February 2011 Archives

The mostly blind woman, all 90 years of her, wanders into the concrete expanse shared by four apartment buildings.  While I watch and row.  It's good to be rowing.  I am returned from Hawaii in parts.  The latter must be reassembled, and there is no hurry.  Sleep is poor.  Perhaps it would help if I turned up the heat at night.  My body does not believe rest is possible under such frigid conditions.  And where are the waves, rarely lapping, generally pounding, endlessly rushing themselves into foam?  Where is this 90-year-old going, that is the current question?  She has macular degeneration, her resident grandson tells me.  Something keeps her wandering, or as she doubtless regards it, walking.  Being practically sightless, the world either dissolved into formlessness or darkness and light, or so I imagine, how does she navigate?  Actually all of these speculations quickly fall away.  They are superseded by another.

What would happen if I slipped off the rowing machine, crunched on the carport concrete and there remained?  Of course, I do slip off the rowing machine on a regular basis.  This is how I get up and off the thing.  Slipping toward the ground would be a nuance.  Unwanted, but only a matter of degree and direction.  The 90-year-old woman and I encounter each other on a regular basis.  She heads in the general direction of the street which necessitates remaining on the concrete footpath, then navigating the dimensionless parking area, and not getting hit by any cars.  Hello, I often say.  This generally takes her aback.  What to say and where to say it?  She stares into the space about a meter to my right.  A muttered word or two.  On one occasion she says 'I see you.'  I always see her, see her S curves staggering to the street.  

On this occasion I want to know what will happen if I wind up on the carport floor.  Help, help, would that be my cry?  And if it was, what would she do?  Stagger in my direction or, confused, stagger off?  It is the next part that worries me, a matter of constant concern.  Falling.  Helpless.  Abandoned.

Well, it is a little precarious, my rising.  At the end of the rowing machine, just behind my head, Tom the landlord has parked a Safeway shopping cart.  Supermarket trolleys are known for having wheels, rolling rather than fixing themselves to the ground.  And when one considers that the rowing machine sits on a wooden platform atop six plastic milk cartons, nothing in the vicinity affords a steady grip.  But grip I do, the Safeway cart.  It not only rolls, and I encourage this, backwards toward the carport wall, but tilts.  I get off the rowing machine by bracing the less paralyzed arm atop the Safeway stainless steel, leaning dangerously forward over my center of gravity and hoping for sufficient knee power and arm strength to get vertical.  Things are a little wonky on the practical level, I concede.  But if I didn't worry about the rowing machine, wouldn't there be something else?

Which, in retrospect, was the marvelous function of Hawaii.  Lulled by the tropics' sun and moon, cradled by the trade winds, sleeping with windows wide open, night after night of this, defenses settle out of sight, fears soar into the night, all to the steady, dissipating beat of waves.  Stripped to the basics, largely inactivated, will draining day by day, the core remains.  Inherently anxious, yet capable of being soothed.  And strangely articulate.  Reaching a certain depth, neuroses more accessible, everything calms, focuses, finds its voice.  And while devoid of propulsion, finds its way.  Peace, I realized in Hawaii, is the way forward.  Not that I will ever be peaceful.  But the surface and the externals need to settle for the inner turbulence to...well, do what ever it has to do.

Sunday at the farmer's market.  Just watch me.  At the Merced orange stand, I ask one of the busy staff to assemble a two pound bag for me.  They have better things to do.  There is a queue, after all.  But I am either shameless or confident, hard to say which.  I like the oranges, having sampled one juicily over my copy of The Nation.  The latter could use a little orange.  And the brussels sprouts from Modesto?  Same thing.  A woman gathers and weighs them for me.  Moss Landing narcissus?  A young braless woman throws me badly off my neuromuscular stride.  While she assembles the flowers, I fail to assemble the cash.  It is there, in my purse, but things are not moving swiftly.  She gives me change, I stuff the bills behind the others, but they won't go.  Never mind.  I zip the stuffed purse shut, bulging bills and all.  What I can't do, and think I should be able to, is to stop dropping oranges under the narcissus stand.  The braless girl, and I decide that is what she is, barely in her 20s, retrieves the oranges.  I am now trying to be efficient, combining bags of brussels sprouts, oranges, flowers into one, and getting angry.  I have been here forever.  I am a fool.  People are watching me, my incompetence revealed.  In the end, the girl helps me assemble three bags into one and hang my shopping from a handle of the wheelchair.  Goodbye, I tell her, somewhat airily.  Who do I think I am?

In the garden I haven't a clue.  So I go there now, staring at my handiwork.  I do not come from a long line of gardeners.  I come from a short line.  When my parents stepped off a hospital ship and out of their uniforms, in Long Beach Harbor one day in 1945, surely neither of them knew anything about seeds or steer manure.  But within a couple of years there they were in upper Sonoran desert domesticity, going agrarian.  My brother has family photos of my father rolling desert rocks into lines to delineate lawns and flower beds.  Growing up with servants, he had never learned to cook.  But he learned to do this, and I have the photos to prove it.  Not only that, but a scar in my abdomen.  I got a five-year-old's hernia helping him roll stones, according to family legend.  Which may actually be true.

I doubt that my mother knew much more about coaxing irises from the desert sands.  Let alone roses.  But this only occurred to me in retrospect.  At the time, all I knew was that one patch of ground in a boulder-lined bed would shortly produce carrots.  I either sprinkled the seeds on the ground myself or watched closely as my mother did.  Either way, damned if they weren't there within a few months, green tops swaying in the arid winds, orange roots emerging crunchy, and once rinsed off by a garden hose, edible.

They must have made it up as they went along, my parents.  And they had this phase of doing things together, creating an oasis of lawns and flowers out of hostile desert scrubland.  It was very quiet around our desert home.  Too quiet, actually.  There were not enough people around, but there was quiet.  There were no people around, my parents excluded.  A chance to go quietly into oneself or go quietly out of one's mind.  It led where it led.  And, it must be said, everyone came out a gardener.

Strange what happens when one slows down. Although this hardly does the Hawaiian experience justice. The cumulative impact of...whatever it is, and one is never certain...renders the subject immobile, defenseless and more than a little bewildered. There may be humor in the phrase Polynesian Paralysis, but not much. As a descriptor, it will do. In fact, it will have to do, for there isn't sufficient energy to find another. Everything being paralyzed. That is the point. If one still believes there is a point. Other than, say, Diamond Head. No sense in overthinking this. Better conserve one's resources.

With life's throttle gradually being reset from slow to stop, dreams erupt. The less active the life, the more active the psyche. Yes, everything outward yawns and inclines toward sleep. While everything inward awakens and flexes. Everything. Unfortunately, everything. I would like to say that my most prominent dream consisted of Polynesian dancing girls. But alas, no. Although things started quite promising. A sort of tropical glade, the greenest of moss everywhere, palm fronds overhead. I'm stepping through the South Seas lushness on a teak walkway, turn to walk out on a small platform to get a better view of a clear watery pool, a pure bubbling spring. I trip and fall into the water. I drop down and down. I know that no one will pull me out. No one realizes what has happened or will react in time...and I am drowning.

Thus my Hawaiian psyche. Why? Well, the dream signals that I must go deep, go dark, go scary. A reminder that I avoid this experience as much as possible. Yet this is the soul's direction, so don't fight it. And since in Hawaii one does not have the strength to fight anything, we go where we go. Some unfinished business. And with reminders of Marlou's death, and therefore death itself, all around.... I sink into the pool. Terrified, alone. But only for this moment.

Get the shpilkes out of your system and maybe you'll have dreams with native girls shaking grass-skirted bottoms. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll have to make do with what you have. Even in the drowning-death-in-paradise dream, there are remarkable touches. The green mossy bank contains enormous, lovely mushrooms. A foot or two tall, fantasy-sized fungi. Idyllic. Right next to death. Might have to accept that.

As for Waikiki...why, oh why, indeed. Why do all of these tourists want to congregate on one small beach? Why do they need to be entertained so aggressively? The latter strikes me profoundly in our few days of tourist activities, Joan and Dick and Nathan and me. We try to find wheelchair-accessible things to do together. And it turns out there are several. The buses ferrying tourists from Waikiki hotels to sunset luaus, for example, can take wheelchairs. Same for the whale watching excursion. We sign up for both.

And both have a certain amount in common. Scale, for one thing. Our particular luau features 600 of my closest tourist friends. The whale watching boat has four decks and can probably accommodate 1000. Welcome to Hawaii. The common thread running through both of these tourist operations is that things keep running. Each pre-luau bus ride includes a nonstop narrative from our 'host.' The latter stands by the bus driver, microphone in hand, telling jokes of a sort, assuring everyone repeatedly that they will have more than enough to eat and drink. And offering tips. For example, if the three drink coupons allotted to each participant should not suffice, head for the gift shop (and what luau could function without a gift shop?) and purchase a super-size souvenir cup...which holds the equivalent of two mai tais, daiquiris or whatever. Just two kinds of salad dressing, we are advised, French and thousand island. Might want to mix the salmon salad with the green salad for enhanced Hawaiian effect.

The bus is fighting its way through Honolulu's rushhour, the airport on one side, the naval base about to appear on the other. And any sane person would want a moment or two to reflect upon the moment or two. But we have more jokes. Many center about leis, the flower garlands so popular in Hawaii. We are going to get well leid. Or get leid twice tonight. And so on.

It may be that this narrative is designed to cover up the last few moments of the ride. The buses snake through the outskirts of an oil refinery. The luau site is sandwiched between industrial yards. No apologies necessary, for this is still Hawaii. The beach is the beach. The ocean the ocean. And the evening's Polynesian show with hula skirts and twirling torches may include a song from Marlon Brando's 1960s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, but never mind. A stunning moon has risen above the premises. And the show's finale is unmistakable. All eight buses in the parking lot start up at the same moment.

As for the whale watching liner, I hadn't expected 'lunch included' to mean an onboard buffet and deck-long dining room. A sandwich would have done nicely. After all, we had come to see the whales. Unfortunately, the latter were hiding from us. Still, I got good offshore views of Honolulu. Plus close-up shots of middle-class Japanese tourists at leisure. Restrained and modest even in antic moments. Beaming faces but only polite applause at announcements from the Japanese tour guide. While trying very hard. One adventurous young woman was wearing a T-shirt clearly purchased in Japan. It bore a slogan that must derive from Japan's equivalent of 'laugh until you pee in your pants.' It's very hard to find good translators, of course. Her T-shirt proclaimed 'Laugh Gladly and Wet Oneself.'

And in Honolulu Harbor, boat ride behind us, even if the whales have been absent the fish are present and accounted for. Peer through the oily port waters and you'll see tropical fish. What look like giant angelfish, yellow and whiskery. Similar ones, but blue with feelers. Right here in the heart of the city. Even here. Hawaii.

There is an axis to this day, a point around which the rest revolves. And it is just outside the bar of the Ilikai Hotel. Being Honolulu, don't think 'bar' in the sense of anything with walls. Having just come from the Hilton Hawaiian Village a block away, I can testify to this principle. Take the lobby. Nothing separates the carpet-and-tile Hilton interior from the sidewalk outside except an arbitrary point at which the ceiling begins and the sky stops. Protection from sun and rain, that's what the vast area offers, a lobby as open as a carport. Every hotel I have ever witnessed in Hawaii is like this. And what has brought me here to this spot on the concrete bar-terrace of the Ilikai?

 

Never mind the mundanities, life's long road has brought me here to witness the Japanese man at the front table of the virtual bar, that portion of concrete designated for drinks and food. He is my age, perhaps slightly older. I believe he is among the many tourists from Japan who flock here in the winter. He is seated on a disabled scooter, one withered leg slightly propped up on a cane. The man may or may not have some food on the adjoining table. His attention is on the book resting on the holder of his handlebars. In my mind, this is not a momentary snapshot, but a panorama of his trip. He is here enjoying the warm weather. He is alone. His days pass like this. Days on holiday. No job or retirement routine. Rising, sensing the tropical air, going outside with his book and maybe a word here or there to other tourists. On holiday, sunny and alone as Aschenbach. No Venice this. That's what my wheelchair exploration around the neighborhood has confirmed. The disabled man on the scooter is old enough to be a polio survivor. I wonder how the disabled, persons who stick out, build lives in a society accustomed to 'hammering down the nail that protrudes.'

 

I regret that I saw no way to interrupt the man's reading, say hello, make an effort at being friendly. He seemed so self-contained. Still, I might have tried. I am sensitive to signals, used to being formal, even if I don't know the Japanese cultural signals. I might have tried. For I have the great luxury of not having anything like the Japanese man's apparent life. I do not holiday alone. Although in moments when I am alone, rejection, grief and loss can easily cloud my vision. Making me think one moment is forever. But it is not.

 

I have the great luxury of being here on a family visit. Extended family. But not overextended. Marlou's parents, acknowledging that I can no longer handle their upstairs condominium on my own, and at 84 they cannot handle me as a house guest, have come here. Well, next door to here. The Prince Hotel. Which before I began wandering the surrounding blocks of Waikiki seemed a rather staid establishment. Now it is simply tasteful. Having gone out in search of a modest lunch, I am now ready to give up my quest and return to the bar of the Prince.

 

Nathan, Marlou's nephew and Dick and Joan's grandson, is visiting from Iowa. This morning the two of us swam in the hotel pool. The place was deserted. At that hour, the shadows of the Prince's 30-story towers fall across the pool terrace. Sun lovers stay away, I suppose. That and the simple reality of this place, that it is a business hotel. The few people in lounge chairs are engrossed in laptops and yellow writing pads. Nathan and I enter the water.

 

Which isn't easy. Something has changed in my musculoskeletal experience. I used to have no trouble grabbing a railing and stepping down gingerly into a swimming pool. No more. Being barefoot, the slow control necessary to remain stable...who knows? Now the whole thing is very difficult. Moreover, paddling around the water is different. My legs tend to spasm more, extending oddly. The one that works seems hard to bend. Still it is a freeing experience, anxieties aside. And when it is over, and I sit dripping on two Prince towels, I can feel something calmer, looser about my body. Nathan and I look at the adjoining hot tub. No way. The steps are too big. This has been enough.

 

Dick is in dialysis. Which happens every other day or so. Somehow kidney failure and congestive heart failure have become intertwined, making his life harder than ever. He weighs less than I do. And that's where he is on this day, at some dialysis center getting a high-speed mechanical blood wash. Which keeps him alive but at some cost. This, I can see, is no substitute for what is normally a steady and slow background function of the body.

 

They are like parents to me, Dick and Joan. This surprises me. But our differences now seem minor. Dick complains about Hawaii's Democratic Party machine. And all I can see is his courage, his ability to bear loss and even his ability to grow. Nathan, who managed to miss his flight from Des Moines and forget his cell phone, would have greatly irritated an earlier Dick. But Dick has acquired patience. Moreover, he has acquired Joan.

 

'Oh,' she said, hearing of Nathan's delayed arrival for this very short trip, 'I once missed a flight from Tallahassee.' She is the embodiment of the Good Mother. On the night of Nathan's arrival, the two of us sit in the lobby of the Waikiki Prince watching taxi after taxi arrive without her grandson. Until, at 11 PM, 1 AM California time, I give up. For some reason, I had only slept for three troubled hours the previous night. Which makes my own participation in this vigil something of an achievement. My secret is that I am taking a cue from Joan. The message of the Good Mother? Yes, Nathan does not have his act together. But at one point or other, none of us do. I can remember being a very turbulent 23-year-old.

 

The next day, in the ultimate test of this newfound enlightenment, I even fulfill my promise to Dick. 'Make sure Nathan dresses properly,' he advised me. An impossible position, managing the attire of a young adult man, but Dick has enough to manage on his own. So, what the hell, Nathan doesn't have much of anything to wear here. Somehow the blue jeans he packed had not quite made it from washer to dryer. So he packed them wet. And speaking as someone who washes the occasional pee stain out of his blue jeans before retiring and dons them slightly wet the next morning...well, enough calling the kettle black. The ultimate sacrifice? Well Dick and Joan are driving Nathan around Oahu on the first day, I actually drive my wheelchair up the street to the vast shopping center, all expensive name brands straight out of The New Yorker. Along with much of the clientele to which one must add the readership of the Asia Times. Not that I am paying any attention. Nathan's slim waist proves hard to fit. There is nothing for it but to journey from one end of the mercantile hellhole to the other. The Gap. I fall into The Gap. And, yes, they have some shorts that fit him. And we are in business. He is dressed as much as any human being needs to be in Hawaii. And today I am a man.

 

For all its exhausting harmonics, Hawaiian music does have a point. It is the same point contained in the Hawaiian sunset, which is not a song or a movie but that thing now hanging outside my hotel window at 6 PM. Something about the tropics in the way the sun crashes into the water. Probably something about the volcanic haze blowing in from the eruption currently under way on the Big Island. And something about the people at their best, a strange gentleness.

 

I could sense it even on the plane's descent, fierce green jungle, black lava cliffs, aqua blue sea tapering into some surprisingly wild point of land not 50 miles from Honolulu Airport. Polynesia. And in the last seconds of the journey, a rounded tropical lagoon, Pacific greenery crowding its lip, a familiar enough feature of the local topography. This one only distinguished by the presence of large gray ships at anchor. Pearl Harbor. What an improbable place to start a war. Trouble in paradise, lots of it. Dick says he has never forgiven the Japanese. And what do I know, having not lived through those days and not being empowered to forgive? As for the man in the disabled scooter reading his book on the lonely hotel terrace, he certainly could not have fought in the war. But he could, just possibly, have been wounded in it. Everything encourages us to forget about loss, certainly everything in Waikiki. Except for those of us who are immersed in it, enrolled in its courses, certain to never graduate.

 

It's the contrast, the fear, the trip.  And so it goes, departure.  For me, things slow down on the eve of a trip.  I give myself the luxury of poring over details.  Giving myself...not a familiar phrase for a person who does not readily cut himself loads of slack.  But so it goes, the hotel reservation.  The communiqué from Messrs. SuperShuttle.  The wheelchair-accessible taxi number.  One document at a time.  Slow.

Slow enough to take a long, lingering moment in the garden.  The cover crop keeps asserting itself, buried leaves of ryegrass rising from the botanical grave.  Rolling by at wheelchair height, this is irresistible.  I grab a weeding tool and shove the grass back under its layer of steer manure.  Funny stuff, steer manure.  It may look like dirt, but it has the lightness of confetti and much the same tendency to scatter.  Scooping a trowel full of it off the garden surface proves elusive.  Piling it atop a rising knot of ryegrass requires a remarkable amount of effort.  I have a copy of The Nation on my lap, an article from salon.com, a rain hat and now one dirty hand.  What did I expect?  You go out on the garden, mess around with dirt, and it's hardly surprising that some of the substance clings to the suburban farmer.  Enough.  One must let go.

Speeding off to Café Borrone, I feel the essence of the thing retreating, my garden and how it has gone so well.  The tiny sprouts that looked risibly vulnerable just two days ago stand sparkling in the raindrops.  They are doing the Dance of the Cotyledons, more than surviving.  They are going to thrive, constituting one of the three waves of lettuce and spinach coming my way.  The happy accident of sprouts started indoors, small plants purchased at the local garden center and more seeds just sown by volunteer Paul yesterday.  I got a few more seconds of my garden's robustness as I wiped the dirt off my hands on the plastic support frame my brother has built around the raised beds.  A temporary measure, he assured me, but I'm not so certain.  

I found enough raindrops hanging from the underside of the frame to clean my hands.  I found enough time to vouch for the turgidity and botanical enthusiasm of the tiniest, most minimal seedlings.  And sensed something else.  That however strange and unconventional and, doubtless, inadvisable, mine is the right approach.  Everything is happy in its inch-thick layer of steer manure.  And the latter is happily decomposing.  A certain amount of nitrogen slowly washing down to the cover crop rotting beneath.  The decomposition on the surface probably creating just enough heat to make a small difference.  The nitrogen sluicing downwards making up for that consumed by the bacteria rotting the cover crop of grass and fava beans.  None of this intended and all of it working out.

And what do I do now in the final squeeze of hours?  There are only so many before departure.  And many of them must be occupied with sleep.  Reading material?  Or something more sensible, like laying out my clothes to pack?  The answer could not be clearer.  Read.  I don't know where my concentration goes, and what preoccupation displaces it.  But when it returns, feed it.  This is my conclusion, a nurturing one.  And good to know that when the chips are down, time running short, this is where my attention goes.  In the right direction.  Toward what is really needed by an addled mind.  The direction of at least six all copies of The New Yorker.  Westbound, toward several unread novels.  Toward Hawaii.

It is a gray day and cold for these parts.  It is a day of Paul, the weekly volunteer.  Who fortunately likes gardening.  He has come to the right place, and at the right time.  The cover crop has been turned under, steer manure spread atop, the spring garden in the ground.  I have had abundant help.  Not that this has been easy.  I missed something in having my highly efficient brother stick lettuce and spinach seedlings in the ground.  Not to mention build an imaginative frame to hold the anti-squirrel netting in place.  As for the seeds, well I can take some credit and pride there.  I raised them on my desk, I did.  They sat in one corner on a wooden dining tray for the last month, sprouting in their black plastic homes.  Some days they were carried outside to bask in the sun.  Others left indoors to stare at my pens and computer printer, inclined and growing toward the desk lamp, which I left on all day.  And now, with me heading off for a week or so in other parts, it's all in the ground.  

Nothing seems right.  The local garden center had only two badly abused packs of spinach seedlings.  Their lettuce was not much better.  And my desk-grown seedlings, well they have barely grown at all.  They have sprouted, gotten slightly beyond the cotyledon stage.  But they are nowhere ready for prime time, agriculturally speaking.  Yet somehow I believe they will make it.  The cool cloudy weather, the rain expected for the next week, all this bodes well.  In this way, gardening is my instructor.  If I tend to be cautiously pessimistic about other things, the opposite seems to be true in my raised beds.  Raised expectations predominate here.  The brussels sprouts being a case in point.  I have yet to successfully raise a single one, yet the second generation is under way, the first having gone to seed, the seeds having gone to my current garden, and the promise of a crop...not yet abandoned.

Abandonment being something of a leitmotif.  As recently as Sunday morning I awoke at 4:45 brooding over my imminent failure as a public event organizer, in this case the monthly public affairs presentation of one Jewish congregation in Palo Alto.  My job being to arrange a speaker, someone from a local transportation and land-use advocacy NGO.  The latter contacted me on Saturday night with some last-minute ideas, none of which seemed to involve a presentation.  So I could just tell the guy would let me down.  Embarrass me in front of my congregation.  Bad judgment on my part....  For I had been uneasy about him.  Deciding, in fact, to give part of the talk myself.  And now I was just certain he was going to bomb.  And I would bomb with him.  No sense in sleeping.  I stared at the ceiling for a couple of hours, gave up and got up.

On the way to the congregation talk I stopped by at the local copy center to duplicate flyers on the morning's topic, the salvation of Caltrain, the local rail line.  Things were already shifting, attitudinally.  For a last-minute glance at my computer screen revealed that the speaker was bringing his own materials.  A good sign.  More than a good sign.  For when it came to the talk...well, it all worked out.  I give my impressions of the train, its qualities and importance.  The NGO guy revealed himself to be a community organizer, endlessly patient with the audience, gently steering things toward possible solutions.  The quality of patience is never strained in some people, always strained in others, like me.  In short, no one had let me down.  The speaker was fine.  The NGO splendid.  It was good that I helped with the speaking.  Good for me.  I wanted to do this, address familiar faces in a comfortable setting.  Get out there, speak up, make my voice heard, wheelchair and all, introversion and all.  A good cooperative effort.  Maybe a little too much paranoia wasted on my part, but I am rusty.  The fact is that I miss working with others.  I do make it a point to have coffee and lunch dates as frequently as possible.  A splendid thing, of course.  But collaborating, meshing with other human beings' strengths and weaknesses, getting things done and on time, building something...together...this seems to be a primal human need.  It is the basis of trust.  Which takes practice for me, and it's hard practicing on my own.

Besides, there is a world out there.  Funny thing about my congregation, they - or we - are getting old.  Not to mention stuck in their - or our - ways.  All of which heightens the cultural tendency toward opinionated disputation.  Our local commuter rail line, its funding always uncertain, is now on the brink of transit destruction.  Things are serious.  Still, the hour was full of personal stories of 'why I tried Caltrain once and will never do so again.'  I couldn't find the ticket machine.  The conductor didn't see me waiting on the bench.  The trains don't connect with buses.  It's too expensive.  Baseball patrons are too rowdy.

Thing is, I am supposed to know these people, for are we not part of the same community?  Or maybe I don't know myself.  After all, I think nothing of a transit trip to San Francisco.  Why not?  Life is short.  Rowdy baseball fans?  Waiting for buses?  Is this the worst that has ever happened to you?  And yet I do know them, the people of my congregation.  They are here, aren't they?  Kvetching, yes, but here.  Not always seeing the big picture, despite Martin Buber's account.  But seeing it enough to be here, know this is important.  And later to write letters, send e-mails and do all the right things.

As for the garden, it's planted.  Out of my hands.  And quite inadvertently, it may just work out.  I realized just a few hours ago.  Seedlings bought at the nursery will become vegetables within a month or two.  Spinach or lettuce, for a start.  Then the seeds I sprouted on my desk...well, I would say two and a half months, maybe three.  And the seeds Paul sowed  morning.  Three months, maybe four.  Unintended succession.  One crop after the next.  Just letting things happen.  Go figure.

'Our family,' I say as Jane's dogs make their morning presence known on my bed.  They behave predictably, Bixby and Bella.  Jane has to lift the former from floor to bed.  Bixby, ever posttraumatic and never more than partially oriented, does not seem in his element atop the sheets.  He tolerates petting, looks around for some sign and eventually leaps off the bed, back to solid ground.  Bella, having spent the night under the covers, yawns and creeps in for a morning lick.  Her tongue use is both expansive and exploratory.  And on the receiving end, Bella's kisses are highly equivocal.  Like being tickled.  One wants to get away and yet doesn't.  It's Jane who is getting away on this particular morning.  Work being what it is.  And I volunteer, quite happily, to oversee the doggies.  Why not?  Some morning company while I write.  Our family.

Jane straps me into the rowing machine, bids goodbye, and I row via iPod across that big square in Cairo where thousands of people have been telling their leader to get lost.  He has finally agreed to do so.  I wonder how I would react to such massive rejection, 300,000 people saying fuck you.  There is a reason why I'm not a ruler.  When the rowing is over, only twenty minutes have elapsed, which makes me feel good.  After all, there are the dogs, now alone, waiting.  No, they have not just been waiting.  One has had a go at unraveling the fringe on my Baluch carpet.  Is this what dogs do when they get bored?  I don't know.  I eyeball the fringe, have some breakfast and decide to push the envelope even further.  After all, it's caffeine time.  I haven't been to Peet's yet, and the day is young.  I'm going.  Baluch carpet destruction or not.  

Why?  I need to do this.  And not just for the coffee.  I need to keep one or all of us calm.  We are going to make this work, the dogs and I.  We are setting the stage, after all.  They both need petting, these dogs.  Each makes this known in very different ways.  Bella unmistakably, straightforwardly, jealously, even intrusively.  It is almost impossible to pet Bixby without Bella's snout intervening between my hand and Bixby's head.  Which explains what is happening now.  The critical problem here is that I have only one working hand.  Which means one dog at a time.  Which raises serious problems, big time competition and unavoidable neglect.  I try to pet them both, switching off.  The best I can do.

At Peet's, Saturday morning is in full swing.  The lines are long.  The crowds restless.  I am doing what I never do, getting a coffee to go.  After all, there are the dogs.  Also, there was yesterday.  Quite disconcerting, it was.  Here in my stomping ground.  The dogs, everything is going to the dogs, for they are the common factor.  We had journeyed here together, Jane, Bixby, Bella and I.  Everyone headed for the park while I went into Peet's across the street to order some coffees to go.  The Peet's clerk was an alert young woman, probably rather speedy away from the counter.  I felt obliged to explain, sort of establish my needs, set things up.  That I was ordering coffees to go.  Take away, as one says in Britain.  Not for here, my established and accustomed way, caffeine in a china cup.  They know me, after all, these people.,  So I was sort of setting things up, explaining that I would like a cardboard carrier, please.  Now, for the actual order....

Except that not being quite as alert as the young woman behind the counter, I hadn't noticed what was happening.  Her fingers flying across the keyboard.  She had quickly entered the two coffees.  That is to say, two cups of standard brewed Peets.  Which was not what I wanted, was it?  I was referring to coffees generically, setting the stage for what was to come next, my nonfat latte for Jane, cappuccino for me - 'coffees' generically, the important thing being that I needed to transport these in a cardboard holder, with lids.  Nonetheless, from one interpretation, this added up to a total of four drinks: two coffees, one latte, one cappuccino.  I shook my head as though to clear it.  And speaking of clearing, that's what needed to be done to the cash register.  Not that it was a cash register, but a computer terminal, the distinction being effectively fuzzed sometime in the last couple of decades.  The young woman had to ask the manager to undo part of the order, the two coffees which I did, and did not, order.  I am old, the thought rose.  I am slow, not disabled, although that is inescapably true.  But more than disabled, old.  My rhythm is slower.  I shall wear my trousers rolled.

Outside, Jane and the dogs waited.  We sat in the sun imbibing our caffeine.  It had not occurred to me that the whole thing might have been a Freudian slip.  I was ordering coffees, coffees for everyone.  All four of us.  Our family.

Some things are excruciatingly small, others just excruciating, and they comprise a typical day.  One is grateful to be observing them, these things.  For one more day.  One more whatever.  Not a grim thought, but a grounded one.

Let us begin at the breakfast table.  I am also grateful to not approach this site alone.  Breakfasts being a particularly dismal experience in the time after Marlou's death.  Now I am not alone.  Jane has prepared cereal, cut up bananas, is having a quick morning read, dogs circulating.  She will be off in moments.  This is what mornings are for.  This is what this particular part of this morning is for, pre-launch.  When she goes to work at a church office and I go to work at an exercycle.  She has been most helpful, the last few moments dominated by the practical, and it comes to me, the urge to give her a morning kiss.  I am reticent for some reason.  Actually, I am pained.  

To reach out is also to reach in.  Someone about to go.  Someone close to me.  As though forever.  As though uncaring.  Which could not be farther from the truth, but the truth is hardly the point.  For everything quickly fills with loss.  Like rainwater in a footprint.  Now it is the most routine of perceptions, the simple fact that a kiss and a hug require a certain level of premeditation.  Taking the glasses off being part of it.  Maneuvering the wheelchair so that Jane is grabbable.  She rises, spoon down with a clink...and it becomes futile, this gesture.  Though it is not.  Nothing is stopping me but the twin awareness of my need for a soothing embrace before separation and the forty-year separation from my own body.  Missed opportunities, poignancy and disappointment.  It takes a full day to grasp this moment.  Late being better than ever.

Grief Avoidance being a full-time occupation, it's hard to say where to go late the same evening when it's time to vacate my apartment for an hour.  Who better to take with me than William Stafford?  Master of things as they are.  The choices boil down to soup at the outdoor café, although indoors at this hour, or the library.  Somehow the latter feels too bleak.  I question this.  On the way, proximity being what it is, I opt for neither.  Starbucks, oy Starbucks, but it is what it is.  Close, in fact, just here.  I roll inside, but the place is closing at 7 PM.  Not meant to be, of course.  So the library.  The most worthy of public institutions, among the last free and collective spaces in the urban landscape.  Good to see Britons rising in revolt against the Conservatives' attempt to shutter the nation's libraries...and not happening in Menlo Park, and not happening over my dead body in any case.  Someone is at the library door.  Have I come for the puppet show?  Pity.  For the library is only now, only open to those attending the children's performance.  Being shut on Thursdays at 6 PM, as the sign on the door explains.  Soup.  I was obviously destined for soup and café society.  They are all against me.  And I don't even know who they are.

Thing is, I really don't want soup.  I want a table.  Soup, or some food order, goes with the territory.  So it's black bean vegetable soup.  Familiar.  Hot enough.  I open William Stafford.  We are in Kansas, in the radio show that was the 1930s.  Those with rectitude are upright as a board.  The rest have fallen.  Morality being either up or down.  Success and failure at right angles.  And the little boy in the middle of all this windswept, snow drifting mystery, Stafford himself, is forgotten.  Only he remembers and remembers constantly.  I turn the page and have a bite of soft black beans, carrots and a crouton with Parmesan cheese.  The Stafford family is drifting toward the next opportunity, the next state.  It is, though no one knows it, the Depression.  The word is never uttered.  How's the book?

This from a waitress.  Blond, round-faced, a kewpie doll effect.  Before I can answer, she continues.  What is it about?  A day later, it occurs to me that I could have done us both a favor and pleaded ignorance.  I don't know.  This being an introduction to poetry, the art of I don't know, not quite yet, the knowing being just there, almost within grasp.  However.  For the present, I feel invaded.  Having been seated at this table in my solitude and vocational melancholy.  Now exposed.  As though I must justify myself.  What I tell the girl is that this is a poetry book.  A famous one.  She persists.  What is my favorite poem?  I am balancing on a knife edge of irritation and gratitude.  The essential thing is to slow down.  She is only mildly inane, this girl, and probably more insightful than 99% of America.  She is trying to be friendly.  

I wonder if the manager has sicced on me.  Go and talk about lonely old man, won't you?  That sort of thing.  Or her own internal manager has urged her to do the same thing.  It is my manager that must flex some muscle at this moment.  The title poem, I say.  The Darkness around Us, one of Stafford's masterpieces.  I say is my favorite.  Perhaps not true, but true enough.  The girl tells me that she likes the cover art, hands praying.  She adds that she will check it out.  Unlikely, I know.  But she has checked me out in some way.  Perhaps concerned that I looked despondent.  My own manager says no, or so what?  And remember, this exchange says as much about her as about me.  Room is at a premium these days, public space shrinking, and grief?  This is a nation of storage lockers, after all.

Thing about the Grief Road, it only moves forward.  Side turns send you nowhere.  You might as well shut your eyes and progress like a train.  Still, there is progress.  This very morning at Sky Nails, once Mai had completed her major tasks, cuticles shown their proper place in the world, I was actually grateful when she got on with the gratuitous, time-consuming, half embarrassing, for-bored-middle-aged-women-only thing of slathering my forearms with lotion and massaging me.  I liked the contact.  Jane would arrive later, having already arrived once, in fact just moments before my manicure.  Some moments are hellos, others are goodbyes, and they are all sweet sorrow.  But at least they are sweet.  And they keep coming.

It is the smallest things that matter.  The apparent big thing, that I am rolling out the door in search of caffeine and breakfast...well, it dominates the wide screen.  But the titles are rolling in one corner.  And their message?  That I feel a little exposed having my oatmeal and cappuccino at a table in Café Borrone.  And too lonely and on display at Peet's, now that I think of it, approaching Draegers Supermarket where, of course, the electric doors welcome me inside.  More than meets the eye.  More than meets the consciousness.  The something that feels vulnerable, embarrassed, and wants to hide...what is it?  A few more mornings like this one, the sun brilliant, California's winter hanging mild upon the land...and all will be revealed.

I feel like being where people know me.  People such as Gilda, currently waitressing at the Draegers coffee bar.  We have such an interesting history, Gilda and I.  She had a way, several years ago, of coming up to my table, putting her arm around me, and all but muttering pobrecito.  Actually, the last bit, I now realize, was my own invention.  She simply put her arm around me, because she is a natural mama.  And because I do not naturally understand the mama thing, and tend to misinterpret it as a put down, something disabled men may be particularly paranoid about, by the way...I began to give her the cold shoulder.  She responded by being rather huffy, and this went on for some time...years, if I am honest...until something in me matured or came to understand.  Then I warmed up, and we have found a natural balance.  The hugs have ceased, but the mama mia attention is back in place, though more cautious in its delivery.  As I say, we are working it out.

On this particular morning, Gilda asks if I would like powdered chocolate on my cappuccino.  Affirmative, of course, and borderline swooning, such as my gratitude for the attention.  I am a poor little lamb who has lost his way...bah, bah, caffeine.  Gilda and I now have a serious discussion concerning oatmeal.  The latter has recently made its way to the menu here, but not entirely satisfactorily, at least from my perspective.  Can one have walnuts, brown sugar, dried fruits, and so on with the oatmeal?  Oh, no, Gilda tells me.  Which tells me to talk to Dave, the store's assistant manager.  Can't say I don't know my way around this town.  The bran muffin is exceptional, I tell Gilda.  She has heated it, unbeckoned.  Which does the heart good, not to mention the digestion.  And where is Sandra, I ask?  This with reference to the Brazilian woman who manages the cheese department.  Not well, Gilda tells me.  Not well, I ask?  Really, not well, Gilda says.  I express great concern for Sandra.  I stifle my concern for the cheese department.  The cappuccino is lovely.

Which about wraps up the out-of-house experience.  Nothing left but the bounty downstairs.  Funny what you find at Draegers on the way to a quart of milk.  French fruit in a bottle with some sort of liqueur, a $40 dose of olive oil, birds of paradise just off the plane.  I ask a passing shopper to hand me a quart of low-fat.  Some crackers.  And damned if I can pass up three packets of fried rice seasoning for only two dollars.  I have never made fried rice on my own, but there's always a first time.  There will, by my reckoning, be not only a first time, but two additional times...all before the shelf life of these packets expires.  My home is becoming a museum.  My desk running a close second.  Things I buy, but don't want.  Things mailed to me that I don't want to deal with.

And, someone reminded me recently, the anniversary of Marlou's death is fast approaching.  Almost two years.  Not that I need to be reminded of the date, but the impact...well, that is another matter.  It arrives quietly, grief does, often in the mornings.  Its summons is subtle, but inescapable.  Sandra isn't well, and no one is, and on this particular day, I would like this acknowledged.  It only takes a moment.  And I am back, back on the world, back at my desk.  And staring at the seedlings.  Once they were hard little things in a packet.  Now they are greening and growing on my desk.  They have been transported outside on sunny days, and this has been something of a mistake.  Some insect keeps eating them.  Unless Jane is taking random bites.  

So much to deal with.  Something possessed me, no other explanation, to sign up for stamps.com.  The latter bears the official seal of the United States Postal Service, although long after the fact, a close reading revealed that they are a licensed vendor of the USPS.  The post office would not rip us off, right?  They are the last bastion of rectitude, the postal guys.  So why not sign up for their thingy?  I mean, printing postage from your own desktop, surely this is not rocket science.  Metered mail has been around for a long time.  Damned if I didn't sign up for something that requires a $16 monthly fee, not for the postage, just for the right to print the latter.  Splendid if one is a small business, I suppose.  But being no business at all and posting an actual letter in a slot at a frequency of five times a year...well, I phoned them up and decided to cut my losses.  They sent me some free coupons.  The latter have to be signed and, you guessed it, stamped with the new stamps.com postage.  In short, a vicious circle.  Elders being preyed upon all the time.  Certainly that isn't me.

What does it mean that last month's curry still clings to my apartment?  What is clinging and where?  Everyone remarks on it, at least those who care to.  Team Filipina.  Volunteer Paul.  Does the past cling to us in the same way?  Or is there nothing metaphorical and message-laden in this at all?  The answer, the only one, comes on a day like this.  A blustery day.  No Winnie the Pooh, just the aftereffects of cardamom, garlic, tumeric and others.  And opening the doors wide when the morning show starts at 6:45, all it takes is a few windy seconds through my apartment to blast some curry molecules off the carpets, drapes and walls.  Grief blows out the door in the same way, or maybe not.  It clings.  That is all we know.

We know even less about soil.  Paul has volunteered to dig holes in my raised beds, to bury the contents of the compost tumbler deep in the earth.  Friday being a big day, after all, when Team Leaf Blowers put down their mechanized implements in favor of mere pitchforks.  I can see it now, the cover crop getting chopped, it's greenery lifted skywards, turned, dropping earthwards.  Destined to decompose one layer above the just buried compost.  Immensely satisfying.  The compost has been composting itself, with nothing removed, for easily eight months.  Eight months of not using the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.  Reducing flow into the plastic rubbish bins in the carport.  Contradicting everything we have been led to believe about garbage, an immensely satisfying liberal, love-the-biosphere moment.  And what a good boy am I.

And there is more.  Every indication, validated by Jane, that I am ascending into Winged Fury less often these days, minor failings pushing fewer buttons.  So maybe today's appointment with dermatological fate, my every-four-months skin check, well if something is wrong, maybe I haven't failed.  Train or van, that is the question.  Whether it is nobler to take Caltrain just over one mile to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation or drive?  I opt for the latter, a balanced choice in a balanced life.  Important to keep my driving skills well honed, keep the van's batteries well charged.  And what a good boy am I.

No, I shouldn't really park next door at the Town & Country Shopping Center.  But I am throwing legal caution to the winds.  Let them see me, the parking authorities.  Fuck authority, I say.  As the van door slides open I can feel that the day is what it was before, blustery.  The wheelchair, being a little big for the lift, needs to be maneuvered into place.  I drive forward, then back.  But, no, the position still is not right.  The wheelchair's stick control must clear the safety bar on the lift.  Another backing, then we are almost there.  Just a little more from the speed control, and the wheelchair will slide into place, shoving the telescoping lift platform out where it should be.  Bam.  Speed set to high I burst forward.  An upward, the wheelchair's front wheels lifting in the air, me tilting back under the safety bar.  I tilt the joystick back, the front wheels drop, and more or less in place, the wheelchair descends.  

Like most terrifying moments, this one is over before it can be fully sensed.  Down, down the lift goes, a reassuring feeling when the safety gate behind me hits the pavement.  Splendid, easy to roll backward now.  But not.  I reverse the joystick and the chair slithers, making a giant S motion on the lift.  In the end, I am almost facing sideways, a strange, inexplicable experience.  Until I see what has happened.  The safety barrier at the front of the lift, the thing my front wheels push against to make the collapsing platform extend...well, it has failed.  In its mission.  The smaller casters of this wheelchair have lifted up and over it, smashing the thing down.  It folds, although why, I am not certain.  Perhaps for moments like these.  Although there has never been a moment like this.

For in its battery-powered push forward, that extra juice needed to extend the lift, back wheels jammed a little too close to its telescoping sides the wheelchair bucked, like a bronco.  And when it dropped, the front wheels fell straight down on the safety barrier.  Which, fortunately folds.  Although I have never folded it before, not in 14 years of using this thing.  Because, it is four inches high, this metal strip at the front edge of the lift.  There is no way a set of wheels could get over it...unless they rise at least five inches in the air.  Which they obviously did.

Do I get a new wheelchair lift?  Or a modern van with a fold-down ramp, as my siblings keep urging?  Maybe the latter.  I am considering this.  But even more, I am considering that my life, maybe any life, is precarious.  Safety devices that prove unsafe.  The impossible proved possible.  Which cuts both ways, of course.  Summing up my neuromuscular survival, my life.

I've got you covered, I want to say.  Or perhaps I want them to say it to me, the fava beans, the cover crop greening and swaying in the 72°F globally warmed February sun.  Who could keep away?  It is the center of this day's universe, my nearest raised bed.  I can feel the agrarian tension.  There is a race on.  An annual one.  Cover crop versus sprouting vegetables.  They've all had an equal go at the sun.  I am watching carefully.  

The spinach sprouts are utterly lacking in common sense.  On a day like this, it is time to wrest one's cotyledons free of the seed husk, get on with botanical destiny.  And grow, you suckers.  There's only a week, no, six days before the garden crew arrives, pitchforks ready, and whatever the fava beans have accomplished, well, that will do.  Greenery buried, roots exposed, little layer of steer manure on top...and damned if I won't have another year's garden.  This time, totally defended.  Let the local mutant squirrels try to get to my lettuce seedlings, and all they will find is bird netting.  I can see them jerking to a halt.  All squirrels do, in fact, is jerk and halt.  That's what you get for being a rodent.  You get something else for being a lettuce.  Culinary opportunity.  The chance to drape your leaves like a ballet dancer over the wooden tongs of my salad bowl.  It's not summertime, or even spring, but the livin' is easy.

Living isn't easy, of course.  That is the point.  If there is a point.  But for now pointlessness will more than do.  'The King's Speech' still occupies me, more than a day after I saw it.  And what I saw in it?  A man with a sort of disability.  Endlessly disappointed in his own efforts to overcome his limitations.  A man whose human connections have grown out of thin soil, and are hard-won, painfully maintained.  In short, a man who keeps persevering, somewhat drained by his own weltschmerz.  His strength praised by others, unacknowledged by himself.  Whose defenses are natural and massive.  Requiring constant effort to dismantle.  As though this film was conceived from me.  Which of course, it wasn't.  It was conceived for all of us.  The king being an archetypal figure, that which is superior in people.  The quiet, painful struggles of a man who had to seem loud and show no pain.

The most maddening part of my days generally comes in the mornings.  My alertness is low, but demands are high.  I keep dropping things, that is the worst.  And so it went this morning, me trying to get done with the bathroom and out to meet the arrival of Team Filipina's morning representative.  The tasks were driving me to madness, as is the usual case.  When I did something unprecedented.  Looking at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror, seeing my hand rise to my face, I watched.  As I gave myself a caress on the cheek.  Just to see what it looked like, something gentle and soothing, however absurd and auto-directed.  Paul caressing Paul.  Utterly embarrassing to observe, let alone describe.  Apparently narcissistic.  Yet just the opposite.  Compassion in self pantomime.  It will do.

                *                *                *

The thing about mornings is that they keep happening.  Take this next one.  It has taken me.  By surprise, actually, but my 5 AM eyes had popped open like, well, Popeye.  And there I was, practically counting the minutes, until I was up, slipping on my trousers and jamming feet into sockless shoes.  And off.  And damned if it wasn't there, the rosy-fingered dawn.  The pinks and orange stark against the sky, something that reminds me of Amtrak trips.  Plucked awake at odd moments in odd places.  And this sky is so complete, the sunrise not growing, but hanging, without shadows without anywhere to go but away.  I stop on Live Oak Avenue, aware that the morning light show is not only temporary but inconveniently timed.  I haven't seen the sun rise in these parts since...no one can say.  My view takes me diagonally across a block.  I see the sign of the Mermaid Motel for the first time from this vantage point.  It's there, whether witnessed or not.  

With breakfast completed by 7:30 AM, Menlo Park's main street seems unprepared for itself.  No one is buying bagels at this hour, the bagel staff still sliding patio furniture into place on the sidewalk.  Parking is plentiful.  The homeless woman, Mad Mary, is not pushing her shopping cart piled high with blankets of the sort movers use to protect pianos.  She simply strolls down the street, belongings somewhere else, and surprisingly spry and fit.  Oh, what a beautiful morning.

It is at home that the beauty fades, of course.  This is a Sunday morning, Jane at work, and I am on my own.  Strange, for having spent so much of a lifetime taking care of myself, now one morning on my own seems a gross injustice.  It is the contrast.  The caressing hand of a woman, then no woman at all.  I have told myself, actually lied to myself, that it's all going to go swimmingly and swiftly.  Parts of it do.  Showered and out in the globally warmed day in record time.  I even get socks on both feet within an acceptable frame.  It all goes wrong with the shoe and leg brace, me asking why, why, why?  I wedge the foot in place, grab the velcro strap and attempt to rotate the thing into position, thereby inadvertently twisting my arch in such a way that nothing is going to enter this shoe.  I stare at the mess.  

Somehow, that is what it is, my limb, almost a foreign object.  Attached to me, yes, but as much an appendage as an integral part.  Heavy, frequently swollen, always paralyzed.  And now not easily jammed into its plastic home, the brace.  I remember.  I place my hand on the side of my face, fingertips awkwardly finding their way into a caress.  It was utterly beyond my mother, this movement, this gesture, this touch.  I am 64 years old.  Almost done reading the Anger Management book.  Almost done with everything, but not quite.

Life plods along, gray and featureless, then smack.  It fires off signals in staccato.  Bam, bam, bam.  So listen up.  Watch closely.  And here's what happened.

I headed for Walgreens.  One of those revelatory choices one just makes in life.  So there it was, Walgreens' back door, the one facing the parking lot.  I had just maneuvered a wheelchair slalom between cars, parked and moving, the distinction inherently vague in a place where vehicles pause and start at irregular intervals.  The back door.  A woman was opening it, a young Asian woman, glancing backward to see if I might need help.  A decision point for both of us.  I continued on, but only as far as the button for the electric door.  In other words, I spurned her human assistance and went for the automated.

Why?  In retrospect, I was not feeling very good about myself at that particular moment.  Something on the abandoned-unwanted end of the human coziness spectrum.  Feeling unworthy of help and, therefore, determined to prove I did not need it anyway.  So, fuck you, young Asian woman with your door opening.  I've got a button.  Button, button, who's got the button?  Damn straight - me.  Once inside being greeted by another fabular figure, the tale unfolding as it was, who asked me, all intimate and sotto voce, if I did not need a bit of help.  The great puppetmaster in the sky spurring the drama through the clever insertion of this balding, clueless man early in the plot...the question groundless, having effortlessly snagged a shopping basket and heading at speed for the paper products aisle.  No, I told him.

I am nothing if not experienced in the ways of Walgreens.  Trader Joe's.  The entire mercantile spectrum of inner Menlo Park.  The trick being to combine them.  Because, the savvy shopper knows, one can purchase in the overlap zone between shops, say, paper towels at Trader Joe's, and milk at Walgreens.  The latter naturally being on the uppermost and out of reach shelf.  Milk, please, I tell the Filipina staff person.  She grabs the chocolate milk.  Milk, I say.  She attempts to put the chocolate milk in my basket.  Milk, I say again, now shaking my head elaborately to convey in several cultures, across continents, that all is not well.  You don't want milk, she asks?  I want milk, I say.  This is some sort of test, something that springs naturally from my discontent.  My way of proving that she is, what...uncaring, self-obsessed, the bad mother?  Yes, approximately.  Never mind, for we finally get it, the milk that is, into my basket.  Oh, milk, she says, as though this is the first time the word has popped up.

I even know Walgreens well enough to be almost certain that packaging my goods, including nine rolls of toilet paper, will prove beyond the capabilities of the pharmacist.  Yes, I have picked up some toe ointment, throwing a bunch of other stuff on the counter.  Two bags, the pharmacist assures me, will have to do.  Fuck it.  I head for the other counter in the front of the store and ask the woman to achieve unification.  The two small bags go into one big one, and I go out the door.  Having achieved much the same thing, two shopping stops in one, the milk being the key.  And what a good boy am I.

I am, in fact, such a good boy, that I decide it's time for an espresso.  Under normal circumstances this means time for Peet's, but that is precisely what I do not have.  Starbucks being right next door to Walgreens...oh, come on, it won't hurt you now and then.  I order a double espresso, silently musing upon how long it has been since I was here.  Wondering how much the cost of an espresso has gone up.  And falling just short of the estimate, the $2.05 price tag requiring just a bit of change...a nickel residing deep in my man's purse, under the snap closure of the coin holder.  Hardly a big deal, except for the big deal on my lap, the two-bags-in-one load of retail crap I just scored next door.  The barista, being terribly helpful, wanders out from behind her station with my espresso.  Which is, to put a fine point on it, a macchiato...the distinction being too slight to note.  But being a corporate establishment, Starbucks' employees pumped full of customer service cant, what ensues is somewhere between gratuitous and embarrassing.  

She tells me that she has put on some extra milk foam to make my macchiato finer than fine.  One could shrug this off, if one could shrug.  I can barely move, that is the problem, so encumbered am I by my shopping, the tissue lightness of one plastic bag enfolding another, my numbed fingers getting tangled in the mess, that the Anger Management Fairy is badly needed but nowhere in sight.  Because what I'm trying to do while this woman holds my cooling espresso is to pay, to extract change from purse, slap bills and coins on counter, and depart.  Sailing homeward, one hand holding the espresso and the wheelchair joystick at the same time.  But I'm not there yet, am I?  My one hand is fumbling with this fucking purse, the young woman's promotional rap long finished, her macchiato long cooled.  And by the time I manage to get $2.50 on the barrelhead...another helpful customer intervenes.  Don't I want my coins?  No.  Obviously not.  Mr. Tip is our friend, I want to tell the guy.  But there is more.  My purse is open.  My heart is not.  But my funds lie fully exposed and vulnerable to both loss and attack.  There just isn't room between the bag of bags on my lap and my chest to get the thing closed.  Would you help, I ask the barista?  She zips the purse shut.

'Paul?'  It is Jack.  One time high school volunteer, public figure, late of the city council.  Big shot, if one believes such things are possible in Menlo Park.  He knows I am a loser, it seems, cutting our conversation short once names are exchanged.  For which I should be grateful, bouncing up the sidewalk toward my home.  Though something about the last half-hour or so has left me depleted.  Not to mention tense.  And a major failure in anger management.  But what the hell.  I am now active, doing things.  On a roll.  Drowning in grief one moment, coming up for air the next.  But finally, for the first time this day, moving.