows what makes a person angrily, aimlessly wander about a suburban town for years. There is a story there, of course. Which I do not aspire to know. Though the outlines may appear in the crook of the story, that is, the curious twist. Which has to do with why say hello to me? And, the next question, why now?
Perhaps it's because I am in a wheelchair, and therefore nonthreatening, that makes this man smile at me. And I may signal that there is something in my character that is open. Either way, there is something to be learned here. Especially the plot twist. What has happened in this man' life that, after all these years, makes him attempt to reach out? He seems to wish to make contact with the outside world or, more exactly, the inside, centrally heated world. Either way, it's up to me to stay with it, stay tuned.
And so, a year later, on this morning, gazing over my pre-writing latte, I was surprised to see this man shuffle into view, aimless and slow and stopping at Peet's window. Just opposite me. In fact, looking at me. Which I found disturbing enough to try to ignore. After a moment, his gaze turned to the newspaper open on my table. As though this was his purpose, stopping outside a plateglass window to peer at someone's Times. He had a go at the business section, or tried to, being outside and reading what's inside on a café table being a challenge. It's disconcerting being stared at by anyone, particularly while behind plateglass as though part of a store display. Not to mention while one of the ruling class, more or less, or at least the more fortunate.
The lines. The boundaries. Guilt and its legitimate, versus illegitimate, uses. All these waver, in flux, when a society is in upheaval, I suppose. And when one's own moral capacities are under challenge. But at this point in life, it's like seeing the highway ahead through shimmering waves of heat. There is a distortion, but one keeps going, driving very carefully because the territory is unknown. No, I will not get sucked into feeling sorry for this bearded man of the streets. Nor will I get sucked into feeling oblivious to him. I'm curious, above all. Just uncertain how to explore his territory. And when I go to retrieve a paper napkin by the front door, guess who has seated himself right there? The bearded homeless guy. Hi, I say to him, giving the man a smile. He gives me a large grin. If I think about it, having watched this man trudge about the town, eyes downcast, apparently angry, seemingly disdainful of those around him, this moment appears to be the first. The first time I have seen him smile. Ever.
And why me? And why now? And why worry, or even think about any of this?
Because while I watch the larger, protracted drama of America eating its young, equally powerful vignettes are playing themselves out right before my eyes every day. And this matter of healing and saving what one can of humanity and Mother Earth, it's happening on a hands-on basis. And I do have hands. And I am on. And I'm here, in Peet's, and proceeding cautiously, but proceeding.
'Hi,' I say to the guy, as though he's an old buddy, 'it's cold out there.' This is mildly ridiculous, with the temperature in the 60s Fahrenheit, but never mind. I am actually afraid of this character, afraid of getting sucked into a losing conversation. Something demented, in which I have to smile nicely and pretend things are okay and normal. Or I have to endure the kvetching of a victim. Or I have to deal with a request for money, having my guilt buttons pushed, fearing and resenting manipulation. So to short-circuit all these imagined scenarios, I bolt. After all, I had come here to grab a napkin. So, with my wheelchair speed control on high, I complete my mission, head back to the table and get to work on finishing my latte.
So what had I done? Broken the ice, one might say. Which would be putting a too adult gloss on it. I had made tentative contact, acknowledging the man the way anxious teenage boys say hello to girls. Hi and bye. Or even younger schoolkids approach a classmate who is foreign, has a limp or a speech defect. Hello, and who are you?
Saving people seems foolish, overly idealized and ambitious. Understanding them, that's another matter. God only knows what makes a person angrily, aimlessly wander about a suburban town for years. There is a story there, of course. Which I do not aspire to know. Though the outlines may appear in the crook of the story, that is, the curious twist. Which has to do with why say hello to me? And, the next question, why now?
Perhaps it's because I am in a wheelchair, and therefore nonthreatening, that makes this man smile at me. And I may signal that there is something in my character that is open. Either way, there is something to be learned here. Especially the plot twist. What has happened in this man' life that, after all these years, makes him attempt to reach out? He seems to wish to make contact with the outside world or, more exactly, the inside, centrally heated world. Either way, it's up to me to stay with it, stay tuned.
Cedro's is doomed. My favorite Italian breakfast spot....not truly a genre, but never mind...will soon be no more. I peer through the windows in the course of wheelchairing about town, often heading to the inferior café next door. Empty tables. No customers. Soon they'll be gone. Arrivederci Cedro. This morning, late morning, when I roll in for a breakfast vying with lunch, settling on a Caesar salad, and sit alone at the only occupied table, the picture looks even worse. For I lie. Another table is occupied. By the staff. The manager, the head chef, assorted others all sitting at a far table in the corner. Unclear who made my Caesar salad, but it doesn't matter. The food is good. Even if at noon the staff had other fish to fry, lunch apparently not very taxing, at least not yet. Oh well. Restaurants come and go. And I will be sorry to see this one gone. More than sorry. Feeling almost...responsible. Perhaps I should help out, inviting hundreds of my closest friends in for a lunch or two. Keeping the place alive another week. Thus the psychological legacy of an over adutified child of infantile parents...boundaries perennially unclear.
Not the garden. Here things are bounded and bounding. Paul, Tuesday's volunteer, has gone to work on the raised beds. He is raising hell on the raised beds, and what transpires kicks the day into higher gear. The morning is crisp, the atmosphere perspiring against my foggy bedroom windows. But by 8:30 Paul is already at it. The garden crop is finished. One pepper inexplicably flourishes. The border flowers are immortal. And, yes, there is the brussels sprout, looming like a vegetable Redwood in one corner of a raised bed. But everything else is in its death throes, meaning the tomatoes. The fruit is turning Martian, mottled reds and yellows circulating about the skin. The leaves are withering, vines shifting into chartreuse. It's over, but not the mass of the thing. For my tomato plants reach a good two meters toward the sky. The metal frames that support them, the wooden stakes that support the metal frames, the whole jerryrigged assemblage ponderous and immense. Not to worry, for Paul makes fast work of the whole mess. Cutting the ties that hold the vines to the supports, everything crashing down in a pile. And under that pile?
Well, as good as it gets for a quadriplegic gardener, someone who no longer has the physical wherewithal to do many suburban agricultural tasks. Under the pile, cover crop seeds from last year. Where did I buy them? The source eludes me, but their presence in my pantry has burned an indelible mark on what's left of my gray matter. And now Paul, following my explicit instructions, has begun his garden take down with this essential first step. Scattering the seeds upon the bare earth. Well, not so bare, a tomato forest swaying above. But open, ground beneath the plants, now covered in seeds of vetch, fava beans, perennial rye grass and God knows what else. And once the vines have tumbled on top of them, Paul chops them up with garden shears. And after a few days of plant drying and dying, water from a hose or the occasional rains will sprout the seeds, cover crop growing fast as bamboo up through the carcasses of last year's harvest, greening and rising, roots scuttling. Until the waving cover crop field reaches its botanical nadir and the weekly landscape gardener takes his January pitchfork to the whole thing, turning it under, just as the year turns over.
Inclined to focus too much on the death and decay end of things? Grow a garden. You'll stumble upon regeneration, like it or not.
Awake at three in the morning, looking forward to my reunion with Jane later in the day, sleep eludes me. I obsess. The smallest things orbiting in the smallest cycles inside my brain. What about that check I sent to KPFA, the last broadcast voice of the progressive left? Okay, the radio station has been in a crisis. But wasn't that why I sent them money? In the form of one of those electronic checks, which arrive without a cover letter, of course. Making it slightly more difficult for KPFA to send me a little thank you note. Or put me on their e-mail list. Or acknowledge my existence. But now at 3:30 AM this is galling me. Fuck these sloppy people. For there on the electronic check's memo line was my address. Even the phone number. Plenty of ways to contact me, no excuse for ignoring me. KPFA's news reliably skeptical, sometimes insightful, okay, sometimes paranoid. But mostly refreshing. Which I cannot say for myself, not at 4 AM.
It's 7 AM when I switch on KPFA for the morning news. Eileen, the station's anchor at this hour, explains that this is an unusual broadcast. It's unorthodox, she observes at regular intervals. It turns out that she has been fired. She and everyone else. Thing is, Eileen points out, the morning drive-time show is the station's biggest money earner, the only true Pledge Machine working for KPFA - so what gives? Something has to give, says Arlene, who runs the parent Pacifica Foundation. She is right there in the studio, Arlene is. Along with Eileen. What's not there, of course, are the usual wire service stories that comprise the morning news summary, a lead into the first two exposés of the day.
But there's none of that this day, for the news is not being described, but enacted. Embodied, in fact, and Eileen is advancing the plot considerably by asking how and why she got fired. In violation of union rules, she adds. Arlene is back on, telling listeners that the union rules are very much in force. No, says Philip, a former newsreader who has appeared from nowhere. He is the union shop steward at KPFA, Philip says. And rules around seniority and who gets fired first are, by agreement, superseded by other rules in times of crisis. Which leads Philip into a discussion of the other Philip, also a newsreader, not present in this broadcast moment, but a fixture of my mornings. And with lack of sleep since 3 AM, if I was having trouble tracking Eileen and Arlene, the advent of two Philips has pushed me over the edge.
