March 2011 Archives
On my way to the compost tumbler this morning, carrying a bottle of urine.... Why go on? With an opening line like this, is there any need? All that could be said has been said. This is my life. And I have one. Surely, there could be no better evidence than this. I do what needs to be done. Things get done in what Frank Sinatra called 'my way.' And yet the way is not solely mine, for this transmission grows out of a conversation with my 30-year-old volunteer, Paul. Who seems to be making a transition toward the Agrarian Path, after some exposure to my raised beds. And who has not only emptied the compost tumbler, as well as filled it, but noted its most effective constituents. The thing is getting full, Paul pointed out only yesterday, and things decompositional once moved along more swiftly...with a healthy dose of urea. The latter being in abundant and available quantity on the bedside table of this quadriplegic, plastic urinals filling nightly, part of my ever elimination-interrupted sleep. All of which brings me, bearing a small amount of the night's byproducts, rolling out to the plastic compost maker this fine morning, and thinking about my mother.
She had in the last years of her life Alzheimer's, or something like it, living in a series of care facilities, one more caring than its predecessor. And at what must have been about midpoint in her decline, sitting on the bench in front of one of these nursing homes. Waiting. And carrying a large purse. Too large not to escape notice. In fact, seated where she would not escape notice. For my mother was constantly complaining about her confinement, frequently expressing the wish to be elsewhere. And now she was here. I or my brother or his wife or someone, perhaps my mother's sister, either witnessed this moment or its aftermath. When someone from the nursing home spotted my mother a little too far from the front door, waiting with a few too many things, and ushered her inside. 'Busted,' said my mother. Which is what I am recalling this morning. That remarkably she never lost her sense of humor. Despite being burdened with a turbulent mix of sadness, guilt and despair. So much had gone wrong in her not very happy life. And there she was muttering about being busted, a wry sense of her own plight, and apparent acceptance of her own halfhearted efforts at escape.
And why this hits me, and how this hits me, on this particular moment on the way to the locus of accelerated garden rot...is anyone's guess. Except for the mixture of fecundity and things breaking down, growth and old stuff disintegrating. And what of my mother is in me? Much. That helpless and wrenching sense of so much going wrong and me somehow being responsible for it - while not giving up and maintaining a certain humorous pluck in the face of it all. I can see myself in all this. And though it would be nice to lessen the torture burden, the sense of having failed and too much going wrong, the survival spirit is admirable.
And in a process that might be described as knitting together or unraveling, various threads touch and inform each other. For it has been hanging over me, seeping into everything, grief. Apparently springing from the time of year. It seems organic, the organism's approach to the grief of 2 April. It's like garlic. The growth of the plant from cloves into green shoots, then bulbs...follows the clock. Garlic responds to lengthening days. Try planting the stuff after 21 June, and it's not the same. Garlic knows. Grief knows. But what I know, or think I know, is considerably less. It has been bewildering me, the descent into sadness, the apparent reversion to an experience I would like to forget. Sad, everything has become sad. Who could understand?
Turns out my friend Richard, for one. Over lunch in Palo Alto just yesterday I mentioned, half apologetically, that with Marlou's yahrzeit approaching, everything was feeling pained. Sure, he said, launching into his own experience, his mother's recent death, how the anniversary took over, springing to emotional life much as my current mood has. It is good to talk, that is what struck me as Richard and I exchanged our truths. It is good to trust. It is good to have friends and to value and tend to those relationships, just like garlic in the garden. And my emotional turbulence is not a fault, does not have to bewilder me as it did my mother. It is life, and I am not to blame, just to experience and endure. And laugh. No, not all the time, but the fact that this is possible at all, well, that is to be treasured. Honored and treasured.
I have been taking care of business this week. My usual inclination is to let things drift, bills and bureaucracy building up on my desk like sand dunes in Death Valley. But I have been moving things along. Getting my book contract sorted, finalized, even done. Dealing with tax matters. And with grief. Jane and I are going out on Monterey Bay on 2 April, taking a whale watching excursion. On the very same boat from which Marlou's ashes were scattered last May. I feel like I'm doing something, perhaps the only something anyone could do. And things are decomposing and composing and weaving and unraveling...into whatever comes next.
She had in the last years of her life Alzheimer's, or something like it, living in a series of care facilities, one more caring than its predecessor. And at what must have been about midpoint in her decline, sitting on the bench in front of one of these nursing homes. Waiting. And carrying a large purse. Too large not to escape notice. In fact, seated where she would not escape notice. For my mother was constantly complaining about her confinement, frequently expressing the wish to be elsewhere. And now she was here. I or my brother or his wife or someone, perhaps my mother's sister, either witnessed this moment or its aftermath. When someone from the nursing home spotted my mother a little too far from the front door, waiting with a few too many things, and ushered her inside. 'Busted,' said my mother. Which is what I am recalling this morning. That remarkably she never lost her sense of humor. Despite being burdened with a turbulent mix of sadness, guilt and despair. So much had gone wrong in her not very happy life. And there she was muttering about being busted, a wry sense of her own plight, and apparent acceptance of her own halfhearted efforts at escape.
And why this hits me, and how this hits me, on this particular moment on the way to the locus of accelerated garden rot...is anyone's guess. Except for the mixture of fecundity and things breaking down, growth and old stuff disintegrating. And what of my mother is in me? Much. That helpless and wrenching sense of so much going wrong and me somehow being responsible for it - while not giving up and maintaining a certain humorous pluck in the face of it all. I can see myself in all this. And though it would be nice to lessen the torture burden, the sense of having failed and too much going wrong, the survival spirit is admirable.
And in a process that might be described as knitting together or unraveling, various threads touch and inform each other. For it has been hanging over me, seeping into everything, grief. Apparently springing from the time of year. It seems organic, the organism's approach to the grief of 2 April. It's like garlic. The growth of the plant from cloves into green shoots, then bulbs...follows the clock. Garlic responds to lengthening days. Try planting the stuff after 21 June, and it's not the same. Garlic knows. Grief knows. But what I know, or think I know, is considerably less. It has been bewildering me, the descent into sadness, the apparent reversion to an experience I would like to forget. Sad, everything has become sad. Who could understand?
Turns out my friend Richard, for one. Over lunch in Palo Alto just yesterday I mentioned, half apologetically, that with Marlou's yahrzeit approaching, everything was feeling pained. Sure, he said, launching into his own experience, his mother's recent death, how the anniversary took over, springing to emotional life much as my current mood has. It is good to talk, that is what struck me as Richard and I exchanged our truths. It is good to trust. It is good to have friends and to value and tend to those relationships, just like garlic in the garden. And my emotional turbulence is not a fault, does not have to bewilder me as it did my mother. It is life, and I am not to blame, just to experience and endure. And laugh. No, not all the time, but the fact that this is possible at all, well, that is to be treasured. Honored and treasured.
I have been taking care of business this week. My usual inclination is to let things drift, bills and bureaucracy building up on my desk like sand dunes in Death Valley. But I have been moving things along. Getting my book contract sorted, finalized, even done. Dealing with tax matters. And with grief. Jane and I are going out on Monterey Bay on 2 April, taking a whale watching excursion. On the very same boat from which Marlou's ashes were scattered last May. I feel like I'm doing something, perhaps the only something anyone could do. And things are decomposing and composing and weaving and unraveling...into whatever comes next.
One of the benefits of a sound cry is a sound sleep, which held true until about 4:30 AM, after which the eyelid demons pinned themselves open, and all was lost. At least in terms of sleep. As for the sound cry, well, perhaps not sound enough. Mind you, my sister had prepared me rather well for this. The strange effects of Oscar Hammerstein, and I must principally credit him, though the ur-melodies of Richard Rodgers do get under the skin, any skin, any epoque. Even done by amateurs in a pokey little theater in San Jose, getting off to a very weak start with Mrs. Mullins, the merry-go-round's owner, unable to act her way out of a paper bag...the audience, in fact, hoping that one would descend over her head...but nonetheless it was all there in spirit, with a fine orchestra and singers...Carousel. And my sister's warning about how she lost it, her phrase, watching the British version imported by the National Theatre in the mid-1990s, though, I had not paid much attention to her story at the time.
But almost as soon as the lights went down and the sad tale of Liliom begins to unfold, so did I. First sniffling, then tearing, and crying as softly as one could reasonably manage through both acts. Reasonably composed for the intermission, a chat with Jane and our friends outside in the matinee air of early spring, then back to the story and the music and more crying. Liliom being a powerful tale well rooted in Hungarian culture. Whatever. It's the other tale, the one triggered by Marlou's death anniversary, just days away.
The real nature of which is only half conscious. That the reminder is unspeakably sad, that much I know. But how it is sad, in one particular way, and how it creeps up on me, all of this seems unclear. It doesn't matter. That is the thing. The tears come. They falleth as the gentle rain and must be welcomed. And why Carousel? Why not? A tale of love and loss, with the lyric sense of the continuance of things. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to sit and cry. It's that time of year.
Which has me wandering out to the spinach at regular intervals. Harvest time almost. Who knows what these are? Particularly the fast-growing ones with the red stems. All that the local garden center had at a particular moment. And now it's another moment, the red-stemmed spinach with the triangular leaves squeezing out the more sensible variety. Marlou's ashes feeding them all. And another year, followed by another, although one cannot say. Crying for Marlou and her suffering, and for me and for having a caring human ripped from my life, her life, all life...too young, too soon, although all such rendings feel the same now.
At home, Jane gone for a routine night with her own daughter in her own condominium, I feel more solid and aware of my life than in some time. No abandonment, Jane returning in the morning, and when some excess of lights, office heater and computer pushes my 55-year-old wiring over the brink, a circuit breaker darkening half of my apartment, I know what to do. Alert Jane that conditions are what they are, no rescue required, but no e-mail either. Then retire, hall light on, which I used to request as a little boy. For I know there are lights around. My wheelchairs, and I have three, are well supplied with headlights. Electrical circuit to the thermostat is working well. And it is almost April. Just not that cold at night anymore. I will survive.
I will also wake up at 4:30 AM. How do I know it is this hour, the bedside clock being off along with the lights? Well, I don't, until the 5:09 AM Caltrain roars past. It is awfully early, and I have plenty of time, certainly time for more sleep. But there will be none. It is a mystery, what underlies the grief experience. I thrash until 6:30 AM, get up. And there is the day.
But almost as soon as the lights went down and the sad tale of Liliom begins to unfold, so did I. First sniffling, then tearing, and crying as softly as one could reasonably manage through both acts. Reasonably composed for the intermission, a chat with Jane and our friends outside in the matinee air of early spring, then back to the story and the music and more crying. Liliom being a powerful tale well rooted in Hungarian culture. Whatever. It's the other tale, the one triggered by Marlou's death anniversary, just days away.
The real nature of which is only half conscious. That the reminder is unspeakably sad, that much I know. But how it is sad, in one particular way, and how it creeps up on me, all of this seems unclear. It doesn't matter. That is the thing. The tears come. They falleth as the gentle rain and must be welcomed. And why Carousel? Why not? A tale of love and loss, with the lyric sense of the continuance of things. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to sit and cry. It's that time of year.
Which has me wandering out to the spinach at regular intervals. Harvest time almost. Who knows what these are? Particularly the fast-growing ones with the red stems. All that the local garden center had at a particular moment. And now it's another moment, the red-stemmed spinach with the triangular leaves squeezing out the more sensible variety. Marlou's ashes feeding them all. And another year, followed by another, although one cannot say. Crying for Marlou and her suffering, and for me and for having a caring human ripped from my life, her life, all life...too young, too soon, although all such rendings feel the same now.
At home, Jane gone for a routine night with her own daughter in her own condominium, I feel more solid and aware of my life than in some time. No abandonment, Jane returning in the morning, and when some excess of lights, office heater and computer pushes my 55-year-old wiring over the brink, a circuit breaker darkening half of my apartment, I know what to do. Alert Jane that conditions are what they are, no rescue required, but no e-mail either. Then retire, hall light on, which I used to request as a little boy. For I know there are lights around. My wheelchairs, and I have three, are well supplied with headlights. Electrical circuit to the thermostat is working well. And it is almost April. Just not that cold at night anymore. I will survive.
I will also wake up at 4:30 AM. How do I know it is this hour, the bedside clock being off along with the lights? Well, I don't, until the 5:09 AM Caltrain roars past. It is awfully early, and I have plenty of time, certainly time for more sleep. But there will be none. It is a mystery, what underlies the grief experience. I thrash until 6:30 AM, get up. And there is the day.
On a gray day, overcast in more than one sense, Jane at work, me at home...it is where I go, as they say. One of the recurring memories. Not pleasant and one that evokes lingering resentment, a grudge. I bear a grudge. And 'bear' is the word. Because it weighs something, too much in fact. So what is it? Oh, a silly meeting at the local high school, years ago. I was employed there, by the parents' foundation. To help with public relations. It seemed a decent thing. I wanted out of the corporate world, into something more worthwhile. And the whole experience, a year or two, ended badly, and ended here.
I'm not sure why the meeting was called for 8 AM. But the hour had a punitive feel to it. I met with two people from the foundation board. About what? Honestly, I can't recall. They were fed up with me. Actually, I wasn't too happy with them. What had happened over the course of time? The simplest answer is that I found what I wanted to do. This is one of the downfalls of the so-called creative personality. One is drawn strongly to certain things, deflected with equal force from others.
I discovered that one sliver of my job, a small and subordinate portion, held my keen interest. The district, the region's governing body for secondary schools, was building a new civic theatre in conjunction with the town of Menlo Park. The official behind the theater caught me up in his grand vision. Actually, the only thing grand about it was its commonsense solidity. The district assistant superintendent, a man named Ed, had done some phoning around. Philharmonia Baroque, New Century Chamber Orchestra, the then budding Music at Menlo season...all these regional endeavors used the inadequate performance halls at Stanford University or various churches in the area. There was no theater really geared to classical music. No concert venue or recital space adequate to the task. And after some routine due diligence, Ed got the hang of it. Make sure the new Menlo-Atherton theater had good acoustics, real concert-hall sound, and we would be in business. The 'we' meant me, of course, such was my enthusiasm.
So early in the high school PR job, I did some of my best press relations work ever. I made much of the architectural competition for the new hall. The local suburban weekly ran two color pages on the designs. Townspeople flocked to the open house, looking at the architects' models, each wilder than the one before. It was a heady time for someone who was a product of small-town life. As a boy, as soon as my cultural horizons began to expand, something like this became my fantasy. That great people of the theater or concert world would come to Banning, California, population 8500, and perform their dramas or music for the townspeople, everyone and everything uplifted and bettered. There was no getting me out of Banning, but maybe it was possible to get the dead-end, hicksville essence out of Banning. A slightly highbrow version of the circus coming to town.
So in Menlo Park, the new theater had captivated me. High school athletics, the debating competition, this and that award...all these things bored me. I had lunch with Ed. Could I work for him, and the district, on behalf of developing the new theater, building momentum for it, encouraging local support? Ed quietly shook his head over lunch at the crêpe place by the railway station. A gray day, and his 'no' had a winter certainty about it. He was worried for his own job, he told me, the district running low on money. What about quarter time, I asked knowing the answer before the words even emerged. Another quiet shake of the head. Over dinner, I asked Marlou what she thought. Should I quit the high school foundation? Work for the district and its theater for no pay at all? Her answer was the logical one, try to make the school job work, do the theater stuff as much as one could. A sensible approach, but sense is just so...boring.
The high school job gradually deteriorated. The new principal had no interest in the theater, grew openly bored at talk of it...putting us on not the best of courses. I tried working on site. In cash-strapped secondary schools in California conditions are spartan. And this cannot do much for morale. Getting a PC installed in the backroom of the library took some doing. Getting the thing attached to the district network took forever. It took everything she had for the librarian to be civil to me. Soon, I did not like the job. I floundered for some months, and soon I was here, in the library for this 8 AM meeting, purpose and agenda since forgotten. But I do remember the tone, strained. These people didn't like me. I didn't like them. Worse, they were parents. Parent figures. Authorities. Disapproving, punitive...in the end, it came to reliving childhood experience. I should have quit and worked for Ed, for free.
But I didn't. And here I am today thinking that I am a marked man, my incompetence revealed to all, no longer fit to surface in Menlo Park, California. Which may be overstating things ever so slightly.
Possible lessons from my job of four, five, maybe even six years ago? First, it may be hard for an employer to confront a disabled employee. Particularly in a more informal, NGO type setting. For this is one of my lingering gripes. Why didn't these people talk to me if they didn't like my work? Of course, why didn't I talk to them? A bit of blame on both sides. In any case, fallibility. Not to mention eccentricity. The ability to fail, and even fail publicly, that is a high art. One I may just aspire to.
I'm not sure why the meeting was called for 8 AM. But the hour had a punitive feel to it. I met with two people from the foundation board. About what? Honestly, I can't recall. They were fed up with me. Actually, I wasn't too happy with them. What had happened over the course of time? The simplest answer is that I found what I wanted to do. This is one of the downfalls of the so-called creative personality. One is drawn strongly to certain things, deflected with equal force from others.
I discovered that one sliver of my job, a small and subordinate portion, held my keen interest. The district, the region's governing body for secondary schools, was building a new civic theatre in conjunction with the town of Menlo Park. The official behind the theater caught me up in his grand vision. Actually, the only thing grand about it was its commonsense solidity. The district assistant superintendent, a man named Ed, had done some phoning around. Philharmonia Baroque, New Century Chamber Orchestra, the then budding Music at Menlo season...all these regional endeavors used the inadequate performance halls at Stanford University or various churches in the area. There was no theater really geared to classical music. No concert venue or recital space adequate to the task. And after some routine due diligence, Ed got the hang of it. Make sure the new Menlo-Atherton theater had good acoustics, real concert-hall sound, and we would be in business. The 'we' meant me, of course, such was my enthusiasm.
So early in the high school PR job, I did some of my best press relations work ever. I made much of the architectural competition for the new hall. The local suburban weekly ran two color pages on the designs. Townspeople flocked to the open house, looking at the architects' models, each wilder than the one before. It was a heady time for someone who was a product of small-town life. As a boy, as soon as my cultural horizons began to expand, something like this became my fantasy. That great people of the theater or concert world would come to Banning, California, population 8500, and perform their dramas or music for the townspeople, everyone and everything uplifted and bettered. There was no getting me out of Banning, but maybe it was possible to get the dead-end, hicksville essence out of Banning. A slightly highbrow version of the circus coming to town.
So in Menlo Park, the new theater had captivated me. High school athletics, the debating competition, this and that award...all these things bored me. I had lunch with Ed. Could I work for him, and the district, on behalf of developing the new theater, building momentum for it, encouraging local support? Ed quietly shook his head over lunch at the crêpe place by the railway station. A gray day, and his 'no' had a winter certainty about it. He was worried for his own job, he told me, the district running low on money. What about quarter time, I asked knowing the answer before the words even emerged. Another quiet shake of the head. Over dinner, I asked Marlou what she thought. Should I quit the high school foundation? Work for the district and its theater for no pay at all? Her answer was the logical one, try to make the school job work, do the theater stuff as much as one could. A sensible approach, but sense is just so...boring.
The high school job gradually deteriorated. The new principal had no interest in the theater, grew openly bored at talk of it...putting us on not the best of courses. I tried working on site. In cash-strapped secondary schools in California conditions are spartan. And this cannot do much for morale. Getting a PC installed in the backroom of the library took some doing. Getting the thing attached to the district network took forever. It took everything she had for the librarian to be civil to me. Soon, I did not like the job. I floundered for some months, and soon I was here, in the library for this 8 AM meeting, purpose and agenda since forgotten. But I do remember the tone, strained. These people didn't like me. I didn't like them. Worse, they were parents. Parent figures. Authorities. Disapproving, punitive...in the end, it came to reliving childhood experience. I should have quit and worked for Ed, for free.
But I didn't. And here I am today thinking that I am a marked man, my incompetence revealed to all, no longer fit to surface in Menlo Park, California. Which may be overstating things ever so slightly.
Possible lessons from my job of four, five, maybe even six years ago? First, it may be hard for an employer to confront a disabled employee. Particularly in a more informal, NGO type setting. For this is one of my lingering gripes. Why didn't these people talk to me if they didn't like my work? Of course, why didn't I talk to them? A bit of blame on both sides. In any case, fallibility. Not to mention eccentricity. The ability to fail, and even fail publicly, that is a high art. One I may just aspire to.
There is a new certainty about it, that is the thing that is different. And behind that sureness? Something steadfast and the loss of fear. The reason to talk about it with others, not so much insight as sight. There is no other way to see if, and when, something changes. Dialogue provides a reflection, a bounce back, an image. Anyway, whichever way, I can feel it now, as the date draws near...some shift in the recognition of Marlou's death, and by extension, my own.
First, there is the sadness. In the shower this morning, conditions converged...perhaps because things were going well, solitary but well cared for by me...and this very shower chair being the site of yesterday's gesture of caress to my own face...that and the nurturing warmth of the water spray...that it came out, the sadness at seeing someone die so young and in such agony. And the certainty? That it is okay. That something unspeakable can, and has, happened to someone else, that it can, and will, in some form, happen to me. Acceptance. Glib enough a description, yet what else is there?
Emotionally, there seems to be a downshifting from horror to sorrow. From panic to loss. Normalization. Literature provides a good glimpse, a first look at this. Laurie Lee as a small boy staring at the faces of the recently dead in his Gloucestershire village. Everything immediate and physical and down to earth, all of this displacing horror. And perhaps the most strongly counterbalancing experience since Marlou's labored breathing stopped...and the nurse standing at the foot of the bed said matter-of-factly, by way of uninflected information, that there would be no more breaths. It was time to weep or stare in blank puzzlement...and either way, it was time. It was time, then and now, for relief. From pain. That it was over for the onlookers too. There is new certainty in that, as well. And that there is something transcendent in such a moment. What could it be? Clearing a hurdle, that is what currently comes to mind. Leaping over an obstacle between existence and nonexistence? Getting through an ordeal? Shutting up shop, pulling down the shutter, day's work at an end. And what feels transcendent in the defeat of the organism? Maybe that life can exist at all. That the living state can go on for years, even decades, fighting off continuous microbial assault, playing Scrabble, safely crossing streets, oxygenating a billion cells.
I leaned forward in the shower to let the hot water needles penetrate my shoulder muscles. Ping away at the soreness that goes with having a body, even without age and musculoskeletal stress. A moment to slow down and be kind to the organism. Not automatic for me. Perhaps the only antidote to sorrow, gentle mercy. Which brought me back to this final agonizing week two years ago, and also to the small voyage one year ago. Marlou's ashes dissolving as a gray watery cloud in Monterey Bay. In all of life applauding. Sea lions pounding their flippers. Cormorants diving in and out with fish. Pelicans swooping and ladling sea water skywards. The slippery sheen of harbor seals gliding past the boat's hull. Chug, chug, a small contingent of mortals heading not very far west with a plastic box. Most faces weighed down with sadness, until the continuous balancing over the waves and the sparkling of the maritime day and its vast cast of mammal and avian actors moved the story in another direction. And the porpoises. I seem to have been the only one to see them. The sight of the fins curving in formation so perfect in sleekness and in timing, just as the boat turned at the last glimpse of the dissolving Marlou, that it might have been an hallucination. But it wasn't. A vision. Mine.
First, there is the sadness. In the shower this morning, conditions converged...perhaps because things were going well, solitary but well cared for by me...and this very shower chair being the site of yesterday's gesture of caress to my own face...that and the nurturing warmth of the water spray...that it came out, the sadness at seeing someone die so young and in such agony. And the certainty? That it is okay. That something unspeakable can, and has, happened to someone else, that it can, and will, in some form, happen to me. Acceptance. Glib enough a description, yet what else is there?
Emotionally, there seems to be a downshifting from horror to sorrow. From panic to loss. Normalization. Literature provides a good glimpse, a first look at this. Laurie Lee as a small boy staring at the faces of the recently dead in his Gloucestershire village. Everything immediate and physical and down to earth, all of this displacing horror. And perhaps the most strongly counterbalancing experience since Marlou's labored breathing stopped...and the nurse standing at the foot of the bed said matter-of-factly, by way of uninflected information, that there would be no more breaths. It was time to weep or stare in blank puzzlement...and either way, it was time. It was time, then and now, for relief. From pain. That it was over for the onlookers too. There is new certainty in that, as well. And that there is something transcendent in such a moment. What could it be? Clearing a hurdle, that is what currently comes to mind. Leaping over an obstacle between existence and nonexistence? Getting through an ordeal? Shutting up shop, pulling down the shutter, day's work at an end. And what feels transcendent in the defeat of the organism? Maybe that life can exist at all. That the living state can go on for years, even decades, fighting off continuous microbial assault, playing Scrabble, safely crossing streets, oxygenating a billion cells.
I leaned forward in the shower to let the hot water needles penetrate my shoulder muscles. Ping away at the soreness that goes with having a body, even without age and musculoskeletal stress. A moment to slow down and be kind to the organism. Not automatic for me. Perhaps the only antidote to sorrow, gentle mercy. Which brought me back to this final agonizing week two years ago, and also to the small voyage one year ago. Marlou's ashes dissolving as a gray watery cloud in Monterey Bay. In all of life applauding. Sea lions pounding their flippers. Cormorants diving in and out with fish. Pelicans swooping and ladling sea water skywards. The slippery sheen of harbor seals gliding past the boat's hull. Chug, chug, a small contingent of mortals heading not very far west with a plastic box. Most faces weighed down with sadness, until the continuous balancing over the waves and the sparkling of the maritime day and its vast cast of mammal and avian actors moved the story in another direction. And the porpoises. I seem to have been the only one to see them. The sight of the fins curving in formation so perfect in sleekness and in timing, just as the boat turned at the last glimpse of the dissolving Marlou, that it might have been an hallucination. But it wasn't. A vision. Mine.
Sleep had been slow in coming as the night began, and now a sideways glance at the morning clock shows that it is quick in ending. For I have heard the Caltrain sound, the diesel equivalent of a cock crowing, know that it is after 5 AM when the first northbound rumbles by and have known this for at least half an hour, not quite looking the time full in its face. Splendid. 6:35 AM, and the train sound was not the first but the third of the day. I swing my legs off the edge of the bed, gather my strength, then kick the working right foot in the general direction of the Aleutian Islands, do this again until I can coordinate the activity of my stomach muscles into a sit up, me rising to perch at the edge of the mattress, the edge of the day. For a sobering moment I take in the bad news. The glance at the LED clock face was a bit too fast, and myopic morning vision straining sideways has distorted a 5 into a 6. The real time is 5:35 AM. I am up too early, with little strength and no will to do much. Safely making my way through the bathroom and its cold porcelain perils feels like scaling Annapurna.
I really must change the heat settings. It is cool these California mornings. And because the quadriplegic body can get cold before it feels cold, driving muscles to behave oddly and making sensation uncertain, some warmth would do. I flick on the electric heater under my desk, one of the three sent to me in a mistaken UPS volley. And turn on the computer. What could be more modern, that is to say, more taken for granted, than this electronic portal? Everything is here, or will soon appear here, in glowing pixels. My cousin Bob in Paris discussing the former editor of Punch, no less than two e-mails devoted to the topic....for which I am particularly grateful. Life is catching up with Bob, no more being a big macher in economics past age 65 in his current post, so he's catching up with the rest of life. Maybe I will catch up with him in June. But not now. Now it is March, and contrary to reports, the cruelest month.
The rain seems unrelenting, particularly when it gets light enough to see. For the time being, it can only be heard. I make tea and open all doors. Cold stormy air blasts about the apartment. No matter, I am a quadriplegic and immune. I sit in the kitchen in the dawn darkness, staring at my tea. Good intentions are turning to bad in Libya. I stir in some milk. A little cactus sweetener. Back to the computer. It is too early to undertake anything substantial, not to mention the fact that I am too tired. Menchu will arrive in an hour...I have a go at the iPod. It is still broken, and I can't understand why. What have I done to this thing except drag it over the pavement, trolling hundreds of dollars of compact electronics through a puddle or two. So why doesn't it work? I am a consumer and know my rights.
Oddly, and quite incredibly, I managed to resurrect Marlou's old iPod. Not only does the thing function, which is to be expected, having been safely shelved as opposed to immersed and battered. But I learn something new. At 64 years old and 6:55 AM on a sleep-deprived morning, I discover a much easier way to sync the iPod. Forget the way I used to do it. Never mind. It was too tedious for words. This is much better.
Why am I not sleeping? Or why have Jane's slightly altered comings and goings thrown me into such a tizzy? No, that is the judgmental, dismissive account. Now in the gray morning light it almost makes sense. That one relaxes and releases deep into the trusting possibility of a relationship...and there is hell to pay. Old fear, core fear.... Hell to pay, right now, no monthly installments. And speaking of that sort of thing with Menchu just over the horizon, better head for the bathroom...but lo, what star is this? It is a small one, barely visible and almost capable of being ignored. But I know better. Besides, these events are so fearfully compelling that they not only demand attention but the entire marquee. If this heads in its usual direction vision will not quite blur, but go slightly wonky. Then there is the star development, the arcing nebula. At least I'm used to it, this thing that only made sense as a brain tumor the first time or so. Which is actually an optical migraine, and as bathroom events unfold takes its usual course, from a sort of abstract star, a slightly askew line drawing with four or five points, to a jagged neon ring of shark teeth. All pointy and wavering at the edge of my peripheral vision, as I now reach for the toilet paper.
Does this really interfere with anything this morning? No, I have decided, sleep having been badly interfered with already. I shall get on with things, go about the day, as long as life and limb are not threatened. And they aren't. In fact, the shower feels most warm and welcome. Hot needle blasts into my neck and shoulders, enlivening and soothing at the same time. I'm aware that this is the most dangerous room in my house, all tile and porcelain and naked quadriplegic skin and orthopedics. Mixing successfully so far. And none of this can be accomplished without great care, such is the risk. I know this too. It is not my usual or natural bent, being kind and patient with myself at an annoying juncture. But in the face of danger, this is the way, the gentle way. Have a gentle morning, Jane would say. And I remember that thing tried once before standing before the mirror. I raise my hand to give my own face a caress. A soothing touch. Private, even secret, and feeling slightly ridiculous and daring and right.
I even remember something Jane said as we walked home the other day from Trader Joe's. No, we did not both 'walk,' but such distinctions have long fallen away. Jane was talking about presenting the concept of healing in prayer to the more skeptical parishioners. It's really very simple, she said. It's all about love. I swing my legs, for the second time that day, over the edge of something, this time the shower chair, rise from the bathtub...and let the day begin.
True, by 12 noon I am berating myself. Why can't I get the jacket around my shoulders? The rain is pouring, Alan is waiting for me at the local pizza joint. I throw the jacket one way, a one-handed swing over one shoulder. The jacket simply does not cover my back. In fact, I wonder how this has ever been done before. The answer: someone does it for me. I am stupid. Fuck you, I say to myself. Stupid. Stupid. Time is wasting, and I'm behind. I look forward to the moment well I am finally out the door, neuropeptides subsiding. It is raining so hard that crossing one intersection, a small tsunami swamps my shoes. That makes the rain about seven or eight inches deep at this juncture. I am getting soaked, but not yelled at. This is better.
I really must change the heat settings. It is cool these California mornings. And because the quadriplegic body can get cold before it feels cold, driving muscles to behave oddly and making sensation uncertain, some warmth would do. I flick on the electric heater under my desk, one of the three sent to me in a mistaken UPS volley. And turn on the computer. What could be more modern, that is to say, more taken for granted, than this electronic portal? Everything is here, or will soon appear here, in glowing pixels. My cousin Bob in Paris discussing the former editor of Punch, no less than two e-mails devoted to the topic....for which I am particularly grateful. Life is catching up with Bob, no more being a big macher in economics past age 65 in his current post, so he's catching up with the rest of life. Maybe I will catch up with him in June. But not now. Now it is March, and contrary to reports, the cruelest month.
The rain seems unrelenting, particularly when it gets light enough to see. For the time being, it can only be heard. I make tea and open all doors. Cold stormy air blasts about the apartment. No matter, I am a quadriplegic and immune. I sit in the kitchen in the dawn darkness, staring at my tea. Good intentions are turning to bad in Libya. I stir in some milk. A little cactus sweetener. Back to the computer. It is too early to undertake anything substantial, not to mention the fact that I am too tired. Menchu will arrive in an hour...I have a go at the iPod. It is still broken, and I can't understand why. What have I done to this thing except drag it over the pavement, trolling hundreds of dollars of compact electronics through a puddle or two. So why doesn't it work? I am a consumer and know my rights.
Oddly, and quite incredibly, I managed to resurrect Marlou's old iPod. Not only does the thing function, which is to be expected, having been safely shelved as opposed to immersed and battered. But I learn something new. At 64 years old and 6:55 AM on a sleep-deprived morning, I discover a much easier way to sync the iPod. Forget the way I used to do it. Never mind. It was too tedious for words. This is much better.
Why am I not sleeping? Or why have Jane's slightly altered comings and goings thrown me into such a tizzy? No, that is the judgmental, dismissive account. Now in the gray morning light it almost makes sense. That one relaxes and releases deep into the trusting possibility of a relationship...and there is hell to pay. Old fear, core fear.... Hell to pay, right now, no monthly installments. And speaking of that sort of thing with Menchu just over the horizon, better head for the bathroom...but lo, what star is this? It is a small one, barely visible and almost capable of being ignored. But I know better. Besides, these events are so fearfully compelling that they not only demand attention but the entire marquee. If this heads in its usual direction vision will not quite blur, but go slightly wonky. Then there is the star development, the arcing nebula. At least I'm used to it, this thing that only made sense as a brain tumor the first time or so. Which is actually an optical migraine, and as bathroom events unfold takes its usual course, from a sort of abstract star, a slightly askew line drawing with four or five points, to a jagged neon ring of shark teeth. All pointy and wavering at the edge of my peripheral vision, as I now reach for the toilet paper.
Does this really interfere with anything this morning? No, I have decided, sleep having been badly interfered with already. I shall get on with things, go about the day, as long as life and limb are not threatened. And they aren't. In fact, the shower feels most warm and welcome. Hot needle blasts into my neck and shoulders, enlivening and soothing at the same time. I'm aware that this is the most dangerous room in my house, all tile and porcelain and naked quadriplegic skin and orthopedics. Mixing successfully so far. And none of this can be accomplished without great care, such is the risk. I know this too. It is not my usual or natural bent, being kind and patient with myself at an annoying juncture. But in the face of danger, this is the way, the gentle way. Have a gentle morning, Jane would say. And I remember that thing tried once before standing before the mirror. I raise my hand to give my own face a caress. A soothing touch. Private, even secret, and feeling slightly ridiculous and daring and right.
I even remember something Jane said as we walked home the other day from Trader Joe's. No, we did not both 'walk,' but such distinctions have long fallen away. Jane was talking about presenting the concept of healing in prayer to the more skeptical parishioners. It's really very simple, she said. It's all about love. I swing my legs, for the second time that day, over the edge of something, this time the shower chair, rise from the bathtub...and let the day begin.
True, by 12 noon I am berating myself. Why can't I get the jacket around my shoulders? The rain is pouring, Alan is waiting for me at the local pizza joint. I throw the jacket one way, a one-handed swing over one shoulder. The jacket simply does not cover my back. In fact, I wonder how this has ever been done before. The answer: someone does it for me. I am stupid. Fuck you, I say to myself. Stupid. Stupid. Time is wasting, and I'm behind. I look forward to the moment well I am finally out the door, neuropeptides subsiding. It is raining so hard that crossing one intersection, a small tsunami swamps my shoes. That makes the rain about seven or eight inches deep at this juncture. I am getting soaked, but not yelled at. This is better.
I don't mind rolling out to the garden to have a look at things, but I do mind the desperation. It is as though the lettuce and spinach and brussels sprouts, all rain-dappled and sparkling, contained the only life. Jane's comings and goings these days, correspond to the coming and going of my spirits, an unaccustomed level of dependency, embarrassing even to consider. So it is. In the garden? Well, whatever it takes, I say. The garden, a roll to Trader Joe's, Peet's. If life seems to ebb at at home, enlarge the definition of home. Go out, decide out is in, and don't worry. Or so I have decided on this particular day, at this particular moment.
Yesterday, in another moment, Paul the weekly volunteer, and I journeyed into the center of town, stopping at the Romanian hardware store...and lingering. Which I must appreciate about Paul. A 30-year-old guy, dropout from graduate school, affiliate of the Catholic Worker House...the very name of which provides a shot in the arm, echoes of Michael Harrington and all...who is on a spiritual quest, Paul is. How I figure into this odyssey is unclear, but ours is not to reason why. Ours is to pull into the nether reaches of this wildly overcrowded emporium, shelves jammed with one of everything, in search of organic fertilizer for my garden. In spirit, this is a 19th-century general store. There is virtually nothing one cannot buy. A cruet for salad dressing. A battery booster for one's dead car. Nuts and bolts, nuts bowls and deadbolt locks. And, yes, in this nether reach of the place, about one meter of garden fertilizer.
As one expects, the opportunities for specialization are few. It is a miracle that there is any fertilizer at all in between the rat poison and tire irons, and to expect natural, organic garden products, all biotic and everything, well that is a bit much. Thing is, I am armed with Paul. Who has slowed down his external processes enough to crank up the others, the result being a leisurely and attentive rifling through of the uppermost shelf, the one not only beyond my reach but well beyond my sight. Paul extracts a colorful plastic bag, the ingredients revealed to be as organic a fertilizer as one could find anywhere, the likes of ground chicken feathers, eggshells and so on, not to mention bacterial spores...the latest in natural agronomic theory...and the direct result of slowing the pace, reducing the anxious, background activity level. And soon spread across my garden, awaiting the next stage, the most reliable, rain.
Which I used to enjoy. Everything about it, the watering of the earth, the revitalizing of the arid California lands...the annual mystery of whether the nurturing drops would come. They have come, and they are what they are, cool as early spring is cool. The mountains laden with snow. Not to mention the garden. The lettuce would not be as crisp, nor as plentiful, in warmer weather. It is a time of cool bounty, yet for the first time in my life, I keep pricing flights to Palm Springs. Mazatlan. Somewhere fairly close and very warm. A significant shift, and attributable to...age? Or anxiety.
I put on warm socks this morning, or Jane did, but the impulse was mine. A splendid one, particularly for me, kind, gentle and not stoic. Just in case this neurologically numbed quadriplegic body was feeling colder than it knew during my between-rain sorties into Retail Land. Hard to say, but the only measure is home. There is only one. How it feels, how cozy things are or aren't, that is the measure. Much be said for being at home in the home. Snug. Just as the concentration of ground up slaughterhouse components, when spread upon the garden and deftly worked into the soil by Paul, give off a certain acrid, familiar scent. Remembered from my childhood? It has that feel, something that goes way back. Perhaps a pleasant memory of my mother in her element, which was the garden, not the home. And for a moment the possibility of a cozy spring indoors, however anxious, and the desperation to get away from California weather, of all things...good to see that on mute.
It's coming up, Paul observes over coffee and bran muffin in the Boulangerie outlet just up the street. This with reference to the anniversary of Marlou's death. I anticipate this date with conscious relief, for the conventional wisdom is that the whole thing takes about two years. After which, well, things are better, if not over. The prospect of the latter exerts great power. How nice to be over such a thing as grief and what goes with it, the horror, reality shaken down, primitive anger and fear circulating like blood. Yes, I tell him. And how do I feel about it, he asks.
I don't really know, that is the answer. Time has passed. Things are different. It was a garden day, after all, 2 April...the incoming crop providing then, as now, diversion and a reminder of life. Sunny. Late afternoon, and the neighbor's little boy making noise. Of a most refreshing sort, anything for life. And then it was over, and one year later it was still over and still becoming, while Marlou's hard cremated granules poured from a box as her mother watched, supervised. That's enough, she said. The certainty and mystery of this statement still echoing. And now it is another year.
And remembering, or not forgetting, has become optional, an act of will. The fear, Marlou's terror, that is what I remember now. Even then, I thought, well, maybe there is a better, more conscious way to face this. But it was my feeling, not hers. She had the real thing, mine the observer's impression. Fear, the most instructive kind, is optional. There is always distraction. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Until there isn't. Until there is a brick wall across the road. So while the vista seems limitless, the challenge is to remember the wall and its hard, cold surface. Where things end. And let it be, as Paul McCartney once said. Let it be.
Yesterday, in another moment, Paul the weekly volunteer, and I journeyed into the center of town, stopping at the Romanian hardware store...and lingering. Which I must appreciate about Paul. A 30-year-old guy, dropout from graduate school, affiliate of the Catholic Worker House...the very name of which provides a shot in the arm, echoes of Michael Harrington and all...who is on a spiritual quest, Paul is. How I figure into this odyssey is unclear, but ours is not to reason why. Ours is to pull into the nether reaches of this wildly overcrowded emporium, shelves jammed with one of everything, in search of organic fertilizer for my garden. In spirit, this is a 19th-century general store. There is virtually nothing one cannot buy. A cruet for salad dressing. A battery booster for one's dead car. Nuts and bolts, nuts bowls and deadbolt locks. And, yes, in this nether reach of the place, about one meter of garden fertilizer.
As one expects, the opportunities for specialization are few. It is a miracle that there is any fertilizer at all in between the rat poison and tire irons, and to expect natural, organic garden products, all biotic and everything, well that is a bit much. Thing is, I am armed with Paul. Who has slowed down his external processes enough to crank up the others, the result being a leisurely and attentive rifling through of the uppermost shelf, the one not only beyond my reach but well beyond my sight. Paul extracts a colorful plastic bag, the ingredients revealed to be as organic a fertilizer as one could find anywhere, the likes of ground chicken feathers, eggshells and so on, not to mention bacterial spores...the latest in natural agronomic theory...and the direct result of slowing the pace, reducing the anxious, background activity level. And soon spread across my garden, awaiting the next stage, the most reliable, rain.
Which I used to enjoy. Everything about it, the watering of the earth, the revitalizing of the arid California lands...the annual mystery of whether the nurturing drops would come. They have come, and they are what they are, cool as early spring is cool. The mountains laden with snow. Not to mention the garden. The lettuce would not be as crisp, nor as plentiful, in warmer weather. It is a time of cool bounty, yet for the first time in my life, I keep pricing flights to Palm Springs. Mazatlan. Somewhere fairly close and very warm. A significant shift, and attributable to...age? Or anxiety.
I put on warm socks this morning, or Jane did, but the impulse was mine. A splendid one, particularly for me, kind, gentle and not stoic. Just in case this neurologically numbed quadriplegic body was feeling colder than it knew during my between-rain sorties into Retail Land. Hard to say, but the only measure is home. There is only one. How it feels, how cozy things are or aren't, that is the measure. Much be said for being at home in the home. Snug. Just as the concentration of ground up slaughterhouse components, when spread upon the garden and deftly worked into the soil by Paul, give off a certain acrid, familiar scent. Remembered from my childhood? It has that feel, something that goes way back. Perhaps a pleasant memory of my mother in her element, which was the garden, not the home. And for a moment the possibility of a cozy spring indoors, however anxious, and the desperation to get away from California weather, of all things...good to see that on mute.
It's coming up, Paul observes over coffee and bran muffin in the Boulangerie outlet just up the street. This with reference to the anniversary of Marlou's death. I anticipate this date with conscious relief, for the conventional wisdom is that the whole thing takes about two years. After which, well, things are better, if not over. The prospect of the latter exerts great power. How nice to be over such a thing as grief and what goes with it, the horror, reality shaken down, primitive anger and fear circulating like blood. Yes, I tell him. And how do I feel about it, he asks.
I don't really know, that is the answer. Time has passed. Things are different. It was a garden day, after all, 2 April...the incoming crop providing then, as now, diversion and a reminder of life. Sunny. Late afternoon, and the neighbor's little boy making noise. Of a most refreshing sort, anything for life. And then it was over, and one year later it was still over and still becoming, while Marlou's hard cremated granules poured from a box as her mother watched, supervised. That's enough, she said. The certainty and mystery of this statement still echoing. And now it is another year.
And remembering, or not forgetting, has become optional, an act of will. The fear, Marlou's terror, that is what I remember now. Even then, I thought, well, maybe there is a better, more conscious way to face this. But it was my feeling, not hers. She had the real thing, mine the observer's impression. Fear, the most instructive kind, is optional. There is always distraction. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Until there isn't. Until there is a brick wall across the road. So while the vista seems limitless, the challenge is to remember the wall and its hard, cold surface. Where things end. And let it be, as Paul McCartney once said. Let it be.
The man who lives upstairs, my tenant if I think about it, is a fortysomething professional with three very cute little girls...who visit frequently but live elsewhere, divorce apparently under way. I am curious. What is happening to this couple? How can a family get in such a state? I long for a happy outcome here, hoping to hear that the man is moving out, moving back to what is really his home. But there are no such developments. Instead, we simply say hello. I wave to him from my rowing machine in the mornings. Sometimes, if he is getting the little girls off to school, I wave to them as well. I know their names. The whole thing seems heartbreaking beyond words. In particular, I wonder how the man felt just moments ago when he and the girls pounded downstairs, car doors opening and closing, goodbye and off to school, and thanks to someone for picking them up. Presumably the wife.
The man walked back upstairs, his footsteps slower this time. But not funereal. There was no hurry now. And perhaps not even that much sadness.... For this is me, echoes of family disintegration a permanent part of my emotional landscape. And when I think about it, a much bleaker and brutal situation that anything happening upstairs. The parents are cooperating, after all. The kids come and go without apparent strife. Politeness prevails. And there is some lesson here, the difference between losses then and losses now. Because they certainly keep coming, the things taken from us. What goes away. Must be relinquished. Gone.
My painful awareness of loss could be said to grow out of experience, but I have had more than one experience, after all. Very strange to be at a very rich and satisfying stage of life and so easily sucked into a fixation on what has been taken. For the scales of justice, if there are any, have balanced out quite nicely, one could say. A strong, loving relationship at the center of my life. Good work, done for my own enjoyment. Enough money to live on. 'Tis a gift to be simple. Even free.
Not free of anxiety, though. That drives much of my psychic action these days, any days. Jane comes by for a relaxing, low-key Sunday afternoon. Then goes home...and although she will return in the morning...and plans call for another pleasant day together.... Well, never mind. Never has the mind functioned so poorly, it seems...in view of the panicky emptiness that opens inside me. Get a grip, one would say. No, better, get into it. Let the self get sucked into the scary void. Which, of course, is not what happens. So many distractions around the apartment. This to do. That to read. Bit of news. Time for bed...with the ceiling alive with night energy. Things buzzing, sleep elusive.
Over lunch the next day I find myself seated next to Jane, finally enjoying some time together at a restaurant, and oddly silent. It takes time to reconnect, at least for me. Time to get over whatever sense of being left by my parents at a motorway stop somewhere south of Fresno...whatever fantasy one can muster in less than 18 hours.... Never mind. This has nothing to do with external reality. It has to do, of course, with history. And speaking of history, Jane is talking about Northumberland. How when we go to Britain in June to scatter her father's ashes in the far north of the country, not far from the Scottish border, she wants to collect his remains herself, not have them shipped. He enjoyed the journey, she says, from southwest to northeast. She wants to do this herself. It almost makes me cry, this degree of personal concern, hands on even with life off.
It is not a dream, for I do not really fall asleep during our afternoon nap. But I fantasize my mother knocking on my door after some long estrangement. She wants to make up. She wants my attention. I am busy and established and have no need of her. She does not, cannot, pull out my affections. Nothing like this ever occurred in reality. I don't know who either of these people really is, the fantasized me or the imagined mother. We are products of anger, both of us, in this daydream. Immune, closed to each other. And hurt.
The poignancy of Jane's concern for her father, a man of broken dreams, I gather, the relationship not always easy...the particular mixture of love and loss, my secretly churning emotions in a restaurant...this seems excessive. One should have it more together. And what is the 'it?' Reality, I think. Not the muted version. Certainly not what I grew up with. Sometimes sad and sometimes joyous and sometimes angry, but far from dead. More to come. More to fear. And more to eat. Jane is cooking away. She has tried to open one of those classic glass canisters with a stopper that seem to line good kitchen shelves. The thing won't move. Jane is convinced that the grain inside is barley. I am convinced that she is right, but not in this century. The barley, I believe, hails from the last. I have a lot of old stuff around. It is time for new barley. And with that I set off to do what a man must. Shop.
The man walked back upstairs, his footsteps slower this time. But not funereal. There was no hurry now. And perhaps not even that much sadness.... For this is me, echoes of family disintegration a permanent part of my emotional landscape. And when I think about it, a much bleaker and brutal situation that anything happening upstairs. The parents are cooperating, after all. The kids come and go without apparent strife. Politeness prevails. And there is some lesson here, the difference between losses then and losses now. Because they certainly keep coming, the things taken from us. What goes away. Must be relinquished. Gone.
My painful awareness of loss could be said to grow out of experience, but I have had more than one experience, after all. Very strange to be at a very rich and satisfying stage of life and so easily sucked into a fixation on what has been taken. For the scales of justice, if there are any, have balanced out quite nicely, one could say. A strong, loving relationship at the center of my life. Good work, done for my own enjoyment. Enough money to live on. 'Tis a gift to be simple. Even free.
Not free of anxiety, though. That drives much of my psychic action these days, any days. Jane comes by for a relaxing, low-key Sunday afternoon. Then goes home...and although she will return in the morning...and plans call for another pleasant day together.... Well, never mind. Never has the mind functioned so poorly, it seems...in view of the panicky emptiness that opens inside me. Get a grip, one would say. No, better, get into it. Let the self get sucked into the scary void. Which, of course, is not what happens. So many distractions around the apartment. This to do. That to read. Bit of news. Time for bed...with the ceiling alive with night energy. Things buzzing, sleep elusive.
Over lunch the next day I find myself seated next to Jane, finally enjoying some time together at a restaurant, and oddly silent. It takes time to reconnect, at least for me. Time to get over whatever sense of being left by my parents at a motorway stop somewhere south of Fresno...whatever fantasy one can muster in less than 18 hours.... Never mind. This has nothing to do with external reality. It has to do, of course, with history. And speaking of history, Jane is talking about Northumberland. How when we go to Britain in June to scatter her father's ashes in the far north of the country, not far from the Scottish border, she wants to collect his remains herself, not have them shipped. He enjoyed the journey, she says, from southwest to northeast. She wants to do this herself. It almost makes me cry, this degree of personal concern, hands on even with life off.
It is not a dream, for I do not really fall asleep during our afternoon nap. But I fantasize my mother knocking on my door after some long estrangement. She wants to make up. She wants my attention. I am busy and established and have no need of her. She does not, cannot, pull out my affections. Nothing like this ever occurred in reality. I don't know who either of these people really is, the fantasized me or the imagined mother. We are products of anger, both of us, in this daydream. Immune, closed to each other. And hurt.
The poignancy of Jane's concern for her father, a man of broken dreams, I gather, the relationship not always easy...the particular mixture of love and loss, my secretly churning emotions in a restaurant...this seems excessive. One should have it more together. And what is the 'it?' Reality, I think. Not the muted version. Certainly not what I grew up with. Sometimes sad and sometimes joyous and sometimes angry, but far from dead. More to come. More to fear. And more to eat. Jane is cooking away. She has tried to open one of those classic glass canisters with a stopper that seem to line good kitchen shelves. The thing won't move. Jane is convinced that the grain inside is barley. I am convinced that she is right, but not in this century. The barley, I believe, hails from the last. I have a lot of old stuff around. It is time for new barley. And with that I set off to do what a man must. Shop.
It is another world, illness, and ever so often one needs to enter it. Just for the contrast. Just to remember. I have suspicions about the origins of this cold, the one that has just about run its viral course. But no doubts about the experience. It saps core energies. It drains the solar plexus. One becomes less and, for me, remembers one is less anyway. Getting up in the morning, standing, beginning the bathroom day...where is it, the normal life force? And maybe it was never so normal. Strain and effort predominate. Things are slightly woozy. Alertness, whatever one can muster, will make all the difference. The margin is slim, very slim. But it is anyway, and over time it will get slimmer, so enjoy the preview.
I'm always convinced of the psychogenic roots of my illnesses. I get cold when I am emotionally worn down. Or so I believe. Who really knows? What is more certain is the psychological similarity of illness and emotional states. What about getting cold in the meteorological sense? Whose fault is that? The fact is that conditions inner and outer meld. Pleasantly or unpleasantly. Take my iPod. No, don't take it. I want it, that is the point. In fact, I treasure it, that is the real point. If there is a point, and that is the other point that there often isn't. Anyway.
If the rainfall for this part of California could be, let us say, annualized...well, precipitation totals would beat the UK, rival the American Northwest, and so on. For a good five months of the year, any year, in most of California it does not rain at all. So rainfall is squeezed into seven months. At the moment the squeeze is on, with forecasts looking at more than a week of downpours. And that's what they are, huge meteorological dumps, clouds liquefying at a rate that stupefies. Yesterday, with one of these tropical-style deluges under way, inbound raindrops hit the planter-box by my front door with the force of small ballistic missiles...and splatter by splatter, managed to knock a fair amount of mud onto my wheelchair ramp. A reminder not to not look so puzzled next time you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, half doubting that the sliver of water a mile below could really have carved such a vastness. Anyway.
Things were mending. My cold was petering out. Jane had spent the night, her cold still very much in force, and after some days apart and some misunderstandings, we were sharing a pleasant morning. She was writing her sermon. I was heading out the door to work off spilkes on my exercycle. And the skies were fearsome. Which has become routine over the last week or so. So, no big deal, I had the essentials, feet held up in the air while I blasted down the wheelchair ramp, iPod on my lap. A dash through the monsoon, then under the sheltering carport roof, Jane right behind. Something was dragging. Probably one of my seatbelts. Really should use those things, cinch myself into the chair when I go dashing about. Can't be bothered.
I leaned over to pick up the dragging belt, puzzled and impatient...for nothing was dangling on the left or the right. Here, Jane said, handing me the iPod. I had been dragging the thing on its headset line...down the plywood wheelchair ramp, into the monsoon, crossing the driveway, over and through puddles. It was on, the iPod. It was playing poetry from some collection I must have had for 10 years. All I could think of, particularly as I began to fiddle with the controls, was my dying father, how his sightless eyes darted back and forth for hours under final instructions from his brain tumor. Thus the final moments of my iPod.
Stupid. How could I be so stupid? This muttered aloud as Jane snapped my bike shoes into the machine. One foot sliding quite nicely into place, the other almost as quickly. Very well, I was now ready for the hour-long neuromuscular assault on my systems, cardiovascular and otherwise. Jane paused, looked pensive. You're not stupid, she said...and it upsets me when you say that. Goodbye kiss. And there I was, left with whatever this was.
And whatever it was, or is, gets to the heart of things healed and broken in my life. By now, it's a reflex, getting angry at myself for losing control of things like the iPod. Automatic, stimulus-response, on the level of Pavlov's dogs. I know better. Intellectually...such a reflexive habit of self blame derives from my childhood experience...life out of control, parents about to divorce, family exploding despite my 12-year-old's interventions, everything intensified by living neighborless at the end of a desert road. Too much, and too much for years, and the best way to feel not so panicked...I can do something, control this, nudge the father this way, coax the mother that way.... Unless I fail, in which case, it's my fault and still a possibility for correction. A madness. Now a deeply ingrained, reflexive one. How could anyone be so stupid?
Jane loves me, this sinking in as I ramped up from the '1' setting on the exercycle, preparing to shift to that quadriplegic high spot, the formidable muscle-draining '2.' Jane loves me. It's a battle to hang onto this knowledge at times. And it's no substitute, one might say, for going easy on myself. But with the rain pounding, and an hour of hard leg pushing ahead, I had to say one thing. Jane loves me, and it's a start.
I'm always convinced of the psychogenic roots of my illnesses. I get cold when I am emotionally worn down. Or so I believe. Who really knows? What is more certain is the psychological similarity of illness and emotional states. What about getting cold in the meteorological sense? Whose fault is that? The fact is that conditions inner and outer meld. Pleasantly or unpleasantly. Take my iPod. No, don't take it. I want it, that is the point. In fact, I treasure it, that is the real point. If there is a point, and that is the other point that there often isn't. Anyway.
If the rainfall for this part of California could be, let us say, annualized...well, precipitation totals would beat the UK, rival the American Northwest, and so on. For a good five months of the year, any year, in most of California it does not rain at all. So rainfall is squeezed into seven months. At the moment the squeeze is on, with forecasts looking at more than a week of downpours. And that's what they are, huge meteorological dumps, clouds liquefying at a rate that stupefies. Yesterday, with one of these tropical-style deluges under way, inbound raindrops hit the planter-box by my front door with the force of small ballistic missiles...and splatter by splatter, managed to knock a fair amount of mud onto my wheelchair ramp. A reminder not to not look so puzzled next time you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, half doubting that the sliver of water a mile below could really have carved such a vastness. Anyway.
Things were mending. My cold was petering out. Jane had spent the night, her cold still very much in force, and after some days apart and some misunderstandings, we were sharing a pleasant morning. She was writing her sermon. I was heading out the door to work off spilkes on my exercycle. And the skies were fearsome. Which has become routine over the last week or so. So, no big deal, I had the essentials, feet held up in the air while I blasted down the wheelchair ramp, iPod on my lap. A dash through the monsoon, then under the sheltering carport roof, Jane right behind. Something was dragging. Probably one of my seatbelts. Really should use those things, cinch myself into the chair when I go dashing about. Can't be bothered.
I leaned over to pick up the dragging belt, puzzled and impatient...for nothing was dangling on the left or the right. Here, Jane said, handing me the iPod. I had been dragging the thing on its headset line...down the plywood wheelchair ramp, into the monsoon, crossing the driveway, over and through puddles. It was on, the iPod. It was playing poetry from some collection I must have had for 10 years. All I could think of, particularly as I began to fiddle with the controls, was my dying father, how his sightless eyes darted back and forth for hours under final instructions from his brain tumor. Thus the final moments of my iPod.
Stupid. How could I be so stupid? This muttered aloud as Jane snapped my bike shoes into the machine. One foot sliding quite nicely into place, the other almost as quickly. Very well, I was now ready for the hour-long neuromuscular assault on my systems, cardiovascular and otherwise. Jane paused, looked pensive. You're not stupid, she said...and it upsets me when you say that. Goodbye kiss. And there I was, left with whatever this was.
And whatever it was, or is, gets to the heart of things healed and broken in my life. By now, it's a reflex, getting angry at myself for losing control of things like the iPod. Automatic, stimulus-response, on the level of Pavlov's dogs. I know better. Intellectually...such a reflexive habit of self blame derives from my childhood experience...life out of control, parents about to divorce, family exploding despite my 12-year-old's interventions, everything intensified by living neighborless at the end of a desert road. Too much, and too much for years, and the best way to feel not so panicked...I can do something, control this, nudge the father this way, coax the mother that way.... Unless I fail, in which case, it's my fault and still a possibility for correction. A madness. Now a deeply ingrained, reflexive one. How could anyone be so stupid?
Jane loves me, this sinking in as I ramped up from the '1' setting on the exercycle, preparing to shift to that quadriplegic high spot, the formidable muscle-draining '2.' Jane loves me. It's a battle to hang onto this knowledge at times. And it's no substitute, one might say, for going easy on myself. But with the rain pounding, and an hour of hard leg pushing ahead, I had to say one thing. Jane loves me, and it's a start.
It is a daily battle, part of the long war, and today I seem to be winning. So, let us declare victory, however temporary, and rejoice in the enemy's defeat. That no one has yet identified the enemy, well, that is no matter.
What is the matter...with me, that is? I rarely doubt that something is fundamentally amiss. I mean, I've always been a screwup. Don't all signs point that way? Isn't it obvious?
It would be a considerable step forward for me to see the whole thing as a struggle. No real victory, no real loss, just an endless dynamic. Following my moods and inner turmoil is much like current reports, in mid-March, 2011, of Moammar Gadhafi's civil war. No one knows what's happening, and it's dangerous to be a reporter.
Take this week. In fact, keep it. Jane is tied up with Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, not to mention what I think is called Maundy Thursday...and for all I know, Abstemious Friday. Point being, she's short on time, not to mention attention span, which a wise person would remember has nothing to do with me. But who is a wise person? Show me one, and I'll show him the door.
That's because at this point in life, the wisdom balance is shifting, however inexplicably, in my direction. I didn't plan it this way, honest. Yes, I'm quite used to seeking wisdom outside me. And there seems to be less and less of it around. Help, as opposed to wisdom, remains essential, but the arrows are all pointing at me. Ask him, they say. He's the guy. Yeah, yeah, send him the bill. He could do with your help. But he might as well stumble forward on his own. Forward is forward. Not forearmed, forewarned or foreskined. Just dead ahead, progress.
Last time I looked, no one was giving me awards for publishing, nonetheless I am heading towards a book. By late summer or early autumn. And the reality is that there is a lot to know, a lot to learn. What is a contract? Is it something to fear? Will there be a hidden clause in which I undertake to bankroll the expansion of the Panama Canal? Or just pay for the copy editor's root canal? I mean, since I trust the publisher implicitly, and have good reason for this, how much spilkes is necessary?
Maybe a little. So I happily threw a little money at California Lawyers for the Arts. An NGO, eminently deserving. And the lawyer? Well, he turns out to be a veteran in the publishing field. He is a help, asking me the right questions, getting me to think in the right direction. How wise of me. Maybe I know what I'm doing. Mazel tov.
Publicity for the book. Why doesn't the publisher take care of this? Because, I've been around the block enough times, however dreamily, to know that this is how things are. And how does one find a good publicist? By talking to established writers. Of whom I know a couple. Why? Well, maybe I am a writer myself? Established? Established as what? After 30 years in Menlo Park, surely I do not have to establish residency. Literary stature? Oh, forget it. Some people enjoy reading me, and that's enough. As for a 'good' publicity person, haven't I worked in the PR industry? Don't I know that the field attracts a spectrum of humanity, ranging from communicators to sociopaths? PR, as one agency account executive told me, is not a hand job. It must be something else. At 64, with a certain amount of experience, even some amount of intuition, perhaps I can find that something else. And if I don't? At least I can pull the plug. And pull it quickly.
There are reasons to be wary of the PR industry. In 1982, one day after work I watched the PR firm that employed me battle a rival firm in softball. Someone from my team yelled at the opposing agency, 'bill 'em, bill 'em.' I got the idea. Reasons to be wary, but no cause for paranoia. Self-promotion is not exactly my strongest suit. Self-criticism is. Might as well get a little help. A little help from my friends. Friends who are 'established' enough to be of substantial help. Practical help. Which, practically speaking, I need. Meanwhile, good things happen, not because of me, or in spite of me. In fact, it's not about me at all.
What is the matter...with me, that is? I rarely doubt that something is fundamentally amiss. I mean, I've always been a screwup. Don't all signs point that way? Isn't it obvious?
It would be a considerable step forward for me to see the whole thing as a struggle. No real victory, no real loss, just an endless dynamic. Following my moods and inner turmoil is much like current reports, in mid-March, 2011, of Moammar Gadhafi's civil war. No one knows what's happening, and it's dangerous to be a reporter.
Take this week. In fact, keep it. Jane is tied up with Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, not to mention what I think is called Maundy Thursday...and for all I know, Abstemious Friday. Point being, she's short on time, not to mention attention span, which a wise person would remember has nothing to do with me. But who is a wise person? Show me one, and I'll show him the door.
That's because at this point in life, the wisdom balance is shifting, however inexplicably, in my direction. I didn't plan it this way, honest. Yes, I'm quite used to seeking wisdom outside me. And there seems to be less and less of it around. Help, as opposed to wisdom, remains essential, but the arrows are all pointing at me. Ask him, they say. He's the guy. Yeah, yeah, send him the bill. He could do with your help. But he might as well stumble forward on his own. Forward is forward. Not forearmed, forewarned or foreskined. Just dead ahead, progress.
Last time I looked, no one was giving me awards for publishing, nonetheless I am heading towards a book. By late summer or early autumn. And the reality is that there is a lot to know, a lot to learn. What is a contract? Is it something to fear? Will there be a hidden clause in which I undertake to bankroll the expansion of the Panama Canal? Or just pay for the copy editor's root canal? I mean, since I trust the publisher implicitly, and have good reason for this, how much spilkes is necessary?
Maybe a little. So I happily threw a little money at California Lawyers for the Arts. An NGO, eminently deserving. And the lawyer? Well, he turns out to be a veteran in the publishing field. He is a help, asking me the right questions, getting me to think in the right direction. How wise of me. Maybe I know what I'm doing. Mazel tov.
Publicity for the book. Why doesn't the publisher take care of this? Because, I've been around the block enough times, however dreamily, to know that this is how things are. And how does one find a good publicist? By talking to established writers. Of whom I know a couple. Why? Well, maybe I am a writer myself? Established? Established as what? After 30 years in Menlo Park, surely I do not have to establish residency. Literary stature? Oh, forget it. Some people enjoy reading me, and that's enough. As for a 'good' publicity person, haven't I worked in the PR industry? Don't I know that the field attracts a spectrum of humanity, ranging from communicators to sociopaths? PR, as one agency account executive told me, is not a hand job. It must be something else. At 64, with a certain amount of experience, even some amount of intuition, perhaps I can find that something else. And if I don't? At least I can pull the plug. And pull it quickly.
There are reasons to be wary of the PR industry. In 1982, one day after work I watched the PR firm that employed me battle a rival firm in softball. Someone from my team yelled at the opposing agency, 'bill 'em, bill 'em.' I got the idea. Reasons to be wary, but no cause for paranoia. Self-promotion is not exactly my strongest suit. Self-criticism is. Might as well get a little help. A little help from my friends. Friends who are 'established' enough to be of substantial help. Practical help. Which, practically speaking, I need. Meanwhile, good things happen, not because of me, or in spite of me. In fact, it's not about me at all.
Oh, I suppose there are Luddites and technophobes, but having made a living writing for the computer industry over decades, these terms don't seem fair in describing me. And fairness is important. Because I am on trial. Or have I already been sentenced? Hard to say where the proceedings are, but it's not going well for the defendant.
My friend Andrea recently sent out an all points bulletin concerning her mind-boggling attempts to get a home wireless network functioning. Oy. Hours and hours on the phone. Trips to the local Apple Store. Ultimately to be rescued by, you guessed it, some undaunted person who sorted through the technology tangle. So, what about all this? Why bother with the topic? Because there is an answer, and it must have something to do with technology and age.
Take my recent experience with stamps.com. And this isn't so much a technical issue as a sign of my personal times. Why not print stamps at home on your own PC? I mean, why not? Especially if you are disabled, poorly organized and know that technology is, in the big picture, a remedy for both conditions. After all, were it not for voice recognition software, this blog would not be happening. Truly, and humbly, I owe my living, or at least my past employment, to technology. If I had been injured just a couple of decades earlier, writing might have been so arduous that my output would be minimal, my options for expression few. Not to worry, for things went in a different direction. Fortunately, very fortunately.
So what about stamps.com? I responded to a promotional e-mail, did a quick glance around their website and decided, what the heck. For $16.95, okay. No more ordering stamps, manipulating them with one hand, etc. Also, no more storing or even ordering stamps. Not nirvana for this quadriplegic, but something. Okay. Sign me up. What happened next was what one would expect to happen next. $16.95 disappeared from my credit card reserves. A large envelope arrived in the mail with a diskette, forms, instructions.
Now, let me make it clear. Nothing in this envelope posed a technical challenge. Still, it posed a threat. Something new. Something to read and understand and learn. The labels and diskette and instructions sat around my desk for weeks. I admit this. I am not proud. Finally, the time came to insert the...no, it wasn't a diskette, was it? Those don't exist anymore. It was a CD ROM. Except that isn't the term. Maybe it was just a CD. I don't know, or I'm not absolutely certain. Remember, we are not talking about something obscure. We're talking about a basic digital medium, something pervasive...and I'm not sure about even this.
See what I mean? If you don't dig your fingers into the technology cliff, you slip right off it. And to think that at one point I would pen whole articles on topics such as orthagonal distortion in chipmaking photolithography. I did this, because I had to. Life is like that. Some people have to clean toilets at Safeway. Some people don't have jobs at all. We do what we have to do. And now that I don't have to do anything when Messrs. Stamps.com come to call, in a manner of speaking, I tend to quite easily flip them off. In the nicest and most passive sort of way, but this is what it amounts to.
Time passed. It has a way of doing this, and with the arrival of my next credit card bill, and the one after that, something dawned on me. This $16.95 for the services of the online postal meter people at stamps.com, is not a one-time thing. It is a monthly charge. Seventeen bucks for what? I mean, the truth is that months go by without a single stamp touching my fingers. This $16.95 makes sense on a monthly basis for a small business. For me, it is preposterous. The simple answer. Which of course is no.
Much of what one buys online by way of services has a Roach Motel quality about it. You check in, but you don't check out, not without difficulty. Welcome to the Hotel California.
In short, this necessitated a phone call. Why was I not pleased with stamps.com? The question floored me. A reasonable enough and perfectly standard inquiry, but I simply wasn't ready for it. I stared down the phone line, regretting this was not possible, phone line staring. I fell uncharacteristically silent. What did I like about it? In the silence, I could almost hear the stamps.com guy tapping his fingers. The poor schlump probably worked in some boiler room operation under contract to the postage company. At that juncture I saw no option but the truth. I told him. Seeing the U.S. Postal Service logo on the stamps.com website gave me the false impression that this was an official government service. Not surprising that the agency that handles mail would modernize. The U.S. Postal Service for 2011, why not?
Closer inspection had revealed that this company was actually a licensee of the official US Post Office. All of which brought me to a crossroads of old and new. Being an old liberal, I am attracted to the notion of a government service that is modernizing and wants me to keep up with it. What's new is that the USPS isn't so much modernizing in this arena as subcontracting. Or is it? Apparently you can print postage online through our own government USPS. Or generate labels. With postage. Still, the USPS seems to be directing everyone toward vendors. Ship-n-Click. Or was it Click-n-Ship? I don't care. I don't trust these people. I trust the post office. I want to go postal.
How quaint. Right? Don't I know that everything Big Government does is characterized by incompetence and amounts to state-sanctioned larceny? And now it becomes apparent. I'm not confused by technology but by modernity. I can't get with the contemporaneous program, that is my problem.
The problem with stamps.com, the guy on the phone points out, is that I have already sunk a fair amount of money into their service. So why not at least use the promotional postage that comes with the deal? I see his logic. I fall silent. He promises to send me another startup kit. I have a bunch of the company's stuff on my desk, but being unclear about what comprises startup in the online postal sense, I agree.
Time is not on my side with stamps.com, this is clear. When the next pile of coupons and CD and labels arrives courtesy of the USPS, I do as instructed. The first step is to print off a whole bunch of stamps. This is done with a set of special labels. No big deal. I select the $.44 option, insert the sheet of labels the right way and hit 'print.' Soon I have a whole bunch of, well, stamps. Big adhesive stamps. Some of them have enormous versions of the billowing American flag. Others have messages attached, such as, 'happy holidays' or 'we are moving.' Or even better, 'we appreciate your business' and, my favorite, 'your message here.' I carefully, very carefully, wrote down the date to phone stamps.com and officially terminate the service.
Which I did. Why was I doing this, a woman at stamps.com asked? This question also threw me. Why? Why was she asking me this a second time? Would I tell her why I was unhappy with stamps.com? No, I said, I would not. I let the silence hang in the phone line. Better than hanging up, it seemed to me.
My friend Andrea recently sent out an all points bulletin concerning her mind-boggling attempts to get a home wireless network functioning. Oy. Hours and hours on the phone. Trips to the local Apple Store. Ultimately to be rescued by, you guessed it, some undaunted person who sorted through the technology tangle. So, what about all this? Why bother with the topic? Because there is an answer, and it must have something to do with technology and age.
Take my recent experience with stamps.com. And this isn't so much a technical issue as a sign of my personal times. Why not print stamps at home on your own PC? I mean, why not? Especially if you are disabled, poorly organized and know that technology is, in the big picture, a remedy for both conditions. After all, were it not for voice recognition software, this blog would not be happening. Truly, and humbly, I owe my living, or at least my past employment, to technology. If I had been injured just a couple of decades earlier, writing might have been so arduous that my output would be minimal, my options for expression few. Not to worry, for things went in a different direction. Fortunately, very fortunately.
So what about stamps.com? I responded to a promotional e-mail, did a quick glance around their website and decided, what the heck. For $16.95, okay. No more ordering stamps, manipulating them with one hand, etc. Also, no more storing or even ordering stamps. Not nirvana for this quadriplegic, but something. Okay. Sign me up. What happened next was what one would expect to happen next. $16.95 disappeared from my credit card reserves. A large envelope arrived in the mail with a diskette, forms, instructions.
Now, let me make it clear. Nothing in this envelope posed a technical challenge. Still, it posed a threat. Something new. Something to read and understand and learn. The labels and diskette and instructions sat around my desk for weeks. I admit this. I am not proud. Finally, the time came to insert the...no, it wasn't a diskette, was it? Those don't exist anymore. It was a CD ROM. Except that isn't the term. Maybe it was just a CD. I don't know, or I'm not absolutely certain. Remember, we are not talking about something obscure. We're talking about a basic digital medium, something pervasive...and I'm not sure about even this.
See what I mean? If you don't dig your fingers into the technology cliff, you slip right off it. And to think that at one point I would pen whole articles on topics such as orthagonal distortion in chipmaking photolithography. I did this, because I had to. Life is like that. Some people have to clean toilets at Safeway. Some people don't have jobs at all. We do what we have to do. And now that I don't have to do anything when Messrs. Stamps.com come to call, in a manner of speaking, I tend to quite easily flip them off. In the nicest and most passive sort of way, but this is what it amounts to.
Time passed. It has a way of doing this, and with the arrival of my next credit card bill, and the one after that, something dawned on me. This $16.95 for the services of the online postal meter people at stamps.com, is not a one-time thing. It is a monthly charge. Seventeen bucks for what? I mean, the truth is that months go by without a single stamp touching my fingers. This $16.95 makes sense on a monthly basis for a small business. For me, it is preposterous. The simple answer. Which of course is no.
Much of what one buys online by way of services has a Roach Motel quality about it. You check in, but you don't check out, not without difficulty. Welcome to the Hotel California.
In short, this necessitated a phone call. Why was I not pleased with stamps.com? The question floored me. A reasonable enough and perfectly standard inquiry, but I simply wasn't ready for it. I stared down the phone line, regretting this was not possible, phone line staring. I fell uncharacteristically silent. What did I like about it? In the silence, I could almost hear the stamps.com guy tapping his fingers. The poor schlump probably worked in some boiler room operation under contract to the postage company. At that juncture I saw no option but the truth. I told him. Seeing the U.S. Postal Service logo on the stamps.com website gave me the false impression that this was an official government service. Not surprising that the agency that handles mail would modernize. The U.S. Postal Service for 2011, why not?
Closer inspection had revealed that this company was actually a licensee of the official US Post Office. All of which brought me to a crossroads of old and new. Being an old liberal, I am attracted to the notion of a government service that is modernizing and wants me to keep up with it. What's new is that the USPS isn't so much modernizing in this arena as subcontracting. Or is it? Apparently you can print postage online through our own government USPS. Or generate labels. With postage. Still, the USPS seems to be directing everyone toward vendors. Ship-n-Click. Or was it Click-n-Ship? I don't care. I don't trust these people. I trust the post office. I want to go postal.
How quaint. Right? Don't I know that everything Big Government does is characterized by incompetence and amounts to state-sanctioned larceny? And now it becomes apparent. I'm not confused by technology but by modernity. I can't get with the contemporaneous program, that is my problem.
The problem with stamps.com, the guy on the phone points out, is that I have already sunk a fair amount of money into their service. So why not at least use the promotional postage that comes with the deal? I see his logic. I fall silent. He promises to send me another startup kit. I have a bunch of the company's stuff on my desk, but being unclear about what comprises startup in the online postal sense, I agree.
Time is not on my side with stamps.com, this is clear. When the next pile of coupons and CD and labels arrives courtesy of the USPS, I do as instructed. The first step is to print off a whole bunch of stamps. This is done with a set of special labels. No big deal. I select the $.44 option, insert the sheet of labels the right way and hit 'print.' Soon I have a whole bunch of, well, stamps. Big adhesive stamps. Some of them have enormous versions of the billowing American flag. Others have messages attached, such as, 'happy holidays' or 'we are moving.' Or even better, 'we appreciate your business' and, my favorite, 'your message here.' I carefully, very carefully, wrote down the date to phone stamps.com and officially terminate the service.
Which I did. Why was I doing this, a woman at stamps.com asked? This question also threw me. Why? Why was she asking me this a second time? Would I tell her why I was unhappy with stamps.com? No, I said, I would not. I let the silence hang in the phone line. Better than hanging up, it seemed to me.
I only realized it this morning in mulling over a dream. How wrenchingly painful it is to recall my parents' efforts at loving. Some of their efforts actually succeeded, that is true. But at this stage of my life, it is their failed efforts that seem so poignant, almost unbearably so.
It must have been about 1962. No, it wasn't 'about,' but exactly. I recall the emotional milestones of my life with great accuracy, for better or for worse. In retrospect, the summer of 1962 was only three years after my parents' divorce. At the time, it seemed much longer. Yes, I was a kid, and time had little dimension. But everything about my life had changed. The dream of the happy family had given way to...not a dream, but a dreaminess. At a time of great emotional need, I had little emotional connection. Kids have no perspective on such conditions, but I felt my abandonment without understanding it.
We went to San Francisco. I wish I could say that there was more to the story, but this is the essence. We took the train. In July, 1962, the Southern Pacific Daylight was still a going concern. The coaches were roomy and clean. The windows had been washed. And as lunchtime approached, a waiter, or someone from the dining car, walked through the train ringing a sort of chime. Actually, it looked ike a scaled-down version of a kid's xylophone. But my memory is dim. Whatever it was, the chime was utterly distinctive, gentle in its resonance. It was not only a signal for lunch, but the sign of something truly new.
It was an oddity of my young life that I had been to New York twice, but San Francisco never. In fact, I had not seen much of California. Which is why San Francisco had something of the fabled about it. Cable cars. The Golden Gate Bridge. I knew about these things. It had great allure, San Francisco. I was 15 years old.
The dining car aboard the Daylight seemed wondrous. I was alert to the formality of white tablecloths. The menu consisted of three or four choices, and I do recall having salmon. We all did. Or so it seemed, and in truth, I am not entirely clear who 'we' consisted of. But my brother must have been part of things. It was a period of rather intense sibling rivalry for me, so conditions may have banished him to some background status of my memory. No, there were three of us. Me and my brother and my mother. My sister? Wasn't she there too? Four. The remnants of our family.
I wonder what keenness alerted me to the cost of the trip, the lunch, everything. Certainly, funds were tight for my mother. Child support was a constant source of tension, sometimes legal proceedings, between the squabbling parents. My mother's emotional instability led her to make foolish, impulsive decisions. Property and capital gradually drained, even though I did not know the details. What I knew was that she was a nurse, high in esponsibility, low in pay. Nurses, my mother observed, were suckers. She was angry and had reason to be.
It was a journey north, a novelty. I was used to heading homeward, southbound on the train from Santa Barbara. I was also used to dramatic departures. Something got into my mother on one occasion, something angry, as she drove us from her home to the Southern Pacific depot. On some impulse, as we approached the Santa Barbara station, she angrily turned right and drove between the tracks. There was concrete there. Driving was possible. But this was no road. It was probably the platform, now that I think about it. She frightened me and my brother. My father's lawyer complained. I regretted saying anything about it. Talking only added fuel to their post-marital fire. Gradually, I learned to shut up. But that had been, oh, a year or two before the Daylight. Another era, in kid terms. And now instead of heading south, it was north.
The train hung at the edge of the central California coast, surf white and pounding below us. Then something most unexpected. Vandenberg Air Force Base. In those days this was one of the prime locations of the space race. Missile tests went on here, important launches, headlines. From the train, the place was surprisingly wild, all grassland, gullies and cliffs, the Pacific heaving. I looked for evidence of missiles, but saw only metal Air Force signs. The dining car windows were enormous, the view rocking and tilting with the ride. The salmon arrived sizzling on a metal plate or pan, I cannot recall which. But it was hot off some stove, delivered with a spatula to my plate. No wonder all this was announced with chimes.
Growing up with a disturbed mother made me unusually attentive to her signals. I could sense discomfort. Whatever it was, somehow I knew that this trip had stretched her finances. Maybe she deliberated a bit before opting for the dining car. I picked up the signal, and I knew she was trying. She was doing something difficult for us, her kids. She was trying to give us something. And it was a fine thing. A disappointment to see the end of lunch in the dining car. But there was more, now the mysteries of San Luis Obispo. Where were we? And later, what sort of place was San Jose? How close to San Francisco? Imagine, khaki-colored two-storey commuter trains, surely a sign of something urban. Surprising to see hills draw close to the tracks, another tall commuter train waiting. And then San Francisco, a disappointing station, low mission style. Uncle Dave drove us east to the suburbs.
My mother was trying, it seemed, trying to love us. To love me. Perhaps she wasn't so horrible. Still, there was no way, and at 15 less and less urge, to be close to her. Less urge, yet a primal need. Perhaps I had damaged her by being so angry myself. So painful to see the tortured possibility of love emerge intermittently. She was trying. Somehow, it was almost better not to know.
I lived with my father. This was part of a summer visit, Santa Barbara and the trip north. One parent was depressed, the other enraged. And in between there was San Francisco. My mother had to get back to work, return to her hospital shifts. I believe she took the Greyhound home. Probably with my brother and sister. But I joined them a couple of days later. Someone, probably my aunt, drove me to the Concord bus station, and I journeyed in and out of San Francisco. I saw two plays, being a Wednesday. The theaters were next to each other, and in between, I rode a bus out to meet my aunt's friend in the Presidio. After the evening play, she put me on the bus to Concord. A grand adventure. Lonely, but grand.
What hasn't ended is the wrenching quality of people trying, and failing, to love. I tried to cheer up my mother from an early age. It hadn't worked, and I hadn't understood. She became frightening, and at the divorce my father seemed less so. And there I was, seeing how people tried to care for me. How much effort it took. And what little gratitude I had. She had potential, my mother. I could see that. And it was better not to see. And it was all very sad. And too late.
'That's going to be a good walking leg,' the doctor said to me. He was a neurologist standing in my room at the student hospital at Berkeley. My shooting had occurred about a month before, and there was no telling what was going to happen. The nurse who ran the disabled student program assured me that life in a wheelchair was quite possible. I ignored her. I had had enough of nurses.
They were professionals at the rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, people who had seen spinal-cord-injured people drift in and out of the premises for years. After about three months, the plan was to discharge me in a wheelchair. But my leg kept getting stronger. And at the 11th hour, there was a new plan. Get this guy up and walking, even if it takes another three months. Which it did. After a six-month hospitalization, I walked out the door. Gaunt and limping and moving. There was some secret all along in the poignancy of people trying. Trying to love, trying to walk. Sometimes, if one is very lucky, someone around knows what's going on. Sometimes not. The secret is that the unbearably poignant must become bearable. Or the trying never happens.
It must have been about 1962. No, it wasn't 'about,' but exactly. I recall the emotional milestones of my life with great accuracy, for better or for worse. In retrospect, the summer of 1962 was only three years after my parents' divorce. At the time, it seemed much longer. Yes, I was a kid, and time had little dimension. But everything about my life had changed. The dream of the happy family had given way to...not a dream, but a dreaminess. At a time of great emotional need, I had little emotional connection. Kids have no perspective on such conditions, but I felt my abandonment without understanding it.
We went to San Francisco. I wish I could say that there was more to the story, but this is the essence. We took the train. In July, 1962, the Southern Pacific Daylight was still a going concern. The coaches were roomy and clean. The windows had been washed. And as lunchtime approached, a waiter, or someone from the dining car, walked through the train ringing a sort of chime. Actually, it looked ike a scaled-down version of a kid's xylophone. But my memory is dim. Whatever it was, the chime was utterly distinctive, gentle in its resonance. It was not only a signal for lunch, but the sign of something truly new.
It was an oddity of my young life that I had been to New York twice, but San Francisco never. In fact, I had not seen much of California. Which is why San Francisco had something of the fabled about it. Cable cars. The Golden Gate Bridge. I knew about these things. It had great allure, San Francisco. I was 15 years old.
The dining car aboard the Daylight seemed wondrous. I was alert to the formality of white tablecloths. The menu consisted of three or four choices, and I do recall having salmon. We all did. Or so it seemed, and in truth, I am not entirely clear who 'we' consisted of. But my brother must have been part of things. It was a period of rather intense sibling rivalry for me, so conditions may have banished him to some background status of my memory. No, there were three of us. Me and my brother and my mother. My sister? Wasn't she there too? Four. The remnants of our family.
I wonder what keenness alerted me to the cost of the trip, the lunch, everything. Certainly, funds were tight for my mother. Child support was a constant source of tension, sometimes legal proceedings, between the squabbling parents. My mother's emotional instability led her to make foolish, impulsive decisions. Property and capital gradually drained, even though I did not know the details. What I knew was that she was a nurse, high in esponsibility, low in pay. Nurses, my mother observed, were suckers. She was angry and had reason to be.
It was a journey north, a novelty. I was used to heading homeward, southbound on the train from Santa Barbara. I was also used to dramatic departures. Something got into my mother on one occasion, something angry, as she drove us from her home to the Southern Pacific depot. On some impulse, as we approached the Santa Barbara station, she angrily turned right and drove between the tracks. There was concrete there. Driving was possible. But this was no road. It was probably the platform, now that I think about it. She frightened me and my brother. My father's lawyer complained. I regretted saying anything about it. Talking only added fuel to their post-marital fire. Gradually, I learned to shut up. But that had been, oh, a year or two before the Daylight. Another era, in kid terms. And now instead of heading south, it was north.
The train hung at the edge of the central California coast, surf white and pounding below us. Then something most unexpected. Vandenberg Air Force Base. In those days this was one of the prime locations of the space race. Missile tests went on here, important launches, headlines. From the train, the place was surprisingly wild, all grassland, gullies and cliffs, the Pacific heaving. I looked for evidence of missiles, but saw only metal Air Force signs. The dining car windows were enormous, the view rocking and tilting with the ride. The salmon arrived sizzling on a metal plate or pan, I cannot recall which. But it was hot off some stove, delivered with a spatula to my plate. No wonder all this was announced with chimes.
Growing up with a disturbed mother made me unusually attentive to her signals. I could sense discomfort. Whatever it was, somehow I knew that this trip had stretched her finances. Maybe she deliberated a bit before opting for the dining car. I picked up the signal, and I knew she was trying. She was doing something difficult for us, her kids. She was trying to give us something. And it was a fine thing. A disappointment to see the end of lunch in the dining car. But there was more, now the mysteries of San Luis Obispo. Where were we? And later, what sort of place was San Jose? How close to San Francisco? Imagine, khaki-colored two-storey commuter trains, surely a sign of something urban. Surprising to see hills draw close to the tracks, another tall commuter train waiting. And then San Francisco, a disappointing station, low mission style. Uncle Dave drove us east to the suburbs.
My mother was trying, it seemed, trying to love us. To love me. Perhaps she wasn't so horrible. Still, there was no way, and at 15 less and less urge, to be close to her. Less urge, yet a primal need. Perhaps I had damaged her by being so angry myself. So painful to see the tortured possibility of love emerge intermittently. She was trying. Somehow, it was almost better not to know.
I lived with my father. This was part of a summer visit, Santa Barbara and the trip north. One parent was depressed, the other enraged. And in between there was San Francisco. My mother had to get back to work, return to her hospital shifts. I believe she took the Greyhound home. Probably with my brother and sister. But I joined them a couple of days later. Someone, probably my aunt, drove me to the Concord bus station, and I journeyed in and out of San Francisco. I saw two plays, being a Wednesday. The theaters were next to each other, and in between, I rode a bus out to meet my aunt's friend in the Presidio. After the evening play, she put me on the bus to Concord. A grand adventure. Lonely, but grand.
What hasn't ended is the wrenching quality of people trying, and failing, to love. I tried to cheer up my mother from an early age. It hadn't worked, and I hadn't understood. She became frightening, and at the divorce my father seemed less so. And there I was, seeing how people tried to care for me. How much effort it took. And what little gratitude I had. She had potential, my mother. I could see that. And it was better not to see. And it was all very sad. And too late.
'That's going to be a good walking leg,' the doctor said to me. He was a neurologist standing in my room at the student hospital at Berkeley. My shooting had occurred about a month before, and there was no telling what was going to happen. The nurse who ran the disabled student program assured me that life in a wheelchair was quite possible. I ignored her. I had had enough of nurses.
They were professionals at the rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, people who had seen spinal-cord-injured people drift in and out of the premises for years. After about three months, the plan was to discharge me in a wheelchair. But my leg kept getting stronger. And at the 11th hour, there was a new plan. Get this guy up and walking, even if it takes another three months. Which it did. After a six-month hospitalization, I walked out the door. Gaunt and limping and moving. There was some secret all along in the poignancy of people trying. Trying to love, trying to walk. Sometimes, if one is very lucky, someone around knows what's going on. Sometimes not. The secret is that the unbearably poignant must become bearable. Or the trying never happens.
Clarum Homes, whatever are they? Not to worry, for there are four of them rising where Marlou and I once eyeballed a single home, one that had a sort of apartment unit over its garage. And we kept wondering, or Marlou did, what would happen if the asking price dropped substantially below $1.2 million, we dropped our retirement savings into the property, rented the apartment unit for the maximum.... Couples need such conjectures, I have learned. With any luck, they dream more broadly. Good to see that Messrs Clarum have gotten on with it, crowding four overpriced hunks of architecture into the space of one. It's all happening in the background, making it easy to miss, while impossible to avoid. The background is displacing the foreground, these days.
I am heading lunchward, hoping to forget the morning. Although I can feel its tensions in my shoulder. A series of physical medicine types have explained this to me. Why my shoulder absorbs the tension of the moment. The scapula drawing up and pinching the thingy, as they say in physical medicine. Tension. It's enough to be aware of it, too much to avoid it, impossible to control it. I'm failing in the Anger Management department, a dunce. Which seems to reach a certain peak in the mornings.
Which for 43 years of disabled life have featured glycerin suppositories. No need going into the details. In fact, they are hardly necessary. Put the body mechanics together. A person with one functioning hand, low on feeling. A body that is increasingly stiff. And the morning necessity to get small, slippery items inside oneself. After substantially more than four decades, I am not squeamish about this, only private. The essential fact is that this task requires one additional and supremely important factor. Relaxation. The latter is not exactly my forte. And on days of sufficient spilkes, it is utterly absent.
These days, for example. An operation that might normally take, say, two minutes can require, as it did this morning, more than an hour. Characterized by mounting fury, which results in mounting tension, which defeats the very exercise. And remember, the day, what people normally think of as the day, has not begun. Life, in such moments, has not begun. I have not begun. And now I 64, I am ending. The thought progression moves swiftly along these lines. No, it's not a pretty picture.
And yet it depicts something. Later in the morning, having barely got the morning ablutions complete before Menchu arrives on behalf of Team Filipina, and after a hour-long exercise sprint on the carport machine, I wander outside. To the garden, of course. To stare into the thickness of steer manure and admire the green crop rising. It is the most reassuring spot in my life, these days. Lettuce to the left of me, spinach to the right, into the Valley of Rebirth rode I. From wheelchair height, one can see what's happening. A lone brussels sprout is mistakenly appearing among the red leaf lettuce sprouts. This is errant and wrong and will be corrected, I know. They are all wrong, the brussels sprouts, time and experience has shown, and yet what is wrong, no one can say. And might just as easily become right. In any case, it is growing, this garden, the brown stalks of last year's tomatoes cracking, readily splintering, all but dust, at this stage. A light tap with a trowel on a twig of dead vine has the approximate effect of a tyrannosaurus stepping on a log.
And that's just on the surface, of course. Underground, under the manure layer, decomposition is roaring, the Kentucky red worms FedExed into place years ago now churning their way through decomposing ryegrass, fava beans, yes, tomato vines, and what's left of broccoli grown during Marlou's life. And what's left of Marlou. Some of her ashes reside here. Where exactly being a matter of some dispute. I think the spinach leaves have absorbed her ashes. As I say, it's all happening in the garden.
And after 43 years with a disability, things are getting harder. Not that they weren't before, but age is taking its toll. As it is meant to. A process like the one under way in my garden. Which frightens me. The prospect of losing more neuromuscular ground, growing even more dependent on others. Noticing how things are getting harder just at the moment when the contrast could not be greater. Lulling, nurturing days and nights in a Hawaiian hotel, waking at the approximate rate the sun does. Jane around, loving and helping. Then back to life, normal life, where things are a little more as they are. The net result being another move towards acceptance, letting go, acknowledging loss. And acknowledging anger. I am so fucking pissed off that a bad thing can, and will, get worse. That I have to get worse. Loss upon loss. And yet, the only way forward, is forward. The thing never to lose is one's way.
I am heading lunchward, hoping to forget the morning. Although I can feel its tensions in my shoulder. A series of physical medicine types have explained this to me. Why my shoulder absorbs the tension of the moment. The scapula drawing up and pinching the thingy, as they say in physical medicine. Tension. It's enough to be aware of it, too much to avoid it, impossible to control it. I'm failing in the Anger Management department, a dunce. Which seems to reach a certain peak in the mornings.
Which for 43 years of disabled life have featured glycerin suppositories. No need going into the details. In fact, they are hardly necessary. Put the body mechanics together. A person with one functioning hand, low on feeling. A body that is increasingly stiff. And the morning necessity to get small, slippery items inside oneself. After substantially more than four decades, I am not squeamish about this, only private. The essential fact is that this task requires one additional and supremely important factor. Relaxation. The latter is not exactly my forte. And on days of sufficient spilkes, it is utterly absent.
These days, for example. An operation that might normally take, say, two minutes can require, as it did this morning, more than an hour. Characterized by mounting fury, which results in mounting tension, which defeats the very exercise. And remember, the day, what people normally think of as the day, has not begun. Life, in such moments, has not begun. I have not begun. And now I 64, I am ending. The thought progression moves swiftly along these lines. No, it's not a pretty picture.
And yet it depicts something. Later in the morning, having barely got the morning ablutions complete before Menchu arrives on behalf of Team Filipina, and after a hour-long exercise sprint on the carport machine, I wander outside. To the garden, of course. To stare into the thickness of steer manure and admire the green crop rising. It is the most reassuring spot in my life, these days. Lettuce to the left of me, spinach to the right, into the Valley of Rebirth rode I. From wheelchair height, one can see what's happening. A lone brussels sprout is mistakenly appearing among the red leaf lettuce sprouts. This is errant and wrong and will be corrected, I know. They are all wrong, the brussels sprouts, time and experience has shown, and yet what is wrong, no one can say. And might just as easily become right. In any case, it is growing, this garden, the brown stalks of last year's tomatoes cracking, readily splintering, all but dust, at this stage. A light tap with a trowel on a twig of dead vine has the approximate effect of a tyrannosaurus stepping on a log.
And that's just on the surface, of course. Underground, under the manure layer, decomposition is roaring, the Kentucky red worms FedExed into place years ago now churning their way through decomposing ryegrass, fava beans, yes, tomato vines, and what's left of broccoli grown during Marlou's life. And what's left of Marlou. Some of her ashes reside here. Where exactly being a matter of some dispute. I think the spinach leaves have absorbed her ashes. As I say, it's all happening in the garden.
And after 43 years with a disability, things are getting harder. Not that they weren't before, but age is taking its toll. As it is meant to. A process like the one under way in my garden. Which frightens me. The prospect of losing more neuromuscular ground, growing even more dependent on others. Noticing how things are getting harder just at the moment when the contrast could not be greater. Lulling, nurturing days and nights in a Hawaiian hotel, waking at the approximate rate the sun does. Jane around, loving and helping. Then back to life, normal life, where things are a little more as they are. The net result being another move towards acceptance, letting go, acknowledging loss. And acknowledging anger. I am so fucking pissed off that a bad thing can, and will, get worse. That I have to get worse. Loss upon loss. And yet, the only way forward, is forward. The thing never to lose is one's way.
Things are not quite what I had assumed in the spinach bed. Make your bed and lie in it, I say, thinking this would really be a pleasant option on this particular day.
While faintly protesting and shaking his head in disbelief, about a month ago my brother poured bags of steer manure atop the recently dug-in cover crop...and the resulting smooth and well kept look of the garden beds...there is more to it. Today, perhaps because the sun was out in force for the first time in weeks, I saw the oddity. Yes, things are sprouting and growing with much promise. But the steer manure is a couple of inches thick in places, a sort of sand dune of bovine byproduct. And does this matter in any way? It was not what I intended, that is all. Just as there appears to be a brussels sprout sprouting in the midst of some lettuce seedlings. About which one should not complain. Never have I seen a more errant and disappointing botanical performance than last year's five-dollar-apiece brussels sprouts plantlets. Downright surly, they were. Give your offspring the best years of your life, or at least the best months, and what do they do but flip you off? But I've gone on about this enough, and the matter belongs to agrarian history. We let it go, the brussels sprout disappointment. Besides, the real point of fascination in this morning's sun-illuminated lettuce bed is the cushy thickness of manure, truly soft enough to lie on, or burrow under. Which I would dearly like to do.
I don't like waking at 4 AM, sleep insufficient, superficial buzz to things, fear wafting just under the covers. There are a couple of options. Crawling under the steer manure outside in my raised beds has not yet occurred to me. At this point, the better plan seems to breathe. Deeply, that is, for I can feel the short, shallow intakes of air. Fearful breathing. As though each breath could be my last, like sinking forever beneath the surface of the swimming pool I daily enjoyed in Hawaii. Fresh from intense study of Anger Management, I am now beautifully equipped in the fear management department. Which is why another option presents itself. I will spring to my feet, plop down in the wheelchair and head for the PC where, what else, Consumer Reports will tell me which vacuum cleaner to buy.
Amputees with their phantom limbs have nothing on the rehab-hardened quadriplegic. It actually occurs to me more or less in this form, leaping from bed. Never mind that I haven't leapt anywhere for 43 years. And the same can be said of springing. Under the surface, one might say under the manure, my psyche is dealing with the reality. Getting out of bed, even sitting up on the edge of the mattress, will first require an untangling of feet and sheets, followed by a swiveling of torso and the gravity-fed dropping of my right leg...which actually may spring, more than drop, spasticity being what it is. This vacuum-cleaner-ordering idyll promises some relief from anxiety in its distraction. Furthermore, in fear-management terms, sitting up is a good thing. Remaining supine only adds to a general sense of helplessness, of which at this 4 AM juncture, I have a sufficiency.
Much better plan is the breathing. I attempt to do this, long, deep inhalations, but things do not work out. Shortness of breath wins the day, anxiety being what it is. Still, I keep trying. Caltrain is also trying, the 5:09 AM to San Francisco currently rolling through Menlo Park, horn blowing, locomotive roaring. I am getting older. I have a growing list of things to do, the vacuum cleaner being somewhere near the bottom, actually. They are not getting done, these things. Time is slipping away. Life is slipping away. And I have this long walk across a parking lot, no crutch, and not much of a limp, if one thinks about it...which one isn't, the apparent supermarket across the pavement actually being a theater, and my 3 PM performance imminent. Too bad I haven't used the toilet or showered, things which will require my return home, and since there is less than an hour until curtain, well, there is good reason for fear. All of which ends, as all dreams must, and there is sun slanting through the venetian blinds of my bedroom. And there has been sleep. Okay, not enough, but I can't complain.
Yes, I can. For I may have slept, but there are precious few signs. Actually, I feel as though this is just a brief respite from the Crimean War...the battles not very distant, my return to the front lines inevitable. Now I really do get up, get in the wheelchair and get on with it. Team Filipina is on its way, after all. Actually, just one member, Menchu. I must be ready. I make tea. I do not make plans. Have a gentle day, Jane would advise. Have a cappuccino, I decide once dressed and slightly exercised. Menchu has walked me up and down the apartment footpath. We stopped to have a look at the sprouting garlic. And either out of relief or anxious hysteria, not that it matters, we improvised new lyrics for 'We're off to See the Wizard,' a commentary on our arm-locked procession.
Howard Jacobson, I consider en route to Peet's, does a fine and comical job of capturing the sardonic in London intellectual life. With Jewish tones and what-is-Jewish-about-Jewish tones skillfully stirred in. But I sometimes wish he would be a little less skillful. The style of 'Kaloochi Nights' was a little more clunky, more vulnerable, more human. It takes a lot of critical energy to write, and to read, Jacobson's latest prizewinner. Yet, from another perspective, I was resistant to seeing Mike Leigh's film about the ever upbeat Londoner Poppy. Yet the movie proved something of a tonic. I can be too cynical. I can be too critical. We find the upbeat where we can. Sometimes it even finds us.
The young woman who waits on me at Peet's has won my eternal love through her proactive sprinkling of powdered chocolate atop my cappuccinos. She knows my name. She brings drinks to my table. She is bright and sunny and, at this very moment, asking me if I would like to buy a scone in support of Stanford Childrens Hospital. It seems that if I act now, 25% of my bakery purchase will go to the children. A calorie-challenged quadriplegic needs a scone like William Burroughs needs more heroin. Buy one for the next person, she asks? Sure, I tell her. It's an odd suggestion, but not a bad one at all, and the middle-aged woman who gets the free chocolate chip cookie thanks me profusely. I am a good guy, uncritically, inadvertently, good. And now a good guy heading home, perhaps to bed, but actually to the raised bed, the one currently warming the spinach plants. Just call me Lucky. If it was good enough for Beckett, it's good enough for me.
While faintly protesting and shaking his head in disbelief, about a month ago my brother poured bags of steer manure atop the recently dug-in cover crop...and the resulting smooth and well kept look of the garden beds...there is more to it. Today, perhaps because the sun was out in force for the first time in weeks, I saw the oddity. Yes, things are sprouting and growing with much promise. But the steer manure is a couple of inches thick in places, a sort of sand dune of bovine byproduct. And does this matter in any way? It was not what I intended, that is all. Just as there appears to be a brussels sprout sprouting in the midst of some lettuce seedlings. About which one should not complain. Never have I seen a more errant and disappointing botanical performance than last year's five-dollar-apiece brussels sprouts plantlets. Downright surly, they were. Give your offspring the best years of your life, or at least the best months, and what do they do but flip you off? But I've gone on about this enough, and the matter belongs to agrarian history. We let it go, the brussels sprout disappointment. Besides, the real point of fascination in this morning's sun-illuminated lettuce bed is the cushy thickness of manure, truly soft enough to lie on, or burrow under. Which I would dearly like to do.
I don't like waking at 4 AM, sleep insufficient, superficial buzz to things, fear wafting just under the covers. There are a couple of options. Crawling under the steer manure outside in my raised beds has not yet occurred to me. At this point, the better plan seems to breathe. Deeply, that is, for I can feel the short, shallow intakes of air. Fearful breathing. As though each breath could be my last, like sinking forever beneath the surface of the swimming pool I daily enjoyed in Hawaii. Fresh from intense study of Anger Management, I am now beautifully equipped in the fear management department. Which is why another option presents itself. I will spring to my feet, plop down in the wheelchair and head for the PC where, what else, Consumer Reports will tell me which vacuum cleaner to buy.
Amputees with their phantom limbs have nothing on the rehab-hardened quadriplegic. It actually occurs to me more or less in this form, leaping from bed. Never mind that I haven't leapt anywhere for 43 years. And the same can be said of springing. Under the surface, one might say under the manure, my psyche is dealing with the reality. Getting out of bed, even sitting up on the edge of the mattress, will first require an untangling of feet and sheets, followed by a swiveling of torso and the gravity-fed dropping of my right leg...which actually may spring, more than drop, spasticity being what it is. This vacuum-cleaner-ordering idyll promises some relief from anxiety in its distraction. Furthermore, in fear-management terms, sitting up is a good thing. Remaining supine only adds to a general sense of helplessness, of which at this 4 AM juncture, I have a sufficiency.
Much better plan is the breathing. I attempt to do this, long, deep inhalations, but things do not work out. Shortness of breath wins the day, anxiety being what it is. Still, I keep trying. Caltrain is also trying, the 5:09 AM to San Francisco currently rolling through Menlo Park, horn blowing, locomotive roaring. I am getting older. I have a growing list of things to do, the vacuum cleaner being somewhere near the bottom, actually. They are not getting done, these things. Time is slipping away. Life is slipping away. And I have this long walk across a parking lot, no crutch, and not much of a limp, if one thinks about it...which one isn't, the apparent supermarket across the pavement actually being a theater, and my 3 PM performance imminent. Too bad I haven't used the toilet or showered, things which will require my return home, and since there is less than an hour until curtain, well, there is good reason for fear. All of which ends, as all dreams must, and there is sun slanting through the venetian blinds of my bedroom. And there has been sleep. Okay, not enough, but I can't complain.
Yes, I can. For I may have slept, but there are precious few signs. Actually, I feel as though this is just a brief respite from the Crimean War...the battles not very distant, my return to the front lines inevitable. Now I really do get up, get in the wheelchair and get on with it. Team Filipina is on its way, after all. Actually, just one member, Menchu. I must be ready. I make tea. I do not make plans. Have a gentle day, Jane would advise. Have a cappuccino, I decide once dressed and slightly exercised. Menchu has walked me up and down the apartment footpath. We stopped to have a look at the sprouting garlic. And either out of relief or anxious hysteria, not that it matters, we improvised new lyrics for 'We're off to See the Wizard,' a commentary on our arm-locked procession.
Howard Jacobson, I consider en route to Peet's, does a fine and comical job of capturing the sardonic in London intellectual life. With Jewish tones and what-is-Jewish-about-Jewish tones skillfully stirred in. But I sometimes wish he would be a little less skillful. The style of 'Kaloochi Nights' was a little more clunky, more vulnerable, more human. It takes a lot of critical energy to write, and to read, Jacobson's latest prizewinner. Yet, from another perspective, I was resistant to seeing Mike Leigh's film about the ever upbeat Londoner Poppy. Yet the movie proved something of a tonic. I can be too cynical. I can be too critical. We find the upbeat where we can. Sometimes it even finds us.
The young woman who waits on me at Peet's has won my eternal love through her proactive sprinkling of powdered chocolate atop my cappuccinos. She knows my name. She brings drinks to my table. She is bright and sunny and, at this very moment, asking me if I would like to buy a scone in support of Stanford Childrens Hospital. It seems that if I act now, 25% of my bakery purchase will go to the children. A calorie-challenged quadriplegic needs a scone like William Burroughs needs more heroin. Buy one for the next person, she asks? Sure, I tell her. It's an odd suggestion, but not a bad one at all, and the middle-aged woman who gets the free chocolate chip cookie thanks me profusely. I am a good guy, uncritically, inadvertently, good. And now a good guy heading home, perhaps to bed, but actually to the raised bed, the one currently warming the spinach plants. Just call me Lucky. If it was good enough for Beckett, it's good enough for me.
When Road Runner bonks Wile Coyote on the head with a giant mallet we laugh. Why? Blue stars, a halo of them, circle Coyote's head, while his eyes roll back in their sockets, his canine head lolling. Or, in another scenario, Road Runner, wielding a mallet 10 times his size, pounds Coyote into the ground, only a few strokes required. His situation now compounded, Coyote is well beyond incapacitated, half buried as well as semicomatose. Trapped and incapable of action, that is the joke. Precisely why this seems funny...the reasons are elusive. Maybe we know that under the surface everyone is capable of being little more than incapable. All it takes is a few nights in Hawaii. But I digress.
Or do I? This is the opportunity, or the terror, of a lifetime. Really, I have nothing to digress from. Each day dawns blank and agenda-free. Because I have a primal fear of the inchoate.... Well, it's not easy being...easy. Have a gentle day, Jane will say. The word 'gentle' rings in all directions. Mostly it reverberates with mystery and the unfamiliar. In the end, this advice for the day becomes the agenda, the destination. Only after hours of wandering about, metaphorically, amid the day's distractions does it rise, the gentleness or its possibility.
All of life's answers are to be found in and around Menlo Park's main street. Certainly, any matters involving time. For time is what I have put into this place, or what it has taken from me. Mad Mary is proceeding along the street, her cheeks simultaneously rouged and blackened, as for a stage urchin. Her shopping cart, piled skyhigh with blankets, an endless supply of sweaters with holes, and doubtless a certain cache of food, sits abandoned. God knows where she is headed. Perhaps Peet's, where I have just departed. She makes no eye contact, but that is nothing new. Most people don't. Something about a wheelchair, being just below the conventional sightline, dangerously below the conventional functionality...well, it all adds up to a kind of invisibility. Though I am hardly alone in this matter.
The homeless people outside Draegers Supermarket may number no more than one or two, but they have reached a similar state of transparency. I don't see them. Actually, I don't pay attention to them. In some strange way they even annoy me. Perhaps it's because I don't give them cash. I don't give them the time of day, truth be known. They pull at my guilt strings. Surely they have something better to do, although what that would be eludes me. But they should be doing something, my German Jewish chromosomes tell me.
Craziness, that is my other diagnosis. One would have to be mentally deranged to sit outside, rain and shine, collecting handouts from Silicon Valley shoppers. Judgments, protective judgments, attitudes I adopt to distance myself from...the simple down and out facts of many human lives. Many more these days.
Paul, my once-a-week volunteer, accompanies me to Peet's on some Tuesdays. I like the company and occasionally get to play mentor to my 30-year-old companion. Above all, morning company provides a buffer against that nervous thing just out of reach, my naturally panicky sense of abandonment. Oh, says Paul, as we stride past the Draegers car park. Hello there. He is speaking to the middle-aged black woman who is forever outside the market's entrance, waiting in the cold while the electric doors whoosh open and close Paul kneels to achieve her height. Doesn't he know her, he asks? Didn't she used to wait outside the Whole Foods market in Redwood City? Yes, she tells him. Paul knows her story. She has had some medical problem. She is on a waiting list for a housing nonprofit. Paul chats about the latter, acknowledging how long it takes, wishing her well. In the end, he gives her a hug. Paul, emissary of the Catholic Worker House, somehow on loan to me via Jewish Family Services...well, this morning he is mentoring me. Setting an example. The woman has a name, Josephine. Paul knows this, because he has asked. He has not given her alms but recognition. A hug. Good luck, Josephine. Whatever you are doing with your sign and your cup outside on this February day, good luck.
Thing is, Mad Mary was most certainly heading to Peet's to use the toilet. She doesn't linger there, eyeball the Godiva chocolate or consider the Italian espresso machines for sale. Just a quick hit, in and out. But it always disturbs me. Just as the surly, rude homeless guy from the park across the street unsettles me when he does exactly the same thing. My recently deceased friend Clint had no compunctions about saying hello to this guy, even attempting to engage him in talk. Even lunch. Clint once gave him half his sandwich. Why, I asked? Clint shrugged. He really didn't want it, he said.
When I catch the occasional reflection of myself in the retail plate glass along Santa Cruz Avenue, the larger truth half emerges. No matter how hard I try, something in me is profoundly slumped. I have become one of those wheelchair people. Slightly distorted, things musculoskeletal permanently awry. I am an oddity myself, one of the street people, like it or not. Downtrodden or survivor? Frequently I cannot tell. About me, or them, or us...now uncertain as to the distinction.
Lunch with Alan. A regular occurrence. We have Jewish guy talk. Which is to say, the big questions mixed with irony. Also sushi. We always build in time for cappuccino, and being short on time Alan drives the few blocks to Peet's, while I floor my wheelchair, bouncing towards caffeination at maximum warp. Something opens. Possibly it's the sky, the fiercest of rain clouds forever massing, the grayest of fists...unclenching, the sky's blue piercing the day.
I stop my wheelchair en route to coffee and have another go at the schmutz. This may not be the wisest place to halt. I am not on the sidewalk but the street. The traffic and occasional driveway backings of Live Oak Avenue are not to be taken for granted. But I don't cae. I spattered something, perhaps soy sauce, on my trousers, and now I apply a fingertip of spit to out the damned spot. Actually, two. The ridiculousness of this never occurs to me. The spot is tiny, the half paralysis of my body massive. Not to worry, for it seems to be gone. The spot, not the body.
It would be overstating things to say that the caffeine gives me a new lease on life. But not by much. I even remember the important thing I forgot. The cartridge for my computer printer. I have important things to print. Principally exposés of America's demented right wing in salon.com, gratuitous preaching to the choir, but I don't care.
The salesperson who sees me struggling with the door to Village Stationers is someone I know. She lets me in, follows my wheelchair to the counter, and we begin tracking down the HP printer and its appropriate cartridge. There is a universe of these things, it seems. The woman makes a trip to the shelf, then another, finally resorting to a paper catalog. I offer to help, flipping through the pages. There it is. She thanks me, apologizing for her waning eyesight. A quick exchange of the MasterCharge, and business is done.
But not quite. I ask about Ernst, her husband. It has been a long time since I last inquired. We have a long history, if I think about it. Once, during my second bachelorhood...between marriages...I rode an adult tricycle about the lesser streets of Menlo Park. And on Saturday mornings I was often in the company of a couple of guys out for a walk. Major exercise for me, minor for them, and outings always ended at the Swiss Bakery. Run by Ernst and his wife. He was a master baker, Ernst, displaying wonders such as a chocolate Torah cake for someone's bar mitzvah.
How many years ago? More than 12, I think. Another neuromuscular era for me, another metabolic one too, for eating Swiss pastries every Saturday would now be unwise. Not that that was an option for long. The bakery went broke. Ernst, his wife told me when I ran into her every year or so, had taken to drinking. He had no job. But, when was it, in the last few years had she said something about Ernst finding work? Either way, here we are at the Village Stationers cash register, me about to go. This woman's job behind the counter reminds me of the fate of the farm family in Jane Smiley's 'A Thousand Acres.' How is Ernst, I ask?
Something in me already knows. Oh, the woman says. He died more than three years ago. Because I am ready for this, the other thing comes easily, the saying I am sorry, but not overdoing it. Having been on the receiving end of this exchange, it is all easy. The bakery's failure broke his heart, she says, and Ernst never recovered. I understand about the failure of great works, the failure of life, and the schmutz on my trousers is long forgotten. As the woman opens the door to let me out, I wonder about telling her. After all, the whole Swiss Bakery era predated Marlou, our meeting, our marriage, our death's parting. But I mention it anyway, that my wife died not long ago. Or maybe not long enough. On 2 April, it will have been two years. And I am readjusting from my trip to Hawaii, or maybe recovering parts of the experience. How hard it was. Marlou's parents both brave, having lost their family. All that is gone, while sun and wind and wave continue. I clutch the printer cartridge against my paralyzed fingers and wheel home.
Or do I? This is the opportunity, or the terror, of a lifetime. Really, I have nothing to digress from. Each day dawns blank and agenda-free. Because I have a primal fear of the inchoate.... Well, it's not easy being...easy. Have a gentle day, Jane will say. The word 'gentle' rings in all directions. Mostly it reverberates with mystery and the unfamiliar. In the end, this advice for the day becomes the agenda, the destination. Only after hours of wandering about, metaphorically, amid the day's distractions does it rise, the gentleness or its possibility.
All of life's answers are to be found in and around Menlo Park's main street. Certainly, any matters involving time. For time is what I have put into this place, or what it has taken from me. Mad Mary is proceeding along the street, her cheeks simultaneously rouged and blackened, as for a stage urchin. Her shopping cart, piled skyhigh with blankets, an endless supply of sweaters with holes, and doubtless a certain cache of food, sits abandoned. God knows where she is headed. Perhaps Peet's, where I have just departed. She makes no eye contact, but that is nothing new. Most people don't. Something about a wheelchair, being just below the conventional sightline, dangerously below the conventional functionality...well, it all adds up to a kind of invisibility. Though I am hardly alone in this matter.
The homeless people outside Draegers Supermarket may number no more than one or two, but they have reached a similar state of transparency. I don't see them. Actually, I don't pay attention to them. In some strange way they even annoy me. Perhaps it's because I don't give them cash. I don't give them the time of day, truth be known. They pull at my guilt strings. Surely they have something better to do, although what that would be eludes me. But they should be doing something, my German Jewish chromosomes tell me.
Craziness, that is my other diagnosis. One would have to be mentally deranged to sit outside, rain and shine, collecting handouts from Silicon Valley shoppers. Judgments, protective judgments, attitudes I adopt to distance myself from...the simple down and out facts of many human lives. Many more these days.
Paul, my once-a-week volunteer, accompanies me to Peet's on some Tuesdays. I like the company and occasionally get to play mentor to my 30-year-old companion. Above all, morning company provides a buffer against that nervous thing just out of reach, my naturally panicky sense of abandonment. Oh, says Paul, as we stride past the Draegers car park. Hello there. He is speaking to the middle-aged black woman who is forever outside the market's entrance, waiting in the cold while the electric doors whoosh open and close Paul kneels to achieve her height. Doesn't he know her, he asks? Didn't she used to wait outside the Whole Foods market in Redwood City? Yes, she tells him. Paul knows her story. She has had some medical problem. She is on a waiting list for a housing nonprofit. Paul chats about the latter, acknowledging how long it takes, wishing her well. In the end, he gives her a hug. Paul, emissary of the Catholic Worker House, somehow on loan to me via Jewish Family Services...well, this morning he is mentoring me. Setting an example. The woman has a name, Josephine. Paul knows this, because he has asked. He has not given her alms but recognition. A hug. Good luck, Josephine. Whatever you are doing with your sign and your cup outside on this February day, good luck.
Thing is, Mad Mary was most certainly heading to Peet's to use the toilet. She doesn't linger there, eyeball the Godiva chocolate or consider the Italian espresso machines for sale. Just a quick hit, in and out. But it always disturbs me. Just as the surly, rude homeless guy from the park across the street unsettles me when he does exactly the same thing. My recently deceased friend Clint had no compunctions about saying hello to this guy, even attempting to engage him in talk. Even lunch. Clint once gave him half his sandwich. Why, I asked? Clint shrugged. He really didn't want it, he said.
When I catch the occasional reflection of myself in the retail plate glass along Santa Cruz Avenue, the larger truth half emerges. No matter how hard I try, something in me is profoundly slumped. I have become one of those wheelchair people. Slightly distorted, things musculoskeletal permanently awry. I am an oddity myself, one of the street people, like it or not. Downtrodden or survivor? Frequently I cannot tell. About me, or them, or us...now uncertain as to the distinction.
Lunch with Alan. A regular occurrence. We have Jewish guy talk. Which is to say, the big questions mixed with irony. Also sushi. We always build in time for cappuccino, and being short on time Alan drives the few blocks to Peet's, while I floor my wheelchair, bouncing towards caffeination at maximum warp. Something opens. Possibly it's the sky, the fiercest of rain clouds forever massing, the grayest of fists...unclenching, the sky's blue piercing the day.
I stop my wheelchair en route to coffee and have another go at the schmutz. This may not be the wisest place to halt. I am not on the sidewalk but the street. The traffic and occasional driveway backings of Live Oak Avenue are not to be taken for granted. But I don't cae. I spattered something, perhaps soy sauce, on my trousers, and now I apply a fingertip of spit to out the damned spot. Actually, two. The ridiculousness of this never occurs to me. The spot is tiny, the half paralysis of my body massive. Not to worry, for it seems to be gone. The spot, not the body.
It would be overstating things to say that the caffeine gives me a new lease on life. But not by much. I even remember the important thing I forgot. The cartridge for my computer printer. I have important things to print. Principally exposés of America's demented right wing in salon.com, gratuitous preaching to the choir, but I don't care.
The salesperson who sees me struggling with the door to Village Stationers is someone I know. She lets me in, follows my wheelchair to the counter, and we begin tracking down the HP printer and its appropriate cartridge. There is a universe of these things, it seems. The woman makes a trip to the shelf, then another, finally resorting to a paper catalog. I offer to help, flipping through the pages. There it is. She thanks me, apologizing for her waning eyesight. A quick exchange of the MasterCharge, and business is done.
But not quite. I ask about Ernst, her husband. It has been a long time since I last inquired. We have a long history, if I think about it. Once, during my second bachelorhood...between marriages...I rode an adult tricycle about the lesser streets of Menlo Park. And on Saturday mornings I was often in the company of a couple of guys out for a walk. Major exercise for me, minor for them, and outings always ended at the Swiss Bakery. Run by Ernst and his wife. He was a master baker, Ernst, displaying wonders such as a chocolate Torah cake for someone's bar mitzvah.
How many years ago? More than 12, I think. Another neuromuscular era for me, another metabolic one too, for eating Swiss pastries every Saturday would now be unwise. Not that that was an option for long. The bakery went broke. Ernst, his wife told me when I ran into her every year or so, had taken to drinking. He had no job. But, when was it, in the last few years had she said something about Ernst finding work? Either way, here we are at the Village Stationers cash register, me about to go. This woman's job behind the counter reminds me of the fate of the farm family in Jane Smiley's 'A Thousand Acres.' How is Ernst, I ask?
Something in me already knows. Oh, the woman says. He died more than three years ago. Because I am ready for this, the other thing comes easily, the saying I am sorry, but not overdoing it. Having been on the receiving end of this exchange, it is all easy. The bakery's failure broke his heart, she says, and Ernst never recovered. I understand about the failure of great works, the failure of life, and the schmutz on my trousers is long forgotten. As the woman opens the door to let me out, I wonder about telling her. After all, the whole Swiss Bakery era predated Marlou, our meeting, our marriage, our death's parting. But I mention it anyway, that my wife died not long ago. Or maybe not long enough. On 2 April, it will have been two years. And I am readjusting from my trip to Hawaii, or maybe recovering parts of the experience. How hard it was. Marlou's parents both brave, having lost their family. All that is gone, while sun and wind and wave continue. I clutch the printer cartridge against my paralyzed fingers and wheel home.
