April 2011 Archives
It may be no country for old men, but the old predominate anyway. As for young men, something about the place makes them invisible. Arizona. Tempe, to be exact. My sister and I have set out on a walk. This has been a most enjoyable weekend visit. Instead of feeling obliged to dash about the area doing things, we have spent much time at the home of my sister and brother-in-law having good talks. And now we are out for a stroll. Me in my semi-portable electric wheelchair, my sister walking beside. My head is full of human observations and ideas, such is my sister's world. Now there is this world, a series of suburban neighborhood streets, the late afternoon ebbing, desert air in the upper 70s, the blueness of sky startling in its clarity. Elongated strips of white cloud, the wake of high-altitude airliners over Arizona, disperse in parallel. After crossing the first street without a curb ramp, I steer my wheelchair into the pavement.
Things are abloom. As a desert boy, I have a feel for this. The miracle of flowers in the harshest of life conditions. Not that I am accustomed to such variety. We had one or two species of cactus annually blooming about my boyhood home near Palm Springs. We also had a lot of creosote and transitional shrubs of the chaparral zone. This is true Sonoran Desert, and cactus of every imaginable variety are looking downright flagrant, petals of fluorescent pink and coral appearing right in front of my sister's house. The blossoms of cactus seem like afterthoughts, protuberances as unplanned as warts marching along the green spiky pads. Or appearing at the end of interwoven barbs on cholla. Like flowering pimples on saguaros. And then there are the trees. The palo verdes wave their yellow blossoms in the desert breeze, branches green, foliage seemingly absent...waxy structures substituting for leaves in this arid, heat-blasted land of almost no rainfall.
We talk of schools. My sister has recently won an award for educational research. She seems pleasantly surprised, half puzzled, half buoyed by the experience. She is worried about work. Both of them, my sister and brother-in-law, are academics with a social justice background in the broadest sense. These days, they're worried. They can't be alone, judging by the bars on so many of the houses in this neighborhood. Is crime prevalent here, I ask my sister? She shrugs. Who can say? Crime is everywhere, and today there is probably more than there was a few years ago. Jail-like gratings over windows, signs proclaiming frequent security patrols by this or that company. Would one describe this as a lower middle-class neighborhood? Not only does no one know anymore, but no one can predict. The corporate state having tightened our belts for us, as Cornel West puts it, 'we are all niggers now.'
This is the Sunbelt. Just look up. This day's sun, what is left of it, shines unimpeded. The only clouds seem to be artificial ones, left by mistake by people flying 30,000 feet above. At the stop sign my sister cautions me while we watch cars approach on Hardy Avenue. I am inclined to dart across the traffic several times, for the traffic is hardly there. This is an arterial street, but the cars are few. As we continue through the neighborhood, traffic is nonexistent. There is a ghostly feel to everything. Yes, this is a Sunday. But it is also the prime tourist season, still. No one seems to be moving. We pass one elderly couple on foot. They say hello. Except for Hardy Avenue, this is the first traffic, foot or vehicular, I have seen in twenty minutes. We are now passing newer houses, some small Spanish-style bungalows, which are condominiums. Many have signs on them. For sale, for rent, for good or ill. Housing prices have collapsed here. They keep dropping. No one seems to know how much further they may fall. Staring at one of these single-storey condominiums, admiring the hacienda arrangement of inner courtyard, walled garden, it occurs to me that faced with the choice, buy a new wheelchair van or purchase one of these homes, the expense would be the same.
I shake my head to clear it. What on earth would I do with a home here? For a quadriplegic who does not sweat, the place is uninhabitable for five months of the year. For the rest? The facts are simple enough. No one knows how far things will drop. No one knows what will happen to the neighborhood, this one or any other. No one knows lots of things people living here probably cannot afford to contemplate. Such as water. This is not a good time to read Reiser's famous Cadillac Desert.
Too much of Arizona life has already proved unsustainable. Life here seems to have been predicated on so much that was demonstrably shallow. The endless building of homes, hotels, shopping centers, golf courses, because of the endless influx of people seeking warmer weather. The endless has ended. People are trying to hang on to their homes, the ones they live in, not the second ones they can no longer afford. The future and the present seem as rootless as the vegetation. But not entirely. Now we pass a home that dates from the 1940s, 1930s, even 1920s. Spanish-style, of course, and with lots of land around it. My sister says that the owners keep a few miniature sheep. At this, I say nothing. The thought is as bizarre as Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess. Besides, I am aware that this folding, portable wheelchair is now far from my sister's house and I am getting worried. About what? I can't really say, so keep going. Now passing a park, a sign from the City of Tempe proclaiming its dominion over an expanse of dried pummeled grass, picnic tables and playground equipment.
One street over, we find richer looking homes. Are these people year-long residents or just more affluent winter folk? No one can say, because no one can see them. They are still invisible, the neighborhood folk. One can only conclude that in Arizona there are lots of streets, but not much street life. It is easy enough to see what the place looks like. Hard to define the life in it.
It is easy enough to find my sister's life, for it is abundant. Friends visit frequently. She reciprocates. Because it is harder to find the life, certainly for a visitor, Arizona's upheavals appear more stark. Beyond the belief in endless home construction, endless resort expansion, endless visitors dropping into Sky Harbor Airport en route to endless hotel stays, there was that other thing, the endless importation of labor. For years, Arizonans have lived an idyll of high winter temperatures and low year-round wages. Along with cheap water, the state's cheap workers were imported. In boom times, no one asked any questions about the technicalities. The busboys, the greens keepers, the maids, the shelf stockers, the nannies, the harvesters, all of them had brown skin, spoke Spanish and cost next to nothing. During the non-work hours their activities were unknown. Now that Arizona has entered into its non-work years, the labor force has been discovered to have been procreating all this time. Who would have guessed?
On the way back to my sister's house, there are still no pedestrians, absolutely no cars on her street. The day is mild, prime time for activity before the summer furnace flattens everything. And yet everything already seems flattened. Not even summer time, and the livin' seems too easily invisible.
Things are abloom. As a desert boy, I have a feel for this. The miracle of flowers in the harshest of life conditions. Not that I am accustomed to such variety. We had one or two species of cactus annually blooming about my boyhood home near Palm Springs. We also had a lot of creosote and transitional shrubs of the chaparral zone. This is true Sonoran Desert, and cactus of every imaginable variety are looking downright flagrant, petals of fluorescent pink and coral appearing right in front of my sister's house. The blossoms of cactus seem like afterthoughts, protuberances as unplanned as warts marching along the green spiky pads. Or appearing at the end of interwoven barbs on cholla. Like flowering pimples on saguaros. And then there are the trees. The palo verdes wave their yellow blossoms in the desert breeze, branches green, foliage seemingly absent...waxy structures substituting for leaves in this arid, heat-blasted land of almost no rainfall.
We talk of schools. My sister has recently won an award for educational research. She seems pleasantly surprised, half puzzled, half buoyed by the experience. She is worried about work. Both of them, my sister and brother-in-law, are academics with a social justice background in the broadest sense. These days, they're worried. They can't be alone, judging by the bars on so many of the houses in this neighborhood. Is crime prevalent here, I ask my sister? She shrugs. Who can say? Crime is everywhere, and today there is probably more than there was a few years ago. Jail-like gratings over windows, signs proclaiming frequent security patrols by this or that company. Would one describe this as a lower middle-class neighborhood? Not only does no one know anymore, but no one can predict. The corporate state having tightened our belts for us, as Cornel West puts it, 'we are all niggers now.'
This is the Sunbelt. Just look up. This day's sun, what is left of it, shines unimpeded. The only clouds seem to be artificial ones, left by mistake by people flying 30,000 feet above. At the stop sign my sister cautions me while we watch cars approach on Hardy Avenue. I am inclined to dart across the traffic several times, for the traffic is hardly there. This is an arterial street, but the cars are few. As we continue through the neighborhood, traffic is nonexistent. There is a ghostly feel to everything. Yes, this is a Sunday. But it is also the prime tourist season, still. No one seems to be moving. We pass one elderly couple on foot. They say hello. Except for Hardy Avenue, this is the first traffic, foot or vehicular, I have seen in twenty minutes. We are now passing newer houses, some small Spanish-style bungalows, which are condominiums. Many have signs on them. For sale, for rent, for good or ill. Housing prices have collapsed here. They keep dropping. No one seems to know how much further they may fall. Staring at one of these single-storey condominiums, admiring the hacienda arrangement of inner courtyard, walled garden, it occurs to me that faced with the choice, buy a new wheelchair van or purchase one of these homes, the expense would be the same.
I shake my head to clear it. What on earth would I do with a home here? For a quadriplegic who does not sweat, the place is uninhabitable for five months of the year. For the rest? The facts are simple enough. No one knows how far things will drop. No one knows what will happen to the neighborhood, this one or any other. No one knows lots of things people living here probably cannot afford to contemplate. Such as water. This is not a good time to read Reiser's famous Cadillac Desert.
Too much of Arizona life has already proved unsustainable. Life here seems to have been predicated on so much that was demonstrably shallow. The endless building of homes, hotels, shopping centers, golf courses, because of the endless influx of people seeking warmer weather. The endless has ended. People are trying to hang on to their homes, the ones they live in, not the second ones they can no longer afford. The future and the present seem as rootless as the vegetation. But not entirely. Now we pass a home that dates from the 1940s, 1930s, even 1920s. Spanish-style, of course, and with lots of land around it. My sister says that the owners keep a few miniature sheep. At this, I say nothing. The thought is as bizarre as Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess. Besides, I am aware that this folding, portable wheelchair is now far from my sister's house and I am getting worried. About what? I can't really say, so keep going. Now passing a park, a sign from the City of Tempe proclaiming its dominion over an expanse of dried pummeled grass, picnic tables and playground equipment.
One street over, we find richer looking homes. Are these people year-long residents or just more affluent winter folk? No one can say, because no one can see them. They are still invisible, the neighborhood folk. One can only conclude that in Arizona there are lots of streets, but not much street life. It is easy enough to see what the place looks like. Hard to define the life in it.
It is easy enough to find my sister's life, for it is abundant. Friends visit frequently. She reciprocates. Because it is harder to find the life, certainly for a visitor, Arizona's upheavals appear more stark. Beyond the belief in endless home construction, endless resort expansion, endless visitors dropping into Sky Harbor Airport en route to endless hotel stays, there was that other thing, the endless importation of labor. For years, Arizonans have lived an idyll of high winter temperatures and low year-round wages. Along with cheap water, the state's cheap workers were imported. In boom times, no one asked any questions about the technicalities. The busboys, the greens keepers, the maids, the shelf stockers, the nannies, the harvesters, all of them had brown skin, spoke Spanish and cost next to nothing. During the non-work hours their activities were unknown. Now that Arizona has entered into its non-work years, the labor force has been discovered to have been procreating all this time. Who would have guessed?
On the way back to my sister's house, there are still no pedestrians, absolutely no cars on her street. The day is mild, prime time for activity before the summer furnace flattens everything. And yet everything already seems flattened. Not even summer time, and the livin' seems too easily invisible.
With the general sense of neuromuscular time running out, I couldn't resist the opportunity to have a car trip, overland, overnight, over before it began...my brother and sister-in-law being the time-efficient pair they are...to Walla Walla, Washington. So, it wasn't long before the orthopedic stresses of the road were behind me and I was in this strange little town in the middle of agricultural nowhere. Walla Walla. One of those names like Cucamonga no one can utter seriously. Reminding me of a German Jewish relation's quiet muttering over the London Times' account of African genocide, that if these people want to be taken seriously, they would not call themselves Hutus and Tutsis. Too late for that in Walla Walla. Nothing to do but wallow in Walla Walla.
An intact 1920s center of town, all brick and Midwestern looking, now dominated by wine tasting rooms, upscale restaurants and patisseries. And at the edge of town, agricultural and pastoral reality, wheatfields undulating with greenery cropped finer than a golf course, the snow capped Blue Mountains in the distance. This is where my nephew rides his bicycle during workouts. Everything is a workout for him, I am convinced. But that's another story. For now, driving through this budding velvet drapery of a landscape, I was imagining myself there. I was quite a bike rider during my university days. I would have come here too, cycling through the landscape at maximum warp, freshness and renewal the order of the day.
And in my mind, I am just emerging from Alan's cab at Heathrow Airport, my reason for calling him again and again unclear, except that he is familiar, I have his taxi driver's card, and much about travel is frighteningly erratic, particularly for a mostly paralyzed, aging man.... So having rolled backwards down the taxi's wheelchair ramp to the curb, there I am in the middle of the airport waste, feeling how transitional this moment is. My last moment in Britain. But already, the airport's crush of the world's population has so diluted this few miles of UK as to make the locale unclear, vague as a shopping mall. Which creates a sort of opening. An aperture into what, I do not know. Truly, one is neither here nor there. The 'here' is all frenetic, earnest and anxious, passengers gnawing at the restraining bit like horses at the start...of what? It could not be called a race, not really, but perhaps a steeplechase in which there are no winners. Getting through security. Which only serves to make everyone feel more insecure somehow. Hapless inspectors asking hopeless questions, anyone discerning aware of how futile this will all prove to be, fighting the last battle, while some fiend somewhere is planning to poison the world's cafeteria trays. As for Alan, I still have his card in my passport case. He leads me here, to this patch of concrete outside Terminal 1. In a moment I will join the lemmings rush, of course, and a few moments after that find myself in California. But for now there is this. The puzzle of things. What happens in the space between here and there. This is a moment to take stock. Or just take it all in. This late age of human experience. How it is possible to live in one world and regularly partake of another. And what comes of this tension? Except more tension. Not that one needs to worry, because the travel gears are in motion, one of the Heathrow porters already pushing my bags into the future.
Where was I? In the general vicinity of Pasco, Washington, my brother at the wheel, heading home. The route is taking us north, mostly along the Columbia River, and for a wild, even primal, stretch, the Hanford Reserve. One of the Manhattan Project sites from World War II. A less obtrusive radiation disaster, waste gradually seeping into the river, reputedly home to radioactive bees and jackrabbits. But famously off-limits for so long that this huge tract is one of the most unspoiled, pristine stretches of land in the western United States. I am in transit with my brother and his wife. We do not talk much. Perhaps all of us feel this tension between here and there. Is it the dangers of the road? They are not slight, after all. They are not even predictable. Just last week, my brother tells me, an avalanche tumbled atop a family not unlike ours driving the next stretch of road over the mountains.
For now, the Washington desert keeps opening up vistas, odd ones. There is Seattle, Puget Sound with its islands and orcas, snowy mountains...beyond which is this. A dry, cold, desert. Even the vast Columbia River seems out of place. The shore does not look riparian, at least not to me. Shouldn't there be cottonwoods and other trees hugging the banks, sucking up the precious water in these arid lands? Apparently not. The river ends, and the desert banks began. That's it. As for the mountains, so there is no avalanche, there is snow falling on 17 April. The snowy slopes look packed, waterlogged, ready to slide or melt or both. The huge lake along the motorway is frozen. And an hour later we are home.
Now the sense of in between is less mysterious. I am in between here and Jane. Also, not insignificantly, I am in between here and death. By definition, a morbid thought. And why not? This awareness arises not only from my annual reminder of Marlou's passing, but from the cross-country drive. How many of these do I want to do before it's over? There is a limit, of that I am certain. Everything runs out. And watching the great sweep of roadless desert rise east of the highway, climbing into the mountains at Hanford, the very emptiness and inhospitable fact of the land presents puzzle and promise. There is still wildness in America, key to our national soul. And it thrives, give or take a gene or two, right where things have gone so terribly wrong. Human control overreached, the next acts unfolding regardless. Just as I have overreached my stamina, it becomes apparent trudging up my brother's stairs. Time for bed, someone else's, but tomorrow my own, and most fortunately not alone.
An intact 1920s center of town, all brick and Midwestern looking, now dominated by wine tasting rooms, upscale restaurants and patisseries. And at the edge of town, agricultural and pastoral reality, wheatfields undulating with greenery cropped finer than a golf course, the snow capped Blue Mountains in the distance. This is where my nephew rides his bicycle during workouts. Everything is a workout for him, I am convinced. But that's another story. For now, driving through this budding velvet drapery of a landscape, I was imagining myself there. I was quite a bike rider during my university days. I would have come here too, cycling through the landscape at maximum warp, freshness and renewal the order of the day.