But not for long, for Larry is on. Larry Bensky, among the nation's finest progressive journalists, one of the pioneers of KPFA, vital and feisty and...I had to Google him...pushing 72 years of age. This latter fact flooring me, but after the fact. Because, for now, at 7:20 AM Larry has the floor. And he has my attention, not to mention my respect, and what he's saying digs at me like the truth. That why has KPFA stumbled into a supposed crisis with its foundation owner at this particular moment? This progressive radio station with the powerful signal of the Bay Area's most popular commercial frequencies...some fluke of postwar history...why is its most trenchant news show on the block now? This is the only question to ask. Especially since Arlene's foundation was trying to sell the powerful station several years ago. Which just isn't something you do with a high-megahertz radio voice for what's left of progressive America. I hear the message behind Larry's message, which is inescapably Jewish in its cellular knowledge. Which is that the Cossacks are coming, so look sharp. And you just know that he's right. Because the Cossacks were always as sharp of dress and dull of eye as Sarah Palin. And there's work to do. I'm glad Jane is back. Because I'll sleep better. And, God knows, with all the work cut out for me and the country, I need some rest.
Not the garden. Here things are bounded and bounding. Paul, Tuesday's volunteer, has gone to work on the raised beds. He is raising hell on the raised beds, and what transpires kicks the day into higher gear. The morning is crisp, the atmosphere perspiring against my foggy bedroom windows. But by 8:30 Paul is already at it. The garden crop is finished. One pepper inexplicably flourishes. The border flowers are immortal. And, yes, there is the brussels sprout, looming like a vegetable Redwood in one corner of a raised bed. But everything else is in its death throes, meaning the tomatoes. The fruit is turning Martian, mottled reds and yellows circulating about the skin. The leaves are withering, vines shifting into chartreuse. It's over, but not the mass of the thing. For my tomato plants reach a good two meters toward the sky. The metal frames that support them, the wooden stakes that support the metal frames, the whole jerryrigged assemblage ponderous and immense. Not to worry, for Paul makes fast work of the whole mess. Cutting the ties that hold the vines to the supports, everything crashing down in a pile. And under that pile?
Well, as good as it gets for a quadriplegic gardener, someone who no longer has the physical wherewithal to do many suburban agricultural tasks. Under the pile, cover crop seeds from last year. Where did I buy them? The source eludes me, but their presence in my pantry has burned an indelible mark on what's left of my gray matter. And now Paul, following my explicit instructions, has begun his garden take down with this essential first step. Scattering the seeds upon the bare earth. Well, not so bare, a tomato forest swaying above. But open, ground beneath the plants, now covered in seeds of vetch, fava beans, perennial rye grass and God knows what else. And once the vines have tumbled on top of them, Paul chops them up with garden shears. And after a few days of plant drying and dying, water from a hose or the occasional rains will sprout the seeds, cover crop growing fast as bamboo up through the carcasses of last year's harvest, greening and rising, roots scuttling. Until the waving cover crop field reaches its botanical nadir and the weekly landscape gardener takes his January pitchfork to the whole thing, turning it under, just as the year turns over.
Inclined to focus too much on the death and decay end of things? Grow a garden. You'll stumble upon regeneration, like it or not.
Awake at three in the morning, looking forward to my reunion with Jane later in the day, sleep eludes me. I obsess. The smallest things orbiting in the smallest cycles inside my brain. What about that check I sent to KPFA, the last broadcast voice of the progressive left? Okay, the radio station has been in a crisis. But wasn't that why I sent them money? In the form of one of those electronic checks, which arrive without a cover letter, of course. Making it slightly more difficult for KPFA to send me a little thank you note. Or put me on their e-mail list. Or acknowledge my existence. But now at 3:30 AM this is galling me. Fuck these sloppy people. For there on the electronic check's memo line was my address. Even the phone number. Plenty of ways to contact me, no excuse for ignoring me. KPFA's news reliably skeptical, sometimes insightful, okay, sometimes paranoid. But mostly refreshing. Which I cannot say for myself, not at 4 AM.
It's 7 AM when I switch on KPFA for the morning news. Eileen, the station's anchor at this hour, explains that this is an unusual broadcast. It's unorthodox, she observes at regular intervals. It turns out that she has been fired. She and everyone else. Thing is, Eileen points out, the morning drive-time show is the station's biggest money earner, the only true Pledge Machine working for KPFA - so what gives? Something has to give, says Arlene, who runs the parent Pacifica Foundation. She is right there in the studio, Arlene is. Along with Eileen. What's not there, of course, are the usual wire service stories that comprise the morning news summary, a lead into the first two exposés of the day.
But there's none of that this day, for the news is not being described, but enacted. Embodied, in fact, and Eileen is advancing the plot considerably by asking how and why she got fired. In violation of union rules, she adds. Arlene is back on, telling listeners that the union rules are very much in force. No, says Philip, a former newsreader who has appeared from nowhere. He is the union shop steward at KPFA, Philip says. And rules around seniority and who gets fired first are, by agreement, superseded by other rules in times of crisis. Which leads Philip into a discussion of the other Philip, also a newsreader, not present in this broadcast moment, but a fixture of my mornings. And with lack of sleep since 3 AM, if I was having trouble tracking Eileen and Arlene, the advent of two Philips has pushed me over the edge.
But not for long, for Larry is on. Larry Bensky, among the nation's finest progressive journalists, one of the pioneers of KPFA, vital and feisty and...I had to Google him...pushing 72 years of age. This latter fact flooring me, but after the fact. Because, for now, at 7:20 AM Larry has the floor. And he has my attention, not to mention my respect, and what he's saying digs at me like the truth. That why has KPFA stumbled into a supposed crisis with its foundation owner at this particular moment? This progressive radio station with the powerful signal of the Bay Area's most popular commercial frequencies...some fluke of postwar history...why is its most trenchant news show on the block now? This is the only question to ask. Especially since Arlene's foundation was trying to sell the powerful station several years ago. Which just isn't something you do with a high-megahertz radio voice for what's left of progressive America. I hear the message behind Larry's message, which is inescapably Jewish in its cellular knowledge. Which is that the Cossacks are coming, so look sharp. And you just know that he's right. Because the Cossacks were always as sharp of dress and dull of eye as Sarah Palin. And there's work to do. I'm glad Jane is back. Because I'll sleep better. And, God knows, with all the work cut out for me and the country, I need some rest.
It's the tenuousness. I can't quite accept it. Surely there is something wrong, probably with me, something that can be corrected, to put things right. And 'right' means more secure and regular. Things predictable, no fear.
These musings sparked by getting off the exercycle. Getting on it is difficult enough, requiring a helper's intervention. Snapping the bike shoes into their sockets drives many a person around the proverbial bend. But once snapped in, it's pretty much a snap to get the feet out. There is a challenging moment that follows. I rise from the exercycle seat, pulling myself up with the one working arm, put my weight on the one nonworking but plastic-braced leg, turn and haul the good, innervated leg up and over the machine's frame and onto the ground. This does require certain bits of finesse. I lean my torso into the machine's hand bar, grip the top of the seat and balance for a precarious moment. At this stage the cleated bottom of the bicycle shoe gets stuck on one or more protuberances on the exercycle frame. I lift, slide, rock and jiggle the foot until something gives way and the shoe slips over the frame and down to the ground. At which point I fall, almost literally, backwards into the wheelchair.
But this morning it's not happening, not when I push against the top of the seat and attempt to lean against the handlebar. The power isn't there. My shoulder isn't cooperating. And I do, at least, know the simple reason why. The rotator cuff exercises. I haven't done them. They are part of my regular routine, more than 10 years in the physical medicine repertoire. But not recently, having avoided the noisome imperative to pull various elastic bands to open this space and strengthen that muscle. I have been lazy. Or preoccupied. Or both. In any case, the shoulder hurts rather than pushes. And I am neuromuscularly fucked.
But I'm not thinking about this, because I am not thinking at all, more panicking. I can't get off the machine. I will either have to sit here and await a passerby, or seize the cordless phone, which I wisely thought to bring, and call my landlord upstairs. I do not want to do this, raising an alarm about my...well, I don't know, about my anything...but there is more. I don't want to see myself doing this. The defeat implicit in this cry for help.
So I lean mightily, push desperately, and manage to get the foot barely up on the frame. Now I can use my leg power to slide the bicycle shoe across and down. Which I do. Another close call. But with what? Limitations? Reality? I suppose it is the latter. I don't like accepting the moment-to-moment perils of my disabled life.
It shouldn't be like this. Raising the larger question: what should it be like? Well, my neighbors. Buffie, for example, running out to her car of a morning, seven-year-old Avery in tow. Footloose. Blithe. Heedless of peril. Or the new couple across from me, he an investment banker, she a housewife, their six-month-old on a fast track from dozy foot wiggling to ambulation within the next year or so. Even Tom, my landlord, getting stooped with age, but still firing up his fleet of petroleum-guzzling American cars on a regular basis.
These people do not venture into the center of Menlo Park, all of three streets away, with the sense in the back of one's mind that in the event of a wheelchair breakdown...what? Sitting on a sidewalk alone, immobilized and...the rest isn't clear. I suppose I could phone the wheelchair repair guys. I do have their number somewhere. Assuming the mobile phone is in my pocket. Or I might be stuck in Trader Joe's. Or San Francisco, miles from home and reliant upon the kindness of strangers. And always in these situations, never far from the next need to pee.
Which raises another issue. Actually, raises the body to standing, this being the traditional stance of the male in the process of liquid elimination. There can be no spacing out, not even the slightest wavering of attention on my feet. With so much loss in the neuromuscular balance department, staying vertical requires rapt concentration. All it takes is a second for the preoccupied brain to drift to more interesting matters and allow the center of gravity to waver in the wrong direction. Which is the reason that I do not stand more often and walk about my apartment with a crutch. This is a balance-building practice, one I should engage in every day. But there's the fear, the fear of falling alone, to the ground...even breaking my fragile neck in the process.
Thus, one disabled life. The smallest things perilous. Fear abundant. Do I dare to eat a peach...standing over the sink, on one leg, a splendid juice management practice that could involve my last peach or my last stand, take your pick? Body management. Fear management. And it's just another day. But in fairness the day began long ago. Everything in my childhood family life was precarious. Not much I could count on. Anxiety was habitual. Confusing the issue, all issues. Making me wonder why I worry about stumbling in my apartment, when I have been stumbling all my life.
These musings sparked by getting off the exercycle. Getting on it is difficult enough, requiring a helper's intervention. Snapping the bike shoes into their sockets drives many a person around the proverbial bend. But once snapped in, it's pretty much a snap to get the feet out. There is a challenging moment that follows. I rise from the exercycle seat, pulling myself up with the one working arm, put my weight on the one nonworking but plastic-braced leg, turn and haul the good, innervated leg up and over the machine's frame and onto the ground. This does require certain bits of finesse. I lean my torso into the machine's hand bar, grip the top of the seat and balance for a precarious moment. At this stage the cleated bottom of the bicycle shoe gets stuck on one or more protuberances on the exercycle frame. I lift, slide, rock and jiggle the foot until something gives way and the shoe slips over the frame and down to the ground. At which point I fall, almost literally, backwards into the wheelchair.
But this morning it's not happening, not when I push against the top of the seat and attempt to lean against the handlebar. The power isn't there. My shoulder isn't cooperating. And I do, at least, know the simple reason why. The rotator cuff exercises. I haven't done them. They are part of my regular routine, more than 10 years in the physical medicine repertoire. But not recently, having avoided the noisome imperative to pull various elastic bands to open this space and strengthen that muscle. I have been lazy. Or preoccupied. Or both. In any case, the shoulder hurts rather than pushes. And I am neuromuscularly fucked.
But I'm not thinking about this, because I am not thinking at all, more panicking. I can't get off the machine. I will either have to sit here and await a passerby, or seize the cordless phone, which I wisely thought to bring, and call my landlord upstairs. I do not want to do this, raising an alarm about my...well, I don't know, about my anything...but there is more. I don't want to see myself doing this. The defeat implicit in this cry for help.
So I lean mightily, push desperately, and manage to get the foot barely up on the frame. Now I can use my leg power to slide the bicycle shoe across and down. Which I do. Another close call. But with what? Limitations? Reality? I suppose it is the latter. I don't like accepting the moment-to-moment perils of my disabled life.
It shouldn't be like this. Raising the larger question: what should it be like? Well, my neighbors. Buffie, for example, running out to her car of a morning, seven-year-old Avery in tow. Footloose. Blithe. Heedless of peril. Or the new couple across from me, he an investment banker, she a housewife, their six-month-old on a fast track from dozy foot wiggling to ambulation within the next year or so. Even Tom, my landlord, getting stooped with age, but still firing up his fleet of petroleum-guzzling American cars on a regular basis.
These people do not venture into the center of Menlo Park, all of three streets away, with the sense in the back of one's mind that in the event of a wheelchair breakdown...what? Sitting on a sidewalk alone, immobilized and...the rest isn't clear. I suppose I could phone the wheelchair repair guys. I do have their number somewhere. Assuming the mobile phone is in my pocket. Or I might be stuck in Trader Joe's. Or San Francisco, miles from home and reliant upon the kindness of strangers. And always in these situations, never far from the next need to pee.
Which raises another issue. Actually, raises the body to standing, this being the traditional stance of the male in the process of liquid elimination. There can be no spacing out, not even the slightest wavering of attention on my feet. With so much loss in the neuromuscular balance department, staying vertical requires rapt concentration. All it takes is a second for the preoccupied brain to drift to more interesting matters and allow the center of gravity to waver in the wrong direction. Which is the reason that I do not stand more often and walk about my apartment with a crutch. This is a balance-building practice, one I should engage in every day. But there's the fear, the fear of falling alone, to the ground...even breaking my fragile neck in the process.
Thus, one disabled life. The smallest things perilous. Fear abundant. Do I dare to eat a peach...standing over the sink, on one leg, a splendid juice management practice that could involve my last peach or my last stand, take your pick? Body management. Fear management. And it's just another day. But in fairness the day began long ago. Everything in my childhood family life was precarious. Not much I could count on. Anxiety was habitual. Confusing the issue, all issues. Making me wonder why I worry about stumbling in my apartment, when I have been stumbling all my life.
Where does the daylight go when it is saved? And now that we no longer have daylight saving time, are we spending it? And if we are, shouldn't we be saving?
Yesterday's 'Cyrano' at the San Francisco Opera roared off to a swashbuckling start, flagged in the familiar remote-controlled wooing of the lovely Roxanne, sent me drifting off to sleep during the siege of Arras...not a good sign with cannons firing on stage...and found me fully alert for Cyrano's final moment with his beloved. The story strikes a chord, even if Amalfi's chords got tiring. The production, with its big sets and stage action, finally settled down for the autumnal last act, one spare tree shedding its leaves virtually all there is on stage. Which suited me just fine. For have I not reached this stage of things myself? Whatever stage this is. Autumns can be quite pleasant. This one is. Globally warmed. Rain only occasional. A time to come to grips, fess up, get on and get out.
Earlier in the afternoon the packed #47 bus from San Francisco's Caltrain station left a lasting impression. Stopping across from the opera house, it may be convenient, but fighting my wheelchair away through the transit masses in an effort to get up the aisle and out the door...well, never again. And yet rushing out of 'Cyrano' shortly before 5 PM, damned if I don't see a #47 rolling my way. And damned if I don't go after it. For this is one of those rare and stunning moments in which Wheelchair Outraces Bus, if one is writing the headline. For the traffic on Van Ness Avenue is barely moving. But I am. With just a bit of luck, and if I can get slow-moving pedestrians out of my way, my wheelchair will make it to the next stop before the bus does. Which, in fact, happens. Already on board, four opera matrons heading, like me, for the Peninsula suburbs. They are easy to spot, attired like few others on Muni buses, clutching programs, and looking bemused at the goings on. A woman has trudged on board with two huge clear plastic bags. 'Getting a little chilly,' she said to me as the two of us approached the arriving bus. She wears a navy blue watch cap, and an expression that says this is the most natural of endeavors, schlepping about enormous sacks of questionable content.
This is what it is to be a down-at-heel extravert. This woman is black, impoverished, shabbily dressed and carrying one bag of what might be laundry, but is probably her wardrobe, and another bag of what distinctly looks like rubbish...while commenting on the day's weather and generally chatting up a transit storm. She is infectious. The four opera ladies seated across from me exchange pleasantries with her. We stop for a Chinese woman seeking Van Ness Avenue, the driver tells her to take a bus in the opposite direction, and everyone gets involved. The black woman yells out the door 'over there,' pointing across the street. One of the opera matrons attempts a more genteel version of the same advice. 'She's dense,' the black woman says, as the bus pulls away. What is certain is that the Chinese woman knew no English and shared the most salient characteristic of all Muni stalwarts: determination.
The bus turns a corner at the implausible intersection of 10th St. and 12th St., this conjunction doubtless made possible by some quickly improvised urban planning following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. At the corner of 5th and Bryant Streets, the bus stops and the woman commences her exit. 'I've got two bags,' she tells the driver. She drags the first of these halfway down the steps. Careful never to alight on the ground, making her no longer a passenger, she climbs back to her seat and grabs the other bag. Now she bounces both down the steps and onto the sidewalk in front of the St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelter. The Muni #47 jerks down Bryant Street for another block, then turns toward the Caltrain station.
It is out of loneliness that I feel a need to bond with the opera matrons. When we stop by the railway station I turn to them and observe that the Muni opera is over. They laugh. 'I am so glad that I don't live in San Francisco,' says one.
I say nothing. I do not share this sentiment. I am not so glad, more philosophical. To be a slow-moving person in a wheelchair must require a certain heightened vigilance in this, or any other, city. On the other hand, there is the Muni opera, lyric in its own way, certainly more varied and dramatic than the suburban regularity of Menlo Park. More to the point, there is the open survival struggle. It's on stage every day in San Francisco. Yes, more visible in some quarters than others. But never very far away. It is the style of survival that interests me. For this opens a door to the motive force behind surviving. What keeps people going? At my age, any age? How is it possible that there is actually wheelchair space on the 6:15 Caltrain southbound, that I make it back to suburbia quite intact, handle my affairs alone, getting to bed, and even getting rested?
Yesterday's 'Cyrano' at the San Francisco Opera roared off to a swashbuckling start, flagged in the familiar remote-controlled wooing of the lovely Roxanne, sent me drifting off to sleep during the siege of Arras...not a good sign with cannons firing on stage...and found me fully alert for Cyrano's final moment with his beloved. The story strikes a chord, even if Amalfi's chords got tiring. The production, with its big sets and stage action, finally settled down for the autumnal last act, one spare tree shedding its leaves virtually all there is on stage. Which suited me just fine. For have I not reached this stage of things myself? Whatever stage this is. Autumns can be quite pleasant. This one is. Globally warmed. Rain only occasional. A time to come to grips, fess up, get on and get out.
Earlier in the afternoon the packed #47 bus from San Francisco's Caltrain station left a lasting impression. Stopping across from the opera house, it may be convenient, but fighting my wheelchair away through the transit masses in an effort to get up the aisle and out the door...well, never again. And yet rushing out of 'Cyrano' shortly before 5 PM, damned if I don't see a #47 rolling my way. And damned if I don't go after it. For this is one of those rare and stunning moments in which Wheelchair Outraces Bus, if one is writing the headline. For the traffic on Van Ness Avenue is barely moving. But I am. With just a bit of luck, and if I can get slow-moving pedestrians out of my way, my wheelchair will make it to the next stop before the bus does. Which, in fact, happens. Already on board, four opera matrons heading, like me, for the Peninsula suburbs. They are easy to spot, attired like few others on Muni buses, clutching programs, and looking bemused at the goings on. A woman has trudged on board with two huge clear plastic bags. 'Getting a little chilly,' she said to me as the two of us approached the arriving bus. She wears a navy blue watch cap, and an expression that says this is the most natural of endeavors, schlepping about enormous sacks of questionable content.
This is what it is to be a down-at-heel extravert. This woman is black, impoverished, shabbily dressed and carrying one bag of what might be laundry, but is probably her wardrobe, and another bag of what distinctly looks like rubbish...while commenting on the day's weather and generally chatting up a transit storm. She is infectious. The four opera ladies seated across from me exchange pleasantries with her. We stop for a Chinese woman seeking Van Ness Avenue, the driver tells her to take a bus in the opposite direction, and everyone gets involved. The black woman yells out the door 'over there,' pointing across the street. One of the opera matrons attempts a more genteel version of the same advice. 'She's dense,' the black woman says, as the bus pulls away. What is certain is that the Chinese woman knew no English and shared the most salient characteristic of all Muni stalwarts: determination.
The bus turns a corner at the implausible intersection of 10th St. and 12th St., this conjunction doubtless made possible by some quickly improvised urban planning following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. At the corner of 5th and Bryant Streets, the bus stops and the woman commences her exit. 'I've got two bags,' she tells the driver. She drags the first of these halfway down the steps. Careful never to alight on the ground, making her no longer a passenger, she climbs back to her seat and grabs the other bag. Now she bounces both down the steps and onto the sidewalk in front of the St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelter. The Muni #47 jerks down Bryant Street for another block, then turns toward the Caltrain station.
It is out of loneliness that I feel a need to bond with the opera matrons. When we stop by the railway station I turn to them and observe that the Muni opera is over. They laugh. 'I am so glad that I don't live in San Francisco,' says one.
I say nothing. I do not share this sentiment. I am not so glad, more philosophical. To be a slow-moving person in a wheelchair must require a certain heightened vigilance in this, or any other, city. On the other hand, there is the Muni opera, lyric in its own way, certainly more varied and dramatic than the suburban regularity of Menlo Park. More to the point, there is the open survival struggle. It's on stage every day in San Francisco. Yes, more visible in some quarters than others. But never very far away. It is the style of survival that interests me. For this opens a door to the motive force behind surviving. What keeps people going? At my age, any age? How is it possible that there is actually wheelchair space on the 6:15 Caltrain southbound, that I make it back to suburbia quite intact, handle my affairs alone, getting to bed, and even getting rested?
It is hard to say what is so difficult about rolling outside in November's rosy-fingered dawn, the sun still yawning and only half out of its horizon bed at 7:45 AM. It's not really cold. And I've been up for hours, literally. I do sleep better with Jane about, which speaks loads about her and us and my life's good fortune. Which is all well and good, but the amount of energy it is requiring this morning to schlep up and down in front of my apartment, well, it is most discouraging. And why? I am, at last count, a 63-year-old quadriplegic. A graph of all the forces at work, stamina versus gerontology versus will...I am not sure what it would show. But, trust me, it's not a pretty picture. For this aging business...oy. People getting older and the nation getting older, and no one getting any wiser. Apparently not me, at least, since the cancer now popping up among friends seems like polio, an alien invader. But, of course, it's not. Really, it's just a sign of age. Of time passing, cells wearing out and losing their physiological way, all more or less on schedule.
I am running out of purpose, that is the thing. I have gone out of the way to involve myself with younger people, my children's' generation if I'd had any. Saving Caltrain. Fighting the good political fight. Whatever my role in the march of ancestors, historical struggles, all these things wear thin with age. Because there's that other line on the great graph of life, the absurdity line. Justifications and reasons run out. By 80, many a wise person agrees, the prospect of things ending does not sound like such a bad proposition.
Except for Clint. He is 80 and effortlessly goes about disproving my suppositions. I am sitting beside him at his dining room table, watching a laptop as our friend Tom waltzes through YouTube in search of some Janecek. I tell Clint that his beard and abundant white hair have reached an impressively John Muir stage. He shrugs. Clint is more concerned with e-mailing friends about his art show. He has one, opening soon. There is the matter of e-mailing announcements, and this is what's happening. Tom is helping Clint address and send the art show messages, the precise reason unclear, but the larger situation obvious. Melanoma's spread is making things hard. Clint pats his head. He is going to have radiation after all, he says, for his brain tumors. Clint seems impatient about whatever misfunctions emanate from the cancer in his cranial cavity. It's a nuisance, a brain tumor, and he wishes these radiation guys would get to work on it. Clint pats my hand. Nice to see you, he says. Nice to be here seeing Clint seeing me.
Phyllis joins us at the table. She has thought of some other e-mail addresses, even group address lists, that will help spread the word about Clint's art show. What I feel is all the years Clint has been spreading word himself. Visit my website, he says at the end of his e-mails. I have made the occasional visit, but not nearly often enough. For Clint's eye is a keen one, his watercolors plucking the flavorful moments from his travels to Ireland, southern India. He has a fine technique and one of those rarest of modern qualities, whimsy. And now this November art show could be his last. And I wish I had opened his website more often. And here we are, all of us around the table, sending, helping send, or simply watching e-mails. 'It takes forever,' Phyllis says of her recent tire changing at Costco. She had a flat. It is November, and whether or not it is Clint's last November, this is the November we have, all of us, this afternoon, and we are together, and we are here. And the sadness of not being here, that may come. But for now there is this. And this is now.
Clint and Phyllis live in an old, relatively speaking, Palo Alto neighborhood that goes about the business of being upscale in a pleasant sort of way. I have parked my white Ford on their street, facing the wrong way, and return to find that there is no parking ticket. While locking my wheelchair into place I wave at a delivery guy. He seems to be dropping off steaks, his delivery van proclaiming the Sonoma Cattle Company. Hi, the man says unexpectedly. He adds that it's the end of the day and 'we're making all kinds of stupid deals.' I admit to having a thing about deals. I like them. They have a magnetic quality, but at the moment there is an equal and opposite force pushing me away. Something about the ring of 'stupid deals.'
With my van ..door still open, the man shows me his wares. Boxes of frozen steaks and lobster tails and fish fillets. I shake my head and tell him sorry, there's no room in my freezer. He is a black guy, this man who was talking about stupid deals...which do not exist, I tell myself. The man's partner appears from the other side of the delivery van, younger and white. He explains that they have one shipment too many here, excess goods. Thus, in this mini sales drama, the opportunity for a stupid deal. I tell them that it's wonderful, food delivery and all, and do they have a website? Oh, no, the black guy tells me, the website isn't up yet. The side of his van proclaims sonomacattlecompany.com. I slide my door shut.
Janeless sleep is not good sleep, and I rouse myself from slumber the next morning like a drunk in some satirical novel. My eyes are rolling around in my head, my head rolling around in my eyes, and the worthwhileness of the day more elusive than ever. Where is love...a song from 'Oliver!' Where is Jane? Where is Carmen San Diego? Where, or when, does Team Filipina arrive? I know the answer to this one. 8 AM. Which gives me time to dine, in a manner of speaking, on oatcakes and almond butter and honey. I am nothing, if not efficient, this morning, at least when it comes to the using up of food stocks. Jane and I purchased these oatcakes in a Bloomsbury branch of Waitrose last June. They are soon to expire. I feel the same way about myself. But I always do, so discounting this, finish my tea.
Underneath it all, there is the fearful possibility of exercise. The latter is a constant. And so, it seems, is the fear. I have three options. Ambulate, exercycle or rowing machine. Donning slacks and jacket for the opera matinee, I am in no mood for changing bike shoes or rubbing my elbows against the oxidizing paint on the wall by the rowing machine. But walking? I can see myself falling, descending to the sidewalk pavement. I am old and alone and everything is hard, and falling is hard, and walking is hard. And now with Bing, leader of Team Filipina, bustling about the kitchen, I do what must be done. I rise from my wheelchair, slip the Canadian crutch around my forearm, and prepare to schlep about the apartment. I haven't done this in weeks, perhaps months. The wheelchair is so easy. I fear falling on my own. But I am not on my own, Bing being a shout away. I take a step. The precariousness of my office hits me, IKEA bookcases tilting, the carpet seating. I raise my head. Now I am opposite, right on the same level with, a happy portrait of Marlou and me at a bar mitzvah years ago. I remember what it is like to be at this altitude, the level of the walking, head up. A chronic bent neck probably throws me off balance, my British cousin Caroline once told me. All this comes to me at the same time, and I take another step, then another, progressing down the hallway and remembering, even proving, that I can do this. Walking, not falling, balancing, holding my head up in every sense of the word. Making me wonder less about the age that comes with age and more about the fear.
I am running out of purpose, that is the thing. I have gone out of the way to involve myself with younger people, my children's' generation if I'd had any. Saving Caltrain. Fighting the good political fight. Whatever my role in the march of ancestors, historical struggles, all these things wear thin with age. Because there's that other line on the great graph of life, the absurdity line. Justifications and reasons run out. By 80, many a wise person agrees, the prospect of things ending does not sound like such a bad proposition.
Except for Clint. He is 80 and effortlessly goes about disproving my suppositions. I am sitting beside him at his dining room table, watching a laptop as our friend Tom waltzes through YouTube in search of some Janecek. I tell Clint that his beard and abundant white hair have reached an impressively John Muir stage. He shrugs. Clint is more concerned with e-mailing friends about his art show. He has one, opening soon. There is the matter of e-mailing announcements, and this is what's happening. Tom is helping Clint address and send the art show messages, the precise reason unclear, but the larger situation obvious. Melanoma's spread is making things hard. Clint pats his head. He is going to have radiation after all, he says, for his brain tumors. Clint seems impatient about whatever misfunctions emanate from the cancer in his cranial cavity. It's a nuisance, a brain tumor, and he wishes these radiation guys would get to work on it. Clint pats my hand. Nice to see you, he says. Nice to be here seeing Clint seeing me.
Phyllis joins us at the table. She has thought of some other e-mail addresses, even group address lists, that will help spread the word about Clint's art show. What I feel is all the years Clint has been spreading word himself. Visit my website, he says at the end of his e-mails. I have made the occasional visit, but not nearly often enough. For Clint's eye is a keen one, his watercolors plucking the flavorful moments from his travels to Ireland, southern India. He has a fine technique and one of those rarest of modern qualities, whimsy. And now this November art show could be his last. And I wish I had opened his website more often. And here we are, all of us around the table, sending, helping send, or simply watching e-mails. 'It takes forever,' Phyllis says of her recent tire changing at Costco. She had a flat. It is November, and whether or not it is Clint's last November, this is the November we have, all of us, this afternoon, and we are together, and we are here. And the sadness of not being here, that may come. But for now there is this. And this is now.
Clint and Phyllis live in an old, relatively speaking, Palo Alto neighborhood that goes about the business of being upscale in a pleasant sort of way. I have parked my white Ford on their street, facing the wrong way, and return to find that there is no parking ticket. While locking my wheelchair into place I wave at a delivery guy. He seems to be dropping off steaks, his delivery van proclaiming the Sonoma Cattle Company. Hi, the man says unexpectedly. He adds that it's the end of the day and 'we're making all kinds of stupid deals.' I admit to having a thing about deals. I like them. They have a magnetic quality, but at the moment there is an equal and opposite force pushing me away. Something about the ring of 'stupid deals.'
With my van ..door still open, the man shows me his wares. Boxes of frozen steaks and lobster tails and fish fillets. I shake my head and tell him sorry, there's no room in my freezer. He is a black guy, this man who was talking about stupid deals...which do not exist, I tell myself. The man's partner appears from the other side of the delivery van, younger and white. He explains that they have one shipment too many here, excess goods. Thus, in this mini sales drama, the opportunity for a stupid deal. I tell them that it's wonderful, food delivery and all, and do they have a website? Oh, no, the black guy tells me, the website isn't up yet. The side of his van proclaims sonomacattlecompany.com. I slide my door shut.
Janeless sleep is not good sleep, and I rouse myself from slumber the next morning like a drunk in some satirical novel. My eyes are rolling around in my head, my head rolling around in my eyes, and the worthwhileness of the day more elusive than ever. Where is love...a song from 'Oliver!' Where is Jane? Where is Carmen San Diego? Where, or when, does Team Filipina arrive? I know the answer to this one. 8 AM. Which gives me time to dine, in a manner of speaking, on oatcakes and almond butter and honey. I am nothing, if not efficient, this morning, at least when it comes to the using up of food stocks. Jane and I purchased these oatcakes in a Bloomsbury branch of Waitrose last June. They are soon to expire. I feel the same way about myself. But I always do, so discounting this, finish my tea.
Underneath it all, there is the fearful possibility of exercise. The latter is a constant. And so, it seems, is the fear. I have three options. Ambulate, exercycle or rowing machine. Donning slacks and jacket for the opera matinee, I am in no mood for changing bike shoes or rubbing my elbows against the oxidizing paint on the wall by the rowing machine. But walking? I can see myself falling, descending to the sidewalk pavement. I am old and alone and everything is hard, and falling is hard, and walking is hard. And now with Bing, leader of Team Filipina, bustling about the kitchen, I do what must be done. I rise from my wheelchair, slip the Canadian crutch around my forearm, and prepare to schlep about the apartment. I haven't done this in weeks, perhaps months. The wheelchair is so easy. I fear falling on my own. But I am not on my own, Bing being a shout away. I take a step. The precariousness of my office hits me, IKEA bookcases tilting, the carpet seating. I raise my head. Now I am opposite, right on the same level with, a happy portrait of Marlou and me at a bar mitzvah years ago. I remember what it is like to be at this altitude, the level of the walking, head up. A chronic bent neck probably throws me off balance, my British cousin Caroline once told me. All this comes to me at the same time, and I take another step, then another, progressing down the hallway and remembering, even proving, that I can do this. Walking, not falling, balancing, holding my head up in every sense of the word. Making me wonder less about the age that comes with age and more about the fear.
I haven't seen Social Network, the film loosely based on Facebook's founder. And lunching in San Francisco diagonally opposite the Loews where it is currently screening, I had planned to wheel across the street and while away a couple of hours, but I decide no. It would be nice to see the movie, perhaps worthwhile. But not worth my while. The 30 Stockton bus appears almost by magic on Fourth Street, and I take this as a sign. In any case, I take the opportunity to board, rolling into the Caltrain station with seconds to spare.
I have work to do. Yes, without a job. Yet there is work. For me, it is the labor of awareness. Falling back upon my own resources with Jane far away, I have been avoiding the long quiet evenings' potential for introspection. God only knows what one may find. So Caltrain is taking me home. Home to sit and write and brood. All of which have consistently proven to work quite splendidly, however painfully, for me. As for the film, it's time for time. Staring at the walls time. The-passage-of-time time. I just don't want to take in someone else's image of what's happening, however trenchant.
Part of the hangover from Marlou's dying is the Direct TV satellite package, thousands of channels of television, it seems, not to mention TiVo, along digital radio and God knows what else, which probably includes a free listening device from Homeland Security. In moments of pique, or of sanity, I vow to cancel the whole thing. But I can't quite do this, having promised satellite TV in all my ads for the upstairs apartment. At least I could scale back. Fortunately, the Direct TV website assures me that it's 'easier than ever to manage your Direct TV account.'
Sure enough, the screen displays a list of all my stuff, all the content I don't even know exists, let alone watch, and there they are, the four movie channels costing, on their own, an additional $44 per month. How do I get rid of them? I scroll up and down, go back and forth from one part of the website to another. Surely I am missing something. The only apparent way to 'manage my account' is to add, not delete, sports channels, movie channels, bigger this and more expansive that.
I dial Direct TV's 800 number. I tell the operator I want to nix the movies. She transfers me to another operator. Oh, the new woman says, well which movie channels do you watch the most? I have learned how to handle these people. Say nothing. Telephonic nothingness being most interesting, the infinite electronic 'om' hissing just faintly in the staticy background. Hello? Yes, I assure her, I am still here. She asks about the channels, which movies I watch. I ask her when the $44 monthly charge will stop. Naturally, she asks again about which movies I watch. I don't watch any, I tell her. That's why I want my $44 back. It's mildly gratifying, this sort of interaction, while sad at the same time. This woman has a job, employment being in short supply, and she's doing what she has been told to do, has to do, like so many of us. But I am doing what I have to do also. Direct TV has sent me scurrying through its Orwellian website, and here I am, a time-wasting caller. My version of blowback.
Over lunch, Betsy, Marlou's cousin, asks the most simple of questions. In the current climate, how can Democrats enact a national tax cut and, on election day, confront voters who think Obama has done nothing but raise taxes? Really, it is a perfectly sensible line of inquiry. The answer couldn't be simpler or grimmer. The nation is engaged in one endless propaganda war. Mind control is at stake. Truth has been long forgotten. People are scared, poor and getting poorer, and the national disdain for thought is now at its peak, although within a couple of years this peak may look like a valley. And what is a man to do? Take care of his spirit, but not ignore the outside world. For the latter is rapidly encroaching.
It all seems temporary. I wonder how many more years people will be traveling the globe quite so casually. I wonder what happens when the fraying national infrastructure really begins splitting at the seams. I wonder who the down-at-heel people are getting off the bus in Menlo Park, their suitcases old and battered, destination in this affluent town unknown. I wonder where the next Hurricane Katrina will manifest...possibly in something as invisible as drug-resistant tuberculosis. Well, I tell Betsy, these are, as the Chinese proverb says, interesting times. One thing is for sure. It's time to stay alert.
I have work to do. Yes, without a job. Yet there is work. For me, it is the labor of awareness. Falling back upon my own resources with Jane far away, I have been avoiding the long quiet evenings' potential for introspection. God only knows what one may find. So Caltrain is taking me home. Home to sit and write and brood. All of which have consistently proven to work quite splendidly, however painfully, for me. As for the film, it's time for time. Staring at the walls time. The-passage-of-time time. I just don't want to take in someone else's image of what's happening, however trenchant.
Part of the hangover from Marlou's dying is the Direct TV satellite package, thousands of channels of television, it seems, not to mention TiVo, along digital radio and God knows what else, which probably includes a free listening device from Homeland Security. In moments of pique, or of sanity, I vow to cancel the whole thing. But I can't quite do this, having promised satellite TV in all my ads for the upstairs apartment. At least I could scale back. Fortunately, the Direct TV website assures me that it's 'easier than ever to manage your Direct TV account.'
Sure enough, the screen displays a list of all my stuff, all the content I don't even know exists, let alone watch, and there they are, the four movie channels costing, on their own, an additional $44 per month. How do I get rid of them? I scroll up and down, go back and forth from one part of the website to another. Surely I am missing something. The only apparent way to 'manage my account' is to add, not delete, sports channels, movie channels, bigger this and more expansive that.
I dial Direct TV's 800 number. I tell the operator I want to nix the movies. She transfers me to another operator. Oh, the new woman says, well which movie channels do you watch the most? I have learned how to handle these people. Say nothing. Telephonic nothingness being most interesting, the infinite electronic 'om' hissing just faintly in the staticy background. Hello? Yes, I assure her, I am still here. She asks about the channels, which movies I watch. I ask her when the $44 monthly charge will stop. Naturally, she asks again about which movies I watch. I don't watch any, I tell her. That's why I want my $44 back. It's mildly gratifying, this sort of interaction, while sad at the same time. This woman has a job, employment being in short supply, and she's doing what she has been told to do, has to do, like so many of us. But I am doing what I have to do also. Direct TV has sent me scurrying through its Orwellian website, and here I am, a time-wasting caller. My version of blowback.
Over lunch, Betsy, Marlou's cousin, asks the most simple of questions. In the current climate, how can Democrats enact a national tax cut and, on election day, confront voters who think Obama has done nothing but raise taxes? Really, it is a perfectly sensible line of inquiry. The answer couldn't be simpler or grimmer. The nation is engaged in one endless propaganda war. Mind control is at stake. Truth has been long forgotten. People are scared, poor and getting poorer, and the national disdain for thought is now at its peak, although within a couple of years this peak may look like a valley. And what is a man to do? Take care of his spirit, but not ignore the outside world. For the latter is rapidly encroaching.
It all seems temporary. I wonder how many more years people will be traveling the globe quite so casually. I wonder what happens when the fraying national infrastructure really begins splitting at the seams. I wonder who the down-at-heel people are getting off the bus in Menlo Park, their suitcases old and battered, destination in this affluent town unknown. I wonder where the next Hurricane Katrina will manifest...possibly in something as invisible as drug-resistant tuberculosis. Well, I tell Betsy, these are, as the Chinese proverb says, interesting times. One thing is for sure. It's time to stay alert.
Menchu, key member of Team Filipina, warned me about it, and with Jane far away and time abundant, what the hell, why not do a little dermatology? I got an appointment and prepared for medical exam launch. Retired people in Florida, a reliable friend told me, more or less hang out at medical appointments, filling doctors' waiting rooms up and down the sunshine state...because, well, it's something to do. Seeing my dermatologist just because an inexpert member of Team Filipina spots a patch of red on my back? Yes, that and the fact that I have no schedule conflicts. I have, of course, no schedule.
But Caltrain does, and I have decided to make the most of it, while it makes the most of itself. The 10:22 AM southbound has a working life of less than two months, having been deleted from the 2011 schedule. The very thought makes me swoon, my brain pounding with where-is-this-country-heading thoughts. Damned if I'm going to drive. Something tells me this borders on ludicrous, the distance to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation actually bridgeable via wheelchair. Somehow the thought of hoisting myself aboard the white whale that is my Ford...well, it's all too much. No, I'm going to make the 1.1 mile journey via Caltrain.
First I am going to make the distanceless journey via exercycle, my frequent 40-minute ride to nowhere. Which requires the assistance of Menchu, providing us both with a sort of journey, at least, a side trip. While I may not have a schedule, I do have a daily deadline. It's the morning meeting, the 7:30 one, Team Filipina presiding. I do have to be showered and in my wheelchair or getting close, to take advantage of the morning help, the putting on of socks being the featured attraction. On this morning, news of the Republican red tide, vis-à-vis midterm elections, addles my brain long before 6 AM, and I find myself dressing on the edge of my bed when Menchu wanders in. Being male and oblivious and utterly used to people seeing me naked, the reactions of my helpers generally go in one neuron and out the other. But I can tell Menchu isn't happy with this situation, the nude and various body parts exposed to the dawn air, making me talk of impersonal things and hurrying up the trousers process. Once attired, we both relax. Nothing but morning routine until the exercycle.
It's not a snap, the exercycle, although it involves one. Affixing my paralyzed right foot to one of the pedals requires me to wear bicycle shoes, the latter clipping into place. It is a snap, literally, the way the foot clicks onto the pedal. Menchu is having a hard time this morning. I have already snapped my working foot into position, and she is struggling with the paralyzed one. My impatience is frothing. I want to get my day under way, get this fucking exercise over and done with. But there's Menchu, Filipina immigrant who, this morning, acknowledged that she is not allowed to vote in elections like last night's. Yet, she added.
Need to watch out for this primal I-am-stronger than you thing. With everyone. Including the nation's electorate. Personally, I am inclined to be disdainful. Americans keep choosing badly, voting against their own economic interest, emotions, principally fear, sending them in the wrong direction. My brother tells me that Obama is partly responsible these days, being a cerebral guy, perceived as aloof by the extravert American populace. Reminding me that politics begin at home, and Menchu has quite out of the blue volunteered that gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is 'mean to her helpers,' and this potential future vote of a naturalized American is not to be taken for granted.
So, impatience be damned, I am mollified, even somewhat humbled, by the look of fear I see in Menchu's eyes. She is failing, not performing her duties adequately, perhaps to be fired by me, whitey overseer. Not to worry, I tell her. The shoe/exercycle thing drives everyone nuts. I ask her to summon my neighbor, Buffie, who arrives and demonstrates her foot snapping technique. Which is good, for she has one advantage over me, being able to see the bottom of my bicycle shoe. See you tomorrow, I tell Menchu, already speeding off on my day's virtual five miles.
Approaching Caltrain, the 10:22 destined to get me to Palo Alto at 10:25, I am already considering a quick cappuccino at Caffe Doge...though at 10:15 a mystery train is sliding south. Which doesn't look good. I may be bad at quantum mechanics, but I understand the local rail schedule. Something is off. Sure enough, electronic signs reveal a whole bunch of trains delayed. Until, 10 minutes later, an actual live person announces through the loudspeakers that my train has been annulled. And I did not even know we had been married, I want to yell, the lingo of technologists being notoriously immune to nuance. Never mind, for I do have a dermatology appointment, cells to keep before I sleep, now sending me in the direction of El Camino Real, the main avenue from anywhere to anywhere...realizing I may just have to head home, change shoes, even change wheelchairs, hoist myself into the white Ford and, fuck it, drive.
Doesn't San Mateo County Transit have a bus stop somewhere nearby? Ah, yes, there in the suburban distance. I bounce up the sidewalk, stop beneath the transit sign and dial the 800 number. Yes, there is a bus at 10:37. And since I am here, even if the bus isn't quite, what the hell. And it comes, bus #390, lowering its wheelchair lift, raising me in a style pioneered by bulldozers. Knowing what is to come, I assure the driver that there's no need to worry about my sliding around. My wheelchair is locked, I tell her, and we can dispense with the hooks and canvas straps...which she is already tightening into place. She says something about a seatbelt. What, I mumble? Do you want one or don't you want one, she snarls? No, I say.
On the meandering, 10-minute ride to Palo Alto, I consider ways to get this rude driver in a certain amount of trouble. A letter in the Personnel file always being most effective. But nearing Palo Alto, which I seem to have been nearing for days, I reconsider. Something about power relationships, feeling talked down to, and the stratification and wrenching apart of American society. I am glad to be psychologically prepared when the bus pulls into its berth in Palo Alto.
'Wake up,' screams the driver. She yells this again. A couple of ragtag people shuffle off. 'They sleep on the bus,' she complains. Oh, I ask? She tells me that drivers have no choice in the matter, that if someone pays a fare, it's okay to sleep. There is nothing, nothing, she can do about it, but she's tired of it, tired. I let her lower me in the wheelchair lift. There is not much logic in what she says. For it's true that a fare is a fare. And why should anyone complain if a passenger wants to sleep? It's the new America, that's the unpalatable truth. Getting through these times is going to take a lot of everything...certainly patience. As for the red spot on my back, it's red and a spot. Nothing compared with the red spreading across the electoral landscape.
But Caltrain does, and I have decided to make the most of it, while it makes the most of itself. The 10:22 AM southbound has a working life of less than two months, having been deleted from the 2011 schedule. The very thought makes me swoon, my brain pounding with where-is-this-country-heading thoughts. Damned if I'm going to drive. Something tells me this borders on ludicrous, the distance to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation actually bridgeable via wheelchair. Somehow the thought of hoisting myself aboard the white whale that is my Ford...well, it's all too much. No, I'm going to make the 1.1 mile journey via Caltrain.
First I am going to make the distanceless journey via exercycle, my frequent 40-minute ride to nowhere. Which requires the assistance of Menchu, providing us both with a sort of journey, at least, a side trip. While I may not have a schedule, I do have a daily deadline. It's the morning meeting, the 7:30 one, Team Filipina presiding. I do have to be showered and in my wheelchair or getting close, to take advantage of the morning help, the putting on of socks being the featured attraction. On this morning, news of the Republican red tide, vis-à-vis midterm elections, addles my brain long before 6 AM, and I find myself dressing on the edge of my bed when Menchu wanders in. Being male and oblivious and utterly used to people seeing me naked, the reactions of my helpers generally go in one neuron and out the other. But I can tell Menchu isn't happy with this situation, the nude and various body parts exposed to the dawn air, making me talk of impersonal things and hurrying up the trousers process. Once attired, we both relax. Nothing but morning routine until the exercycle.
It's not a snap, the exercycle, although it involves one. Affixing my paralyzed right foot to one of the pedals requires me to wear bicycle shoes, the latter clipping into place. It is a snap, literally, the way the foot clicks onto the pedal. Menchu is having a hard time this morning. I have already snapped my working foot into position, and she is struggling with the paralyzed one. My impatience is frothing. I want to get my day under way, get this fucking exercise over and done with. But there's Menchu, Filipina immigrant who, this morning, acknowledged that she is not allowed to vote in elections like last night's. Yet, she added.
Need to watch out for this primal I-am-stronger than you thing. With everyone. Including the nation's electorate. Personally, I am inclined to be disdainful. Americans keep choosing badly, voting against their own economic interest, emotions, principally fear, sending them in the wrong direction. My brother tells me that Obama is partly responsible these days, being a cerebral guy, perceived as aloof by the extravert American populace. Reminding me that politics begin at home, and Menchu has quite out of the blue volunteered that gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman is 'mean to her helpers,' and this potential future vote of a naturalized American is not to be taken for granted.
So, impatience be damned, I am mollified, even somewhat humbled, by the look of fear I see in Menchu's eyes. She is failing, not performing her duties adequately, perhaps to be fired by me, whitey overseer. Not to worry, I tell her. The shoe/exercycle thing drives everyone nuts. I ask her to summon my neighbor, Buffie, who arrives and demonstrates her foot snapping technique. Which is good, for she has one advantage over me, being able to see the bottom of my bicycle shoe. See you tomorrow, I tell Menchu, already speeding off on my day's virtual five miles.
Approaching Caltrain, the 10:22 destined to get me to Palo Alto at 10:25, I am already considering a quick cappuccino at Caffe Doge...though at 10:15 a mystery train is sliding south. Which doesn't look good. I may be bad at quantum mechanics, but I understand the local rail schedule. Something is off. Sure enough, electronic signs reveal a whole bunch of trains delayed. Until, 10 minutes later, an actual live person announces through the loudspeakers that my train has been annulled. And I did not even know we had been married, I want to yell, the lingo of technologists being notoriously immune to nuance. Never mind, for I do have a dermatology appointment, cells to keep before I sleep, now sending me in the direction of El Camino Real, the main avenue from anywhere to anywhere...realizing I may just have to head home, change shoes, even change wheelchairs, hoist myself into the white Ford and, fuck it, drive.
Doesn't San Mateo County Transit have a bus stop somewhere nearby? Ah, yes, there in the suburban distance. I bounce up the sidewalk, stop beneath the transit sign and dial the 800 number. Yes, there is a bus at 10:37. And since I am here, even if the bus isn't quite, what the hell. And it comes, bus #390, lowering its wheelchair lift, raising me in a style pioneered by bulldozers. Knowing what is to come, I assure the driver that there's no need to worry about my sliding around. My wheelchair is locked, I tell her, and we can dispense with the hooks and canvas straps...which she is already tightening into place. She says something about a seatbelt. What, I mumble? Do you want one or don't you want one, she snarls? No, I say.
On the meandering, 10-minute ride to Palo Alto, I consider ways to get this rude driver in a certain amount of trouble. A letter in the Personnel file always being most effective. But nearing Palo Alto, which I seem to have been nearing for days, I reconsider. Something about power relationships, feeling talked down to, and the stratification and wrenching apart of American society. I am glad to be psychologically prepared when the bus pulls into its berth in Palo Alto.
'Wake up,' screams the driver. She yells this again. A couple of ragtag people shuffle off. 'They sleep on the bus,' she complains. Oh, I ask? She tells me that drivers have no choice in the matter, that if someone pays a fare, it's okay to sleep. There is nothing, nothing, she can do about it, but she's tired of it, tired. I let her lower me in the wheelchair lift. There is not much logic in what she says. For it's true that a fare is a fare. And why should anyone complain if a passenger wants to sleep? It's the new America, that's the unpalatable truth. Getting through these times is going to take a lot of everything...certainly patience. As for the red spot on my back, it's red and a spot. Nothing compared with the red spreading across the electoral landscape.
It's all happening this morning, I mean it really is, and now Paul, my Tuesday volunteer, is accompanying me down Live Oak Ave. Being on a roll, determined to ingest sufficient caffeine while the day is young, I am moving undeterred. Something goes thud, and damned if I will stop, all sorts of things appearing under wheelchair tires that go bump in the night, even in the day, for coffee beckons. Whoops, says Paul. He picks up my purse.
Let us call it that. Purse. Yes, it is the European leather organizer thing with plenty of room for credit cards and passports and several of your best friends. Which replaces the waist pack, a.k.a., belt pack, bum bag, and only in the United States, fanny pack, referring to female genitalia in the rest of the English-speaking world.... And now, yes, I have this continental purse dangling from my wheelchair control. Except that it is not dangling at the moment, but lying behind me in Live Oak Ave., which only Paul has noted, me breezing coffeeward. And damned if that wasn't a close call. Paul hands me the purse, I slip the leather strap back around the wheelchair control where it continues to dangle precariously. Yet there seems no other option. The purse either dangles from my wheelchair control or from my unfeeling fingers. Oy, and onward.
Jane's father has died, and she is 6000 miles away dealing with all that. Our usual, highly effective mutual-support operation is idling in the background, but in the foreground we are occupied with our individual lives. Personally, this comes as a major affront, the knowledge that now and then I must, more or less, take care of myself. Yet as the days pass, the organism adapts and prospers. There is an upside. Self-reliance. Time to tend to things undone. Perspective. And the background anxiety about being alone, being abandoned, being period. It is the latter that accounts for my speediness and distraction. That keeps waking me up too early. That also, giving the devil his due, spurs me to open my life in unaccustomed ways.
My neighbor Buffie was helping me get on my exercycle just last night, when it occurred to me. Turn on my vast, 50-inch television, which goes unwatched for weeks at a time, so Buffie and Avery could enjoy the high-definition views of the World Series. While they watched indoors and I peddled outdoors, the game progressed. I got off the exercycle, fiddled with my shoes for a moment, wheeled inside and found my two neighbors holding their breath for the final pitch. I saw it, saw the decisive strike out in the Giants first-in-54-years victory. Champions. Avery and I rolled outside to whoop and yell into the Menlo Park night. Yea. I was glad to be there, even briefly. The true excitement may have eluded me, but not the sense of something to be shared. Little things. Come inside and watch my TV.
So much is happening even when nothing is happening. Particularly early in the morning, black as night at 7 AM, daylight saving itself for...marriage, maybe. At this hour, the globally-warmed autumn being what it is, I often open my door to let things air out. Musty, humany smells dissipating in the dark morning breeze. And it's wonderful to be so far off the beaten track, my apartment a good 50 meters from the street. Here in sleepy, suburban Menlo Park no one is going to wander in. No one, except for Tom, my landlord who strides up the wheelchair ramp, enters my hallway and begins fiddling with the heater thermostat while I sit nude, getting dressed in my bedroom. He has been worried, he says. Worrying about my thermostat. Oh, God, of course. Foolish to have muttered concerns about the heat, even casually, to Tom. He is my protector. And now, at 7:45 in the morning, he is protecting me from lack of heat.
What even I don't realize is that what largely protects me from lack of heat is lack of sensory neurons. With my spinal cord injury, I get cold before I feel cold. And, yes, I have not been able to turn on the heat several mornings in a row. And it would be a good idea to get the furnace going. But not such a good idea that I want Tom in my hallway, while the rosy-fingered dawn wanders straight out of Homer and up my wheelchair ramp. The problem is we are symbiotic, Tom and I. My mutterings feed his worryings. And my worryings, muttered too quietly to myself, go ignored.
Marlou used to manage the thermostat. The thing formed part of her trousseau. She arrived with an old thermostat from her Sacramento house and promptly installed it in our apartment. One could not blame her. For now the heat was not only adjustable, but programmable. The furnace would click on reliably at 6:30 each morning, go off at 10 every evening. A major upgrade, a permanent farewell to the 50-year-old thermostat that the original builders installed during the Eisenhower Administration. There were minor complications, of course. Daylight Savings Time, being one of them. But Marlou took it upon herself to set the heat up and down, on and off, according to her schedule. I didn't care all that much. The heat was going to follow her schedule anyway, and this would at least save her getting out of bed at odd hours. Marlou was never fond of the cold.
And so the original heat settings, which have gradually drifted off mark with the imprecision of all timing devices, needed to be reset. Damned if I was going to fiddle with the stupid thermostat. Even Marlou used to curse as she twiddled the temperature knob and the time knob and the set program knob. I couldn't be bothered. Until I couldn't be warm, which began to happen this autumn. I would glance at the thermostat, see a refreshing 70° on the dial, decide I wasn't cold and try to forget the whole matter. Except that on some subcutaneous level a certain chill was getting to me. Another glance at the thermostat. Still 70°. Until the display went blank. A sign something had gone wrong. Maybe Tom, being our landlord in all, could help. Which brings us to Tom standing in my hallway, uninvited and unwanted, muttering about the digital display. It said 70°, Tom observes. There is a switch that says 'automatic,' Tom adds. I ignore this. I want him to go.
I want him to go so that I can deal with this myself. To quote Billie Holiday, God bless the child that's got his own. Okay, so Jane is gone, and I'm on my own, I'm a quadriplegic, and I'm tired of schlepping about the planet unassisted. But maybe not all that tired. What the thermostat needs is new batteries, nothing more. Paul slips them into place. Things return to normal.
Dave, my upstairs tenant, wanted a mailbox key. Not exactly unreasonable for someone paying Menlo Park rent. I smiled sheepishly. Sure. Here's the key. Let's give it a try. The bronze mailboxes in my apartment building date from the Bronze Age of Mailboxes. Which was a long time ago. Gosh, Dave says, turning the toy key 360 useless degrees without opening the mailbox. Gosh, indeed. The mailboxes should have been replaced decades ago. The fence behind my vegetable beds has declined from the cracked to the toppling post-Erskine Caldwell stage of things, somewhere between Dogpatch and ghost town. God only knows what holds the wooden slats in place between my wheelchair ramp and the adjoining hedge, unless the termites are holding hands. And if I'm honest, merciless in my calculation, hedges on Tom's side of the shared sidewalk have overgrown a good 40% of the available concrete. He takes good care of me, Tom does. It's just that he doesn't like change.
Change has been happening to me throughout my life. And to be brutally honest, I don't like it either. At least in the abstract, in anticipation. When it descends upon me, flashing its talons, well what can one do but duck or fight back? It's good that the change that comes with Jane's absence runs, like my thermostat, on a timer. Okay, maybe it can be set. Still, there is a time limit. I am in charge here.
I'm not in charge of Caltrain, however, and at midday have serious doubts about the worthwhileness of my trip to their headquarters. It is an unfolding quest, my search for the MTC Discount Card, the much vaunted jewel of the Metropolitan Transit Commission. This will be my third rail trip in pursuit of the plastic ID that opens train doors at half the standard price. Not to mention buses. In fact, more or less every means of public conveyance. The Clippercard, it's called, and every transit agency in the region, even the ferries, plans to adopt it. The same card. Like London Transport's Oyster Card (as in, 'the world is my....). First you get the MTC Discount Card, then the Clippercard.
I still cannot find the receipt for my disabled parking placard, the thing that conflicting local transit websites say I do, and do not, need to get this card. Never mind. I am rolling up to the window at Caltrain headquarters, presenting my completed form and praying. Predictably, one clerk says I need the receipt, the other says I need the placard, but since the photocopied form, of questionable vintage, speaks of the placard...I am home free. While the clerk takes my photo, I chat about the Giants World Series victory. Will the trains to San Francisco tomorrow be packed or what, I tell her. She is going to be there, she tells me, along with one million enthusiasts. I am so buoyed by my successful discount card mission, there's only one thing to say. Sure, of course, wouldn't miss it for the world. I half mean this. It's a group experience, one I'd like to be part of, something unifying that doesn't involve invading a country. Action. Perseverance in the face of the arbitrary and unknown. Action. It's the lesson of the day. Perhaps the lifetime.
Let us call it that. Purse. Yes, it is the European leather organizer thing with plenty of room for credit cards and passports and several of your best friends. Which replaces the waist pack, a.k.a., belt pack, bum bag, and only in the United States, fanny pack, referring to female genitalia in the rest of the English-speaking world.... And now, yes, I have this continental purse dangling from my wheelchair control. Except that it is not dangling at the moment, but lying behind me in Live Oak Ave., which only Paul has noted, me breezing coffeeward. And damned if that wasn't a close call. Paul hands me the purse, I slip the leather strap back around the wheelchair control where it continues to dangle precariously. Yet there seems no other option. The purse either dangles from my wheelchair control or from my unfeeling fingers. Oy, and onward.
Jane's father has died, and she is 6000 miles away dealing with all that. Our usual, highly effective mutual-support operation is idling in the background, but in the foreground we are occupied with our individual lives. Personally, this comes as a major affront, the knowledge that now and then I must, more or less, take care of myself. Yet as the days pass, the organism adapts and prospers. There is an upside. Self-reliance. Time to tend to things undone. Perspective. And the background anxiety about being alone, being abandoned, being period. It is the latter that accounts for my speediness and distraction. That keeps waking me up too early. That also, giving the devil his due, spurs me to open my life in unaccustomed ways.
My neighbor Buffie was helping me get on my exercycle just last night, when it occurred to me. Turn on my vast, 50-inch television, which goes unwatched for weeks at a time, so Buffie and Avery could enjoy the high-definition views of the World Series. While they watched indoors and I peddled outdoors, the game progressed. I got off the exercycle, fiddled with my shoes for a moment, wheeled inside and found my two neighbors holding their breath for the final pitch. I saw it, saw the decisive strike out in the Giants first-in-54-years victory. Champions. Avery and I rolled outside to whoop and yell into the Menlo Park night. Yea. I was glad to be there, even briefly. The true excitement may have eluded me, but not the sense of something to be shared. Little things. Come inside and watch my TV.
So much is happening even when nothing is happening. Particularly early in the morning, black as night at 7 AM, daylight saving itself for...marriage, maybe. At this hour, the globally-warmed autumn being what it is, I often open my door to let things air out. Musty, humany smells dissipating in the dark morning breeze. And it's wonderful to be so far off the beaten track, my apartment a good 50 meters from the street. Here in sleepy, suburban Menlo Park no one is going to wander in. No one, except for Tom, my landlord who strides up the wheelchair ramp, enters my hallway and begins fiddling with the heater thermostat while I sit nude, getting dressed in my bedroom. He has been worried, he says. Worrying about my thermostat. Oh, God, of course. Foolish to have muttered concerns about the heat, even casually, to Tom. He is my protector. And now, at 7:45 in the morning, he is protecting me from lack of heat.
What even I don't realize is that what largely protects me from lack of heat is lack of sensory neurons. With my spinal cord injury, I get cold before I feel cold. And, yes, I have not been able to turn on the heat several mornings in a row. And it would be a good idea to get the furnace going. But not such a good idea that I want Tom in my hallway, while the rosy-fingered dawn wanders straight out of Homer and up my wheelchair ramp. The problem is we are symbiotic, Tom and I. My mutterings feed his worryings. And my worryings, muttered too quietly to myself, go ignored.
Marlou used to manage the thermostat. The thing formed part of her trousseau. She arrived with an old thermostat from her Sacramento house and promptly installed it in our apartment. One could not blame her. For now the heat was not only adjustable, but programmable. The furnace would click on reliably at 6:30 each morning, go off at 10 every evening. A major upgrade, a permanent farewell to the 50-year-old thermostat that the original builders installed during the Eisenhower Administration. There were minor complications, of course. Daylight Savings Time, being one of them. But Marlou took it upon herself to set the heat up and down, on and off, according to her schedule. I didn't care all that much. The heat was going to follow her schedule anyway, and this would at least save her getting out of bed at odd hours. Marlou was never fond of the cold.
And so the original heat settings, which have gradually drifted off mark with the imprecision of all timing devices, needed to be reset. Damned if I was going to fiddle with the stupid thermostat. Even Marlou used to curse as she twiddled the temperature knob and the time knob and the set program knob. I couldn't be bothered. Until I couldn't be warm, which began to happen this autumn. I would glance at the thermostat, see a refreshing 70° on the dial, decide I wasn't cold and try to forget the whole matter. Except that on some subcutaneous level a certain chill was getting to me. Another glance at the thermostat. Still 70°. Until the display went blank. A sign something had gone wrong. Maybe Tom, being our landlord in all, could help. Which brings us to Tom standing in my hallway, uninvited and unwanted, muttering about the digital display. It said 70°, Tom observes. There is a switch that says 'automatic,' Tom adds. I ignore this. I want him to go.
I want him to go so that I can deal with this myself. To quote Billie Holiday, God bless the child that's got his own. Okay, so Jane is gone, and I'm on my own, I'm a quadriplegic, and I'm tired of schlepping about the planet unassisted. But maybe not all that tired. What the thermostat needs is new batteries, nothing more. Paul slips them into place. Things return to normal.
Dave, my upstairs tenant, wanted a mailbox key. Not exactly unreasonable for someone paying Menlo Park rent. I smiled sheepishly. Sure. Here's the key. Let's give it a try. The bronze mailboxes in my apartment building date from the Bronze Age of Mailboxes. Which was a long time ago. Gosh, Dave says, turning the toy key 360 useless degrees without opening the mailbox. Gosh, indeed. The mailboxes should have been replaced decades ago. The fence behind my vegetable beds has declined from the cracked to the toppling post-Erskine Caldwell stage of things, somewhere between Dogpatch and ghost town. God only knows what holds the wooden slats in place between my wheelchair ramp and the adjoining hedge, unless the termites are holding hands. And if I'm honest, merciless in my calculation, hedges on Tom's side of the shared sidewalk have overgrown a good 40% of the available concrete. He takes good care of me, Tom does. It's just that he doesn't like change.
Change has been happening to me throughout my life. And to be brutally honest, I don't like it either. At least in the abstract, in anticipation. When it descends upon me, flashing its talons, well what can one do but duck or fight back? It's good that the change that comes with Jane's absence runs, like my thermostat, on a timer. Okay, maybe it can be set. Still, there is a time limit. I am in charge here.
I'm not in charge of Caltrain, however, and at midday have serious doubts about the worthwhileness of my trip to their headquarters. It is an unfolding quest, my search for the MTC Discount Card, the much vaunted jewel of the Metropolitan Transit Commission. This will be my third rail trip in pursuit of the plastic ID that opens train doors at half the standard price. Not to mention buses. In fact, more or less every means of public conveyance. The Clippercard, it's called, and every transit agency in the region, even the ferries, plans to adopt it. The same card. Like London Transport's Oyster Card (as in, 'the world is my....). First you get the MTC Discount Card, then the Clippercard.
I still cannot find the receipt for my disabled parking placard, the thing that conflicting local transit websites say I do, and do not, need to get this card. Never mind. I am rolling up to the window at Caltrain headquarters, presenting my completed form and praying. Predictably, one clerk says I need the receipt, the other says I need the placard, but since the photocopied form, of questionable vintage, speaks of the placard...I am home free. While the clerk takes my photo, I chat about the Giants World Series victory. Will the trains to San Francisco tomorrow be packed or what, I tell her. She is going to be there, she tells me, along with one million enthusiasts. I am so buoyed by my successful discount card mission, there's only one thing to say. Sure, of course, wouldn't miss it for the world. I half mean this. It's a group experience, one I'd like to be part of, something unifying that doesn't involve invading a country. Action. Perseverance in the face of the arbitrary and unknown. Action. It's the lesson of the day. Perhaps the lifetime.