And in my mind, I am just emerging from Alan's cab at Heathrow Airport, my reason for calling him again and again unclear, except that he is familiar, I have his taxi driver's card, and much about travel is frighteningly erratic, particularly for a mostly paralyzed, aging man.... So having rolled backwards down the taxi's wheelchair ramp to the curb, there I am in the middle of the airport waste, feeling how transitional this moment is. My last moment in Britain. But already, the airport's crush of the world's population has so diluted this few miles of UK as to make the locale unclear, vague as a shopping mall. Which creates a sort of opening. An aperture into what, I do not know. Truly, one is neither here nor there. The 'here' is all frenetic, earnest and anxious, passengers gnawing at the restraining bit like horses at the start...of what? It could not be called a race, not really, but perhaps a steeplechase in which there are no winners. Getting through security. Which only serves to make everyone feel more insecure somehow. Hapless inspectors asking hopeless questions, anyone discerning aware of how futile this will all prove to be, fighting the last battle, while some fiend somewhere is planning to poison the world's cafeteria trays. As for Alan, I still have his card in my passport case. He leads me here, to this patch of concrete outside Terminal 1. In a moment I will join the lemmings rush, of course, and a few moments after that find myself in California. But for now there is this. The puzzle of things. What happens in the space between here and there. This is a moment to take stock. Or just take it all in. This late age of human experience. How it is possible to live in one world and regularly partake of another. And what comes of this tension? Except more tension. Not that one needs to worry, because the travel gears are in motion, one of the Heathrow porters already pushing my bags into the future.
Where was I? In the general vicinity of Pasco, Washington, my brother at the wheel, heading home. The route is taking us north, mostly along the Columbia River, and for a wild, even primal, stretch, the Hanford Reserve. One of the Manhattan Project sites from World War II. A less obtrusive radiation disaster, waste gradually seeping into the river, reputedly home to radioactive bees and jackrabbits. But famously off-limits for so long that this huge tract is one of the most unspoiled, pristine stretches of land in the western United States. I am in transit with my brother and his wife. We do not talk much. Perhaps all of us feel this tension between here and there. Is it the dangers of the road? They are not slight, after all. They are not even predictable. Just last week, my brother tells me, an avalanche tumbled atop a family not unlike ours driving the next stretch of road over the mountains.
For now, the Washington desert keeps opening up vistas, odd ones. There is Seattle, Puget Sound with its islands and orcas, snowy mountains...beyond which is this. A dry, cold, desert. Even the vast Columbia River seems out of place. The shore does not look riparian, at least not to me. Shouldn't there be cottonwoods and other trees hugging the banks, sucking up the precious water in these arid lands? Apparently not. The river ends, and the desert banks began. That's it. As for the mountains, so there is no avalanche, there is snow falling on 17 April. The snowy slopes look packed, waterlogged, ready to slide or melt or both. The huge lake along the motorway is frozen. And an hour later we are home.
Now the sense of in between is less mysterious. I am in between here and Jane. Also, not insignificantly, I am in between here and death. By definition, a morbid thought. And why not? This awareness arises not only from my annual reminder of Marlou's passing, but from the cross-country drive. How many of these do I want to do before it's over? There is a limit, of that I am certain. Everything runs out. And watching the great sweep of roadless desert rise east of the highway, climbing into the mountains at Hanford, the very emptiness and inhospitable fact of the land presents puzzle and promise. There is still wildness in America, key to our national soul. And it thrives, give or take a gene or two, right where things have gone so terribly wrong. Human control overreached, the next acts unfolding regardless. Just as I have overreached my stamina, it becomes apparent trudging up my brother's stairs. Time for bed, someone else's, but tomorrow my own, and most fortunately not alone.
In an era that tends to over sexualize things, the smiling attentions of the twentysomething barista at Peet's are not to be taken for granted. Nothing by way of attention from a young woman is ever to be taken for granted at age 64. Will you still need me, will you still feed me? Thing is, I do have special needs. Very special. The need to have someone carry my brimming café mocha to a distant table, the need to have loving attention, the need to feel needed, particularly this morning.
Jane could not stay the night. Something was going on with her daughter, so Jane rushed home. Abandoning me to the forces of...what? Emptiness, mostly. And cellular memory. Growing up with a mother so nervous and preoccupied that she might as well have been elsewhere. She was elsewhere, emotionally. While I was all too present. Being present, as the life mystery gradually reveals, is both curse and asset. Trouble is, the latter has only become apparent late in life. 'Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,' to quote Grace Paley.
Thing about the girl at Peet's, beyond the soft young skin, bursting breasts, and smile...is that she remembers. That I like a sprinkle of chocolate atop my cappuccino. That I like a spoon. That I like her, goes without saying, although I do my best to be, well, discrete. By which I really mean that my need for personal, loving attention is too heartbreakingly real this morning. Just as her kindness is too heartbreakingly generous. This is what my life is all about. Learning to be deserving. Learning, period.
Jane having abandoned me to the forces of the night, I actually slept pretty well until about 5 AM when the Wild Things gathered force. An hour or so later, I gave up, conducted myself through the morning's bathroom rituals...until Jane blew in to help me get dressed. Not that I can't do this on my own. But, it occurred to me this very morning, I have several decades of doing this on my own. Personal attention. Intimate tending to the body and its daily needs. Socks. One must make a sock choice, which I generally shrug off. But not this morning. Warm ones. Seemingly silly in mid-April, but not if I reside in my own body. Old. Paralyzed. Circulation marginal. The day cool. Let us dress in woolen socks. That I readily get with the mothering program, not insisting on my macho ability to brave the mild California elements on my own, represents a sort of progress.
For mothering is not static, it seems. Give the quality rein, and it sets to trotting. Where? Ask Bixby, Jane's rescued dog. Still traumatized, permanently perplexed, yet under Jane's ministrations, he has taken to exuberance. Never mind that Bixby is not always clear where he is, what happens next, and so on. Just watch him prance about my living room. He is happy. Happy to be a dog. Happy to be Jane's dog, not to mention Eleanor's dog. Like mother like daughter. If the dogs get ecstatic around Jane, they go suborbital around her daughter. Not static, mothering.
Not static, quadriplegia, so one must keep moving. Incredibly, even on this morning, there is time for a physiotherapeutic walk before Jane goes to work. As we stroll, she talks about her job. One of her parishioners needs help but tends to drive helpers away. What she really needs, Jane observes, is good mothering. She is mother to the world, I tell Jane. Her response comes quickly, firmly. Nope. That is precisely what she knows she is not. I take this with a grain of salt. For this is my opportunity at mothering. Who else will mother Jane? Mentally, I take us to Mother Harbin Hot Springs. Mother Hawaii. And Jane takes me up and down the footpath. And because the mother spirit is free to do as it will, I get surprising advice.
My spirits are not the most robust, having awakened too early, Marlou's deathly presence never far these nights, particularly in the bedroom. Another day. This particular one involving a complex and rather arduous series of transit experiences, not the least of which involves a ferry boat...all to have lunch in Marin County. Not sure I'm really keen on this Long Days Journey into Public Conveyance. Jane listens. Why not, she asks. What else are you going to do with your day except sit around and brood? Which is where it gets to, the mother experience, if one is lucky and has enough patience and enough time. Out of the nest. Free flight. Spread your fledgling wings while your mom...well, gets into something else. Not static. However strongly felt the need, it must keep moving, mothering. Or become smothering. While I become.... Who can say? At this point in life, becoming anything must be applauded.
Jane could not stay the night. Something was going on with her daughter, so Jane rushed home. Abandoning me to the forces of...what? Emptiness, mostly. And cellular memory. Growing up with a mother so nervous and preoccupied that she might as well have been elsewhere. She was elsewhere, emotionally. While I was all too present. Being present, as the life mystery gradually reveals, is both curse and asset. Trouble is, the latter has only become apparent late in life. 'Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,' to quote Grace Paley.
Thing about the girl at Peet's, beyond the soft young skin, bursting breasts, and smile...is that she remembers. That I like a sprinkle of chocolate atop my cappuccino. That I like a spoon. That I like her, goes without saying, although I do my best to be, well, discrete. By which I really mean that my need for personal, loving attention is too heartbreakingly real this morning. Just as her kindness is too heartbreakingly generous. This is what my life is all about. Learning to be deserving. Learning, period.
Jane having abandoned me to the forces of the night, I actually slept pretty well until about 5 AM when the Wild Things gathered force. An hour or so later, I gave up, conducted myself through the morning's bathroom rituals...until Jane blew in to help me get dressed. Not that I can't do this on my own. But, it occurred to me this very morning, I have several decades of doing this on my own. Personal attention. Intimate tending to the body and its daily needs. Socks. One must make a sock choice, which I generally shrug off. But not this morning. Warm ones. Seemingly silly in mid-April, but not if I reside in my own body. Old. Paralyzed. Circulation marginal. The day cool. Let us dress in woolen socks. That I readily get with the mothering program, not insisting on my macho ability to brave the mild California elements on my own, represents a sort of progress.
For mothering is not static, it seems. Give the quality rein, and it sets to trotting. Where? Ask Bixby, Jane's rescued dog. Still traumatized, permanently perplexed, yet under Jane's ministrations, he has taken to exuberance. Never mind that Bixby is not always clear where he is, what happens next, and so on. Just watch him prance about my living room. He is happy. Happy to be a dog. Happy to be Jane's dog, not to mention Eleanor's dog. Like mother like daughter. If the dogs get ecstatic around Jane, they go suborbital around her daughter. Not static, mothering.
Not static, quadriplegia, so one must keep moving. Incredibly, even on this morning, there is time for a physiotherapeutic walk before Jane goes to work. As we stroll, she talks about her job. One of her parishioners needs help but tends to drive helpers away. What she really needs, Jane observes, is good mothering. She is mother to the world, I tell Jane. Her response comes quickly, firmly. Nope. That is precisely what she knows she is not. I take this with a grain of salt. For this is my opportunity at mothering. Who else will mother Jane? Mentally, I take us to Mother Harbin Hot Springs. Mother Hawaii. And Jane takes me up and down the footpath. And because the mother spirit is free to do as it will, I get surprising advice.
My spirits are not the most robust, having awakened too early, Marlou's deathly presence never far these nights, particularly in the bedroom. Another day. This particular one involving a complex and rather arduous series of transit experiences, not the least of which involves a ferry boat...all to have lunch in Marin County. Not sure I'm really keen on this Long Days Journey into Public Conveyance. Jane listens. Why not, she asks. What else are you going to do with your day except sit around and brood? Which is where it gets to, the mother experience, if one is lucky and has enough patience and enough time. Out of the nest. Free flight. Spread your fledgling wings while your mom...well, gets into something else. Not static. However strongly felt the need, it must keep moving, mothering. Or become smothering. While I become.... Who can say? At this point in life, becoming anything must be applauded.
How would I manage? The essential fear, at least for me. How would I manage if something happened to my left arm, for example? This possibility came to me in the middle of the night. My grip felt weaker. And wasn't this the way it started at some point in the mid-1990s, the morning I crutched out to my car and found my right arm oddly weakened? Probably my briefcase gave it away. In those days, I could hold small bags, laundry, groceries, in the crook of my gripless right arm. True, the hand was out of neurological action. But the right biceps were still cranking along rather smartly. Until that morning when they weren't. And four neurologists later, it was finally determined to send a surgeon into my neck for a bit of orthopedic search and destroy. Which took care of the bone spurs squeezing off my nerve supply, but too late. And now, more than one and a half decades later, it all seems too late. At 3 AM, my grip has gone in every sense of the word. The bone spurs are at it again, I just know, for it started like this before, more or less, and what comes next....
Jane does. She helps me sit up. I ask for an exercise band and begin pulling the thing with my left arm. Funny thing, but the arm is fine. The fear is not, of course, and after another hour in the dark I am still awake. Some chamomile pills push me over the sleeping edge, for after all, I am now on the right side of things neuromuscular. All is well, or as well as things can be. Though the question does remain. How would I manage?
I am getting older, and things are getting harder, and if the left arm doesn't go, something else will. Perhaps nothing quite so vital, the arm supply being rather limited. Never mind. The fear is there. And for now, that is all I know. That it seems almost unthinkable, certainly unlivable, sustaining any more physical decline. If this is the fact of physically disabled life. The baseline is low. Further physical deterioration, inevitable with age, will have just that much more impact. How would I manage?
I would not manage alone, and this is the first thing to remember. In 1995 or so, with the loss of my right arm, what was left of it, I was recently divorced, seemingly more isolated. But things did not work out that way. My brother worked on some practical solutions to help me carry things around my apartment. My sister and niece came to visit just before my surgery. Guys in my Jewish men's group offered help and support. Caroline, my British cousin, phoned occasionally to ask if any more bits had fallen off. In short, there was love and humor and connection, not to mention help, from all sides. And so one faces the darkness.
There is no schedule for darkness facing. Which is just as well, for there is no anticipating. Life does end, and before that body functions have a way of ending. Trouble with being severely disabled is that none of this is wholly abstract. I have seen body functions end. I have no trouble imagining how others may end. I have seen my wife's life end, and before that, her judgment and reasoning and sense...all assaulted by her final brain tumors. I have seen the best minds of my generation.... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming.... And I'm tired of it, that is the thing. It is enough to see what is in front of you, that is my conclusion. Often, that is scary enough. Try crossing Menlo Avenue in a wheelchair.
Which makes it a good thing, on this particular day, that I have a lunch. It fills the belly, lunch does, a space otherwise occupied by anxiety. This particular lunch will fill me with pasta and a certain amount of railway news. Neither will be good. That is not the point. I don't know what the point is, that after sufficient introspection, the point is to move and keep moving. One thing after the next, not running but advancing. Wish me luck.
Unfortunately, it will take more than luck to get me through the Hallelujah Chorus. The latter being featured in my upcoming concert. Recently, the accompanist pointed out that the bass section was having serious trouble with Weep, Weep, Mine Eyes. No news to me. Fortunately, I have a personal trainer in this department. Tom comes by on a weekly basis to help me over the considerable hurdle that is the Menlo Park Chorus. Which led us first to Handle. Hallelujah, hallelujah. And he shall reign. And this goes on forever and ever. Hallelujah, hallelujah. King of Kings. High note of notes. A clef too far forever and ever. Tom and I carried on in this vein. Me trying to get a handle on the chorus. Tom ignoring the pathetic joke. King of Kings. Voice strain of strains. Slow down, he said. This is supposed to be fun. But, I protested, there is no slowing down an entire chorus. Tom shrugged. Sing it your way, slowly, and enjoy it. Whatever you have to do in performance, however imperfect, do that too. So I've been thinking about this. Forever and ever.
Jane does. She helps me sit up. I ask for an exercise band and begin pulling the thing with my left arm. Funny thing, but the arm is fine. The fear is not, of course, and after another hour in the dark I am still awake. Some chamomile pills push me over the sleeping edge, for after all, I am now on the right side of things neuromuscular. All is well, or as well as things can be. Though the question does remain. How would I manage?
I am getting older, and things are getting harder, and if the left arm doesn't go, something else will. Perhaps nothing quite so vital, the arm supply being rather limited. Never mind. The fear is there. And for now, that is all I know. That it seems almost unthinkable, certainly unlivable, sustaining any more physical decline. If this is the fact of physically disabled life. The baseline is low. Further physical deterioration, inevitable with age, will have just that much more impact. How would I manage?
I would not manage alone, and this is the first thing to remember. In 1995 or so, with the loss of my right arm, what was left of it, I was recently divorced, seemingly more isolated. But things did not work out that way. My brother worked on some practical solutions to help me carry things around my apartment. My sister and niece came to visit just before my surgery. Guys in my Jewish men's group offered help and support. Caroline, my British cousin, phoned occasionally to ask if any more bits had fallen off. In short, there was love and humor and connection, not to mention help, from all sides. And so one faces the darkness.
There is no schedule for darkness facing. Which is just as well, for there is no anticipating. Life does end, and before that body functions have a way of ending. Trouble with being severely disabled is that none of this is wholly abstract. I have seen body functions end. I have no trouble imagining how others may end. I have seen my wife's life end, and before that, her judgment and reasoning and sense...all assaulted by her final brain tumors. I have seen the best minds of my generation.... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming.... And I'm tired of it, that is the thing. It is enough to see what is in front of you, that is my conclusion. Often, that is scary enough. Try crossing Menlo Avenue in a wheelchair.
Which makes it a good thing, on this particular day, that I have a lunch. It fills the belly, lunch does, a space otherwise occupied by anxiety. This particular lunch will fill me with pasta and a certain amount of railway news. Neither will be good. That is not the point. I don't know what the point is, that after sufficient introspection, the point is to move and keep moving. One thing after the next, not running but advancing. Wish me luck.
Unfortunately, it will take more than luck to get me through the Hallelujah Chorus. The latter being featured in my upcoming concert. Recently, the accompanist pointed out that the bass section was having serious trouble with Weep, Weep, Mine Eyes. No news to me. Fortunately, I have a personal trainer in this department. Tom comes by on a weekly basis to help me over the considerable hurdle that is the Menlo Park Chorus. Which led us first to Handle. Hallelujah, hallelujah. And he shall reign. And this goes on forever and ever. Hallelujah, hallelujah. King of Kings. High note of notes. A clef too far forever and ever. Tom and I carried on in this vein. Me trying to get a handle on the chorus. Tom ignoring the pathetic joke. King of Kings. Voice strain of strains. Slow down, he said. This is supposed to be fun. But, I protested, there is no slowing down an entire chorus. Tom shrugged. Sing it your way, slowly, and enjoy it. Whatever you have to do in performance, however imperfect, do that too. So I've been thinking about this. Forever and ever.
I can recall both of my father's medical offices. The first was an odd concrete or even cinderblock structure on our little town's main street. It had a small lawn in front. The rooms, for examination and waiting and lab work, stretched back along a corridor. The linoleum was old and scratched. My father occupied the place until I was about nine years old. Then he purchased a house, a big old place, more spacious, remodeled into something much more light and modern. After his divorce, he lived upstairs in the same building, now with me and my brother. Such an arrangement had been in his mind all along, he told me later. He had seen the marriage failing, apparently, and this was the response.
In the bigger, remodeled place, my father's own personal office became more spacious and its qualities more pronounced. Perhaps it was because I was older that the feel of the room entered into me. There was a thick Persian carpet on the floor. A large mahogany desk. A leather swivel chair. Was all this de rigueur for doctors in that era? I haven't a clue. I haven't many details either. Though even then I was seeking them. Why was there a small white horse in one of my father's desk drawer compartments? He had won a bet, he told me. And the prize was a bottle of White Horse whiskey. It was from years before, this wager. Certainly pre-California. At stake in this bet had been something medical, a diagnosis, I am almost positive. My father liked to be right. And this was a success. But an old one, 10 or 15 or even 20 years in the past. I understand better now that he was not a very secure guy, my father. And there it was, evidence of his win, sitting in a compartment next to paperclips, a story he didn't even bother explaining to a little boy. The complexity may have been a bit much for a 10-year-old. And the significance? That may have been a bit much for my father's own understanding. Or perhaps he needed to keep it bottled, like the whiskey.
A round, etched glass paperweight sat on one corner of the desk. It had to be held, examined, raised to the level of the window light. With illumination from behind, the glass revealed a red and white depiction of neoclassical buildings. The thick glass gave depth to the picture. Of what? One of my father's campuses. Perhaps Jefferson Medical School. To a boy, such details only detracted from the experience. It was an numinous object, the ancient buildings another world, all of it possible to hold in a hand. And such weight. A thing of substance and mystery, its 3-D picture visible at some angles, not at others.
The diplomas in their frames were quite boring, except for the script. Old lettering, some of it ornate, with an embossed seal at the corner. Also three-dimensional, not to exclude the small ribbons that dangled near the bottom. Adult stuff. And then the picture, aside from a landscape or two, the framed line drawing or etching.
An artist painted at an easel, staring into space as though for inspiration, while someone very determined stood just behind playing the violin. Death, my father explained, was fiddling while the artist.... Well, he seemed to be waiting for something. I did not understand, not really. The artist might have been saying to himself...what is that? Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing? As for Death, why was he bothering? What did he care whether the artist heard him or not? Puzzling questions whose answers are no clearer today. Just entering into such speculations has its own effect. So why not start early, say around 10 years old?
It is nice to have an office full of heavy old things. Such objects have soul. As for Death, yes, there is wisdom in such a reminder. Even in the German romantic version, hokey and pedantic. Still, there was something oppressive and burdensome about my father and his office. Though nothing complicated. He was alone, isolated. He was too conscious of mortality to thrive in such loneliness. An office full of traditional objects, the time-bound roots of everything visible and tangible. All this in an arid little town at the edge of the desert. The past empty. No friends, family distant. Why was he there? How did my father wind up homeless? When I consider his circumstances, his emotional ones, he might as well have been out on the streets pushing a shopping cart.
As for me, now it seems important to acknowledge the early and somber weight of my father's world. Surely, I began by shouldering it myself, like it or not. But now, it is easier to sense the difference between my father's life and my own. He had an adult's legacy of consciousness, but he also had a child's grasp of relationships. My father needed human connection. When it failed, he grew embittered and isolated. Something in him had never grown. He died young, my father. In every sense of the word. Younger than I.
My father's office needed more light. Were the drapes open? Enough windows? No, this wasn't the problem. There weren't enough people. Marlou did not die this way. She had great pain, but she had connection. My father's death? Much lonelier. He seemed to have withdrawn from life before life withdrew from him. My mother's? Also lonely. Ashamed of her failing mind, she kept up a certain front. Which became a barrier to others. She faced an ordeal which could not be confronted or discussed. In the end, life's end, it doesn't matter, I suppose. Until then, the mysterious end, things are less a mystery.
In the bigger, remodeled place, my father's own personal office became more spacious and its qualities more pronounced. Perhaps it was because I was older that the feel of the room entered into me. There was a thick Persian carpet on the floor. A large mahogany desk. A leather swivel chair. Was all this de rigueur for doctors in that era? I haven't a clue. I haven't many details either. Though even then I was seeking them. Why was there a small white horse in one of my father's desk drawer compartments? He had won a bet, he told me. And the prize was a bottle of White Horse whiskey. It was from years before, this wager. Certainly pre-California. At stake in this bet had been something medical, a diagnosis, I am almost positive. My father liked to be right. And this was a success. But an old one, 10 or 15 or even 20 years in the past. I understand better now that he was not a very secure guy, my father. And there it was, evidence of his win, sitting in a compartment next to paperclips, a story he didn't even bother explaining to a little boy. The complexity may have been a bit much for a 10-year-old. And the significance? That may have been a bit much for my father's own understanding. Or perhaps he needed to keep it bottled, like the whiskey.
A round, etched glass paperweight sat on one corner of the desk. It had to be held, examined, raised to the level of the window light. With illumination from behind, the glass revealed a red and white depiction of neoclassical buildings. The thick glass gave depth to the picture. Of what? One of my father's campuses. Perhaps Jefferson Medical School. To a boy, such details only detracted from the experience. It was an numinous object, the ancient buildings another world, all of it possible to hold in a hand. And such weight. A thing of substance and mystery, its 3-D picture visible at some angles, not at others.
The diplomas in their frames were quite boring, except for the script. Old lettering, some of it ornate, with an embossed seal at the corner. Also three-dimensional, not to exclude the small ribbons that dangled near the bottom. Adult stuff. And then the picture, aside from a landscape or two, the framed line drawing or etching.
An artist painted at an easel, staring into space as though for inspiration, while someone very determined stood just behind playing the violin. Death, my father explained, was fiddling while the artist.... Well, he seemed to be waiting for something. I did not understand, not really. The artist might have been saying to himself...what is that? Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing? As for Death, why was he bothering? What did he care whether the artist heard him or not? Puzzling questions whose answers are no clearer today. Just entering into such speculations has its own effect. So why not start early, say around 10 years old?
It is nice to have an office full of heavy old things. Such objects have soul. As for Death, yes, there is wisdom in such a reminder. Even in the German romantic version, hokey and pedantic. Still, there was something oppressive and burdensome about my father and his office. Though nothing complicated. He was alone, isolated. He was too conscious of mortality to thrive in such loneliness. An office full of traditional objects, the time-bound roots of everything visible and tangible. All this in an arid little town at the edge of the desert. The past empty. No friends, family distant. Why was he there? How did my father wind up homeless? When I consider his circumstances, his emotional ones, he might as well have been out on the streets pushing a shopping cart.
As for me, now it seems important to acknowledge the early and somber weight of my father's world. Surely, I began by shouldering it myself, like it or not. But now, it is easier to sense the difference between my father's life and my own. He had an adult's legacy of consciousness, but he also had a child's grasp of relationships. My father needed human connection. When it failed, he grew embittered and isolated. Something in him had never grown. He died young, my father. In every sense of the word. Younger than I.
My father's office needed more light. Were the drapes open? Enough windows? No, this wasn't the problem. There weren't enough people. Marlou did not die this way. She had great pain, but she had connection. My father's death? Much lonelier. He seemed to have withdrawn from life before life withdrew from him. My mother's? Also lonely. Ashamed of her failing mind, she kept up a certain front. Which became a barrier to others. She faced an ordeal which could not be confronted or discussed. In the end, life's end, it doesn't matter, I suppose. Until then, the mysterious end, things are less a mystery.
In the mornings I set out from San Francisco in my 1968 Plymouth Valiant, the most reliable of cars, eastbound across the Bay Bridge, the most reliable of routes. I had work, after all. There was little traffic, my employer had no set starting time. So with no pressure, I headed up Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue and pulled directly into what was almost always an empty parking space right in front of the Center for Independent Living. I turned off the engine. The car clicked and pinged, cooling from its mild labor. I eyed the glass doors of the place. Wheelchairs banged in and banged out. People with crutches, which at that stage included me, pushed their way through. It was work. It was what I had. It was 1975. It was the new me, less than seven years post-injury. It was a new day. And somehow I was back in Berkeley, a place that belonged to the era of my late adolescence, my supposed education, my injury and my past. Really, I wanted to move on. I had no place to move to, that was the bitter truth, and nothing to do but get out of my car, grab my crutch and head inside like everyone else.
Graduate school had ended quickly. And my subsequent job began just as quickly. Though not auspiciously. I turned up for my interview only to find my future boss absent. No one seemed to know where he was. Absolutely no one knew about our appointment. I worked through it with my psychologist, why I should not simply say fuck off and look for another, better job. I had no demonstrable skills. No prospects. No other options. And so, after another drive across the Bay, I finally met Ed Roberts, disability rights leader, founder of the Center and indefatigable mega-extravert. He spent much of the days in an iron lung, various assistants acting as his limbs. His was not a private world.
Nor was his office and headquarters. Once inside the glass doors, the Center for Independent Living was an introvert's worst roaring nightmare. Hobbling to my desk, I sat down and tried to work through the din. The nature of my work kept changing. Initially, I was conceived of as a grant writer. I did my best, but the work was slow, my output insufficient to meet demand. So I did other things. Which eventually evolved into a sort of PR function.
It was a first of its kind, the Center, one-stop shopping for disabled people who needed almost anything. The woman at the desk behind mine found attendants for people in wheelchairs. It wasn't a bad job for students, helping a disabled person rise, bathe, eat. And it wasn't a bad job for the post-1960s people living cheap around the campus. The young woman handling attendant referral decided hers was not a bad job either. She spent long hours on the telephone gossiping with friends, details of her frolicsome sex life clearly audible. Wheelchairs whirred, crutches clicked, people screamed, and amid the din somehow work got done. I took to wearing sound excluders of the type used by airport workers. The decor, a gauche and florid scheme painted by one of Ed's friends, assaulted the eye, but not if one tuned it out. As for the passing scene, it was like having a television on without the sound. The office had been an automobile showroom, with huge plateglass windows still framing Telegraph Avenue. Once, absentmindedly turning to watch the foot traffic, I noted a wizard strolling by. He was holding a crooked staff, wearing a starry cloak and a pointed hat, Gandalf in the flesh. I resumed typing. Moments later I looked up, realized what I had just seen and how little it had affected me. Where was I?
At the desk to my left a young man named Ralph gathered statistics and completed reports. This was a fact of NGO life, that with the grants came the supposed results. Which was Ralph's job, assembling numbers of disabled people improved by all this. He wore a hearing aid, extremely thick glasses and tried to keep his flailing limbs directed to a task. Whenever I said hello, he beamed. His cerebral palsy made him hard to understand, but not impossible. He was a quiet guy, quite proud of his job, serious about trying to get things done. I felt bad for his circumstances. My work was somewhat portable, phone calls and typing could be accomplished in the big empty meeting room, or even at home. But Ralph's work kept him at his desk with loud Nancy right behind, screaming about news of her dates, and revealing the steady botching of her job.
'German, the guy said he wanted someone who speaks German.' Nancy was on the phone with a friend, describing some hapless wheelchair visitor from Deutschland. Nancy's voice was heavily Brooklyn and scraped over the ears like ground glass. 'So I told him, you want an attendant? Go talk to the United Nations.'
Ralph was on the phone much of the time, dealing with bureaucrats of various government agencies and foundations. He kept repeating things, people having a difficult time understanding him. Still, he kept at it. This was his job. He was very proud of it. He was always on time. Always worked late. He looked me in the eyes when I said hello, laughed at my occasional jokes. Earnest and seemingly innocent, he kept moving through the numbers, making the phone calls, finishing reports.
To permanently escape this madhouse, I needed skills, some demonstrable accomplishment. It was not difficult to get reporters to come have a look at the Center for Independent Living. And whenever I snagged one, I took them on a tour. It was important that we get out of the main office, anywhere in which it was possible to talk, and to conceive that work might get done.
The best place for this was the wheelchair repair shop. The site had been an automotive sales operation and conveniently offered a garage. Repairing wheelchairs was a serious need, constituted real, observable work. So the shop formed an important part of my press tour. I had developed a commentary, my guess at what journalists might want to know. How hard it was to get wheelchairs repaired. How vital this service was. How the repair crew included disabled workers. Like Ralph, I was proud of my efforts.
It was one of those things one hears and doesn't hear, partly because my attention was on the job at hand, the reporter I was conducting through the shop. We had just paused to observe something truly press-worthy, a paraplegic mechanic pounding a hub back on someone's wheelchair. The reporter folded his pad, headed out while one of the able-bodied mechanics sidled past me. 'Does your shit smell?'
What happened next I can't remember. But I have recalled that moment on and off over the last 35 years. Most recently, I was at Peet's, placing my order and fumbling for my card, aware time was passing while the barista waited. 'What's wrong with me,' I asked. C-4 quadriparesis would be the logical answer. Sufficient reason to keep the world waiting while I fumbled with my Peet's card. And then, bouncing home, this moment in the wheelchair repair shop, 35 years ago remembered and relived on Live Oak Ave. What was wrong with me?
Oh, I probably should have done any number of things. Confronted the dolt who insulted me. Tried to get to know the wheelchair repair crew. I probably did any number of things wrong. But there was nothing wrong with me. That was the thing that was probably unclear then, not entirely clear now. And I keep struggling with. My heart was in the right place. And still is. As for my heart, I trust it more. Maybe that comes to all of us with time, or maybe not. I was young and impatient. Now I am old and impatient. And what I recall most about that time 35 years ago is Ralph. He was, as someone explained it, living in not the nicest part of Berkeley. Someplace wheelchair accessible, within reach of work. Taken care of by attendants. One of whom killed him. Murdered in his own home by his own helper.
He had a good heart, Ralph. He had a job and was proud of it. And probably just as proud to be in his own apartment with his own life. Which we have in common, Ralph and I. As for the wheelchair repair shop incident. Whatever. I had a job. Which led to another. And I toast Ralph at this moment. We had what we had. And as the song says, no, no, they can't take that away from me.
Graduate school had ended quickly. And my subsequent job began just as quickly. Though not auspiciously. I turned up for my interview only to find my future boss absent. No one seemed to know where he was. Absolutely no one knew about our appointment. I worked through it with my psychologist, why I should not simply say fuck off and look for another, better job. I had no demonstrable skills. No prospects. No other options. And so, after another drive across the Bay, I finally met Ed Roberts, disability rights leader, founder of the Center and indefatigable mega-extravert. He spent much of the days in an iron lung, various assistants acting as his limbs. His was not a private world.
Nor was his office and headquarters. Once inside the glass doors, the Center for Independent Living was an introvert's worst roaring nightmare. Hobbling to my desk, I sat down and tried to work through the din. The nature of my work kept changing. Initially, I was conceived of as a grant writer. I did my best, but the work was slow, my output insufficient to meet demand. So I did other things. Which eventually evolved into a sort of PR function.
It was a first of its kind, the Center, one-stop shopping for disabled people who needed almost anything. The woman at the desk behind mine found attendants for people in wheelchairs. It wasn't a bad job for students, helping a disabled person rise, bathe, eat. And it wasn't a bad job for the post-1960s people living cheap around the campus. The young woman handling attendant referral decided hers was not a bad job either. She spent long hours on the telephone gossiping with friends, details of her frolicsome sex life clearly audible. Wheelchairs whirred, crutches clicked, people screamed, and amid the din somehow work got done. I took to wearing sound excluders of the type used by airport workers. The decor, a gauche and florid scheme painted by one of Ed's friends, assaulted the eye, but not if one tuned it out. As for the passing scene, it was like having a television on without the sound. The office had been an automobile showroom, with huge plateglass windows still framing Telegraph Avenue. Once, absentmindedly turning to watch the foot traffic, I noted a wizard strolling by. He was holding a crooked staff, wearing a starry cloak and a pointed hat, Gandalf in the flesh. I resumed typing. Moments later I looked up, realized what I had just seen and how little it had affected me. Where was I?
At the desk to my left a young man named Ralph gathered statistics and completed reports. This was a fact of NGO life, that with the grants came the supposed results. Which was Ralph's job, assembling numbers of disabled people improved by all this. He wore a hearing aid, extremely thick glasses and tried to keep his flailing limbs directed to a task. Whenever I said hello, he beamed. His cerebral palsy made him hard to understand, but not impossible. He was a quiet guy, quite proud of his job, serious about trying to get things done. I felt bad for his circumstances. My work was somewhat portable, phone calls and typing could be accomplished in the big empty meeting room, or even at home. But Ralph's work kept him at his desk with loud Nancy right behind, screaming about news of her dates, and revealing the steady botching of her job.
'German, the guy said he wanted someone who speaks German.' Nancy was on the phone with a friend, describing some hapless wheelchair visitor from Deutschland. Nancy's voice was heavily Brooklyn and scraped over the ears like ground glass. 'So I told him, you want an attendant? Go talk to the United Nations.'
Ralph was on the phone much of the time, dealing with bureaucrats of various government agencies and foundations. He kept repeating things, people having a difficult time understanding him. Still, he kept at it. This was his job. He was very proud of it. He was always on time. Always worked late. He looked me in the eyes when I said hello, laughed at my occasional jokes. Earnest and seemingly innocent, he kept moving through the numbers, making the phone calls, finishing reports.
To permanently escape this madhouse, I needed skills, some demonstrable accomplishment. It was not difficult to get reporters to come have a look at the Center for Independent Living. And whenever I snagged one, I took them on a tour. It was important that we get out of the main office, anywhere in which it was possible to talk, and to conceive that work might get done.
The best place for this was the wheelchair repair shop. The site had been an automotive sales operation and conveniently offered a garage. Repairing wheelchairs was a serious need, constituted real, observable work. So the shop formed an important part of my press tour. I had developed a commentary, my guess at what journalists might want to know. How hard it was to get wheelchairs repaired. How vital this service was. How the repair crew included disabled workers. Like Ralph, I was proud of my efforts.
It was one of those things one hears and doesn't hear, partly because my attention was on the job at hand, the reporter I was conducting through the shop. We had just paused to observe something truly press-worthy, a paraplegic mechanic pounding a hub back on someone's wheelchair. The reporter folded his pad, headed out while one of the able-bodied mechanics sidled past me. 'Does your shit smell?'
What happened next I can't remember. But I have recalled that moment on and off over the last 35 years. Most recently, I was at Peet's, placing my order and fumbling for my card, aware time was passing while the barista waited. 'What's wrong with me,' I asked. C-4 quadriparesis would be the logical answer. Sufficient reason to keep the world waiting while I fumbled with my Peet's card. And then, bouncing home, this moment in the wheelchair repair shop, 35 years ago remembered and relived on Live Oak Ave. What was wrong with me?
Oh, I probably should have done any number of things. Confronted the dolt who insulted me. Tried to get to know the wheelchair repair crew. I probably did any number of things wrong. But there was nothing wrong with me. That was the thing that was probably unclear then, not entirely clear now. And I keep struggling with. My heart was in the right place. And still is. As for my heart, I trust it more. Maybe that comes to all of us with time, or maybe not. I was young and impatient. Now I am old and impatient. And what I recall most about that time 35 years ago is Ralph. He was, as someone explained it, living in not the nicest part of Berkeley. Someplace wheelchair accessible, within reach of work. Taken care of by attendants. One of whom killed him. Murdered in his own home by his own helper.
He had a good heart, Ralph. He had a job and was proud of it. And probably just as proud to be in his own apartment with his own life. Which we have in common, Ralph and I. As for the wheelchair repair shop incident. Whatever. I had a job. Which led to another. And I toast Ralph at this moment. We had what we had. And as the song says, no, no, they can't take that away from me.
No way around it, the ludicrous feeling of boarding Caltrain for the 1.2 mile ride to Palo Alto. Acknowledging that I could, and I have, bounced that distance directly in my wheelchair. No train, no van. Just me and the road surfaces, what is left of them in 2011 Depression California. Never mind, for on my way to the train station, it all begins to dissolve, the sense of the inappropriateness of my day's transit choice. Making room for the real question. Why do I always feel that what I am doing, in fact, my very being, is so terribly wrong? Fortunately, while there is room for this question, there is no time. I have a train to catch, a ticket to purchase. And my sense of urgency is not displaced, for here it comes, the 8:23 AM southbound. And, yes, there is that last-minute worry that I am bothering the train crew with my demand to be hydraulically hoisted aboard here, then mechanically deposited there slightly more than one mile away. But, no, the conductor instead asks where I have been, says he hasn't seen me in a while. Never mind. We are off, a few blocks of the Peninsula drift by, and then I am back on the ground in Palo Alto, rolling toward my meeting.
The Business Marketing Association. I thought this sort of thing was all in my painful past. But David, a fellow corporate writer, is still in the game and giving a presentation at a morning gathering of the BMA. I bounce along the jogging path, skirt the familiar medical clinic, roll into Scotts Restaurant, where David is waiting. He is a good friend, and my presence is clearly sought, and I am glad to be here. No, I am not. I am glad to have turned up. The rest will be whatever it is.
A breakfast meeting. David is speaking on the topic of how to write for the web. A good critical thinker, he has put more into this than most people in the corporate world would appreciate. But like a lot of people in the Depression job market, he has more time on his hands than he would like. Providing the opportunity to create an exhaustive presentation, which he has. Barely halfway through it, I decide to hire him myself, for an NGO advocating for American railways. Mostly, I decide that I want this meeting to end.
Even before it begins, things are uncomfortable in a familiar way. I have to meet people. This means shaking their hands, all twelve or so participants, smiling and looking interested. It's the left-handed nature of this activity that distinguishes me from everyone else, of course. And God knows I've done this for well over four decades of right-handed paralysis, but I have not done it recently. I haven't been to a business meeting like this one in years. Now the excruciating news. Each of us must introduce ourselves. And so it begins, the trip around the tables...I'm Kathy, and I handle marketing communications for Weltscmerz Technologies. I'm Jim. I'm Anastasia. And so on. When it's my turn I only say my first name, Paul. I describe myself as a retired marketing writer, entirely true, and I add that I am active in non-moneymaking realms, such as advocating for Caltrain. As for the first name, I am afraid that I will stammer in uttering the last. Taking me back to a time when I was about 15 years old and tried to leave a message for my doctor father at a hospital somewhere and couldn't get my last name out. It was my era of adolescent stuttering. And somehow I choked at 'Bendix.' It is still with me, this experience. Everything is with me, that is the strange snowball-like fact, how life rolls and gathers everything with it. Moss. Snow. You name it.
A breakfast meeting. Which means the professional quadriplegic must be careful. Choose what you eat. Particularly, choose what you eat in public. The meeting is a small one, and so is the dining room alcove. I have chosen eggs and, being quite nervous and only picking up on the presence of a Jewish woman at the last minute, bacon. My choice was a poor one. First, nerves being what they are, I keep dropping or slamming my fork against the china plate. The resulting clink echoes across time. It awakens the quadriplegics who have come before me. All of us are here now, but I'm the only one who is alive and in public and making a neuromuscular spectacle of myself. As I did for the many years of my professional life. Which was over until about twenty minutes ago, but now has reanimated. Also brought back to life, and playing in the background, is my third year of high school. I drop the fork again, and just to drive home the paralytic message, badly mangle a piece of bacon. The latter defies cutting.
I am surrounded by people who don't want to watch me eat and would much rather hear David speak. Actually, I am with them in spirit, just not in body. I don't even want this breakfast all that much but am stubborn in this regard. I have started something, i.e., a meal, and I am going to finish it. In the end, I come to different solutions. The first involves collapsing a piece of bacon around the end of the fork. On its way to my mouth this accordioned piece of pork belly comes undone, but never mind. I quickly slip the mass into my mouth, hoping the operation has gone unseen. Time passes. David is saying interesting things about how the human eye travels across a webpage. I am focusing on the next piece of bacon. I believe that the least obtrusive answer is the most gauche. Grab the sucker between two fingers and shove it in the defiled mouth. Mine. Proving one of history's least understood chapters in which quadriplegics, not Jews, invented treif.
After the meeting, people politely congratulate David. He deserves it. His quality of thought being several levels deeper than the average business person can, or will, absorb. A woman chit chats with David for an extended period. I can tell he is tired, wants to sit down and recover from his performance. But this woman is going on about synergy. How what she is doing with communications naturally meshes with what he is doing and the two of them really should see how their vectors cross. I know when David is nodding politely, mentally reeling under the assault of incessant bullshit. And this is one of those moments. But this is what self-employment was all about for me. The need to blather on about things I had not mastered, then appear enthused about sales figures and market penetration.
One thing, though. Time does fly. That's the thing about work. That's the thing about activity. I don't like going out in the world. I don't like being out in the world. I'm not even sure I like the world. Nonetheless, I have encountered it. Not only in the past, but on this very day, in the present. And what David has said about the use of metaphor in Web communications rings profoundly true. I didn't intend to pick up useful communication tips. But there are things to say, people to reach, railways to save, trains to keep running. I still care about things. And at times I even care about myself.
Which, rolling back to the Palo Alto Caltrain station, makes it possible for me to see my mother in a certain light. How she seemed to hate herself. More exactly, how she must have felt herself unlovable. For example, how hard it was for my mother to accept that family and friends wanted to throw her a 70th birthday party. She cried continuously and could barely show her face. Unworthiness. The family legacy. And now beset with latter-day grief, what and how much am I really grieving for?
The Business Marketing Association. I thought this sort of thing was all in my painful past. But David, a fellow corporate writer, is still in the game and giving a presentation at a morning gathering of the BMA. I bounce along the jogging path, skirt the familiar medical clinic, roll into Scotts Restaurant, where David is waiting. He is a good friend, and my presence is clearly sought, and I am glad to be here. No, I am not. I am glad to have turned up. The rest will be whatever it is.
A breakfast meeting. David is speaking on the topic of how to write for the web. A good critical thinker, he has put more into this than most people in the corporate world would appreciate. But like a lot of people in the Depression job market, he has more time on his hands than he would like. Providing the opportunity to create an exhaustive presentation, which he has. Barely halfway through it, I decide to hire him myself, for an NGO advocating for American railways. Mostly, I decide that I want this meeting to end.
Even before it begins, things are uncomfortable in a familiar way. I have to meet people. This means shaking their hands, all twelve or so participants, smiling and looking interested. It's the left-handed nature of this activity that distinguishes me from everyone else, of course. And God knows I've done this for well over four decades of right-handed paralysis, but I have not done it recently. I haven't been to a business meeting like this one in years. Now the excruciating news. Each of us must introduce ourselves. And so it begins, the trip around the tables...I'm Kathy, and I handle marketing communications for Weltscmerz Technologies. I'm Jim. I'm Anastasia. And so on. When it's my turn I only say my first name, Paul. I describe myself as a retired marketing writer, entirely true, and I add that I am active in non-moneymaking realms, such as advocating for Caltrain. As for the first name, I am afraid that I will stammer in uttering the last. Taking me back to a time when I was about 15 years old and tried to leave a message for my doctor father at a hospital somewhere and couldn't get my last name out. It was my era of adolescent stuttering. And somehow I choked at 'Bendix.' It is still with me, this experience. Everything is with me, that is the strange snowball-like fact, how life rolls and gathers everything with it. Moss. Snow. You name it.
A breakfast meeting. Which means the professional quadriplegic must be careful. Choose what you eat. Particularly, choose what you eat in public. The meeting is a small one, and so is the dining room alcove. I have chosen eggs and, being quite nervous and only picking up on the presence of a Jewish woman at the last minute, bacon. My choice was a poor one. First, nerves being what they are, I keep dropping or slamming my fork against the china plate. The resulting clink echoes across time. It awakens the quadriplegics who have come before me. All of us are here now, but I'm the only one who is alive and in public and making a neuromuscular spectacle of myself. As I did for the many years of my professional life. Which was over until about twenty minutes ago, but now has reanimated. Also brought back to life, and playing in the background, is my third year of high school. I drop the fork again, and just to drive home the paralytic message, badly mangle a piece of bacon. The latter defies cutting.
I am surrounded by people who don't want to watch me eat and would much rather hear David speak. Actually, I am with them in spirit, just not in body. I don't even want this breakfast all that much but am stubborn in this regard. I have started something, i.e., a meal, and I am going to finish it. In the end, I come to different solutions. The first involves collapsing a piece of bacon around the end of the fork. On its way to my mouth this accordioned piece of pork belly comes undone, but never mind. I quickly slip the mass into my mouth, hoping the operation has gone unseen. Time passes. David is saying interesting things about how the human eye travels across a webpage. I am focusing on the next piece of bacon. I believe that the least obtrusive answer is the most gauche. Grab the sucker between two fingers and shove it in the defiled mouth. Mine. Proving one of history's least understood chapters in which quadriplegics, not Jews, invented treif.
After the meeting, people politely congratulate David. He deserves it. His quality of thought being several levels deeper than the average business person can, or will, absorb. A woman chit chats with David for an extended period. I can tell he is tired, wants to sit down and recover from his performance. But this woman is going on about synergy. How what she is doing with communications naturally meshes with what he is doing and the two of them really should see how their vectors cross. I know when David is nodding politely, mentally reeling under the assault of incessant bullshit. And this is one of those moments. But this is what self-employment was all about for me. The need to blather on about things I had not mastered, then appear enthused about sales figures and market penetration.
One thing, though. Time does fly. That's the thing about work. That's the thing about activity. I don't like going out in the world. I don't like being out in the world. I'm not even sure I like the world. Nonetheless, I have encountered it. Not only in the past, but on this very day, in the present. And what David has said about the use of metaphor in Web communications rings profoundly true. I didn't intend to pick up useful communication tips. But there are things to say, people to reach, railways to save, trains to keep running. I still care about things. And at times I even care about myself.
Which, rolling back to the Palo Alto Caltrain station, makes it possible for me to see my mother in a certain light. How she seemed to hate herself. More exactly, how she must have felt herself unlovable. For example, how hard it was for my mother to accept that family and friends wanted to throw her a 70th birthday party. She cried continuously and could barely show her face. Unworthiness. The family legacy. And now beset with latter-day grief, what and how much am I really grieving for?
I still see them, the people from my other life. Naturally, at Peet's. We say hello, and I am generally verging on the apologetic when it comes to the topic of what I am doing now. Writing. My own writing. I listen to the account of new products, new companies, new ventures, their account of the current working life. And nod. It is generally incomprehensible, what they tell me. Something in the cloud space. The social networking/healthcare space. And by the time it is over I am glad that time is over in my life. I am lucky, and that is the truth. For I no longer have to feign interest in technology or the making of money. Nor do I have to summon vast amounts of extroverted energy to keep myself employed. My work has become my own. Expression. And grief. I would rather do without the latter, of course, but overall, as a job, one could do worse.
And as a life? Well, there has been a lot of it. Death and loss dominating the most recent chapters, but with the other theme late discovered love there too. Jane. And I have seen eras. May you live in interesting times. Take a stroll down Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park. Businesses are shuttered. Although the word evokes none of the truth, none of the emptiness. Plateglass with realty signs. The Italian restaurant run by the Kurds does not appear to be faring well. Curious signs for cheap lunches, depictions of various plates of food for $7.99. Not promising in this town. For people don't want to be reminded that they have to save money, that lunch amounts to a plateful of food that looks like this. No, we are much more discreet and upmarket in Menlo Park. Still, the signs of the declining times are unmistakable. Marche', the pricey bistro, has closed. Just across the street a Subway sandwich shop is about to open. Why not?
Interesting times. And tonight I have to begin the process of Caltrain citizen advisor/service slasher. Fares are going up. Train frequency going down. And is the nation going down? Or, put more honestly, how fast? Interesting times.
And time is what I now have. The grief of the moment, or of the decade, must not overshadow the rest. A relationship. A book coming out. Friends, family, future. Still, there is age. And fuck that. The will to exercise, in particular. On some days, I do not know where it comes from. To rise from the wheelchair, grab crutch and someone's arm, and commence schlepping...I know it's essential, only for my neuromuscular good. But I've known that for a long time. It's become increasingly hard to summon the energy to do it. Yet I do. But for how long?
Still, many friends seem to have an even worse time as they age. At least, I got a lifetime of doing this, habituated to exercise. What seemed like a burden in my youth, now a badly needed pattern. Strange how loss can begin to pay off. And the lesson of sticking with the unbearable. There is no getting away from it. There is no getting away. Stick around for the interesting times.
Still, underneath it all, is there nothing but a panicky sort of emptiness? And if so, can the panic be taken out of it? A lifetime's work. All of it interesting times.
Behind the times, that's what Britain seemed like to me in 1969 while I arrived. Marketing was downright primitive. Take the advertisements that preceded films in the big West End cinemas. The alcoholic drink Babycham featured fawns, reminiscent of Bambi, modestly gamboling about the screen, and that was the most imaginative of the lot. The rest were silly or obvious or boring. In local, neighborhood cinemas, generic footage shared with screens across Britain advertised, say, a fish and chips shop. There they were, the same couple having a merry time of it seated across from each other in a place full of 1960s orange tones, followed by a slide for Neptune Fish Bar, High Street, Chiswick. One gets so accustomed to the incessant assaults of advertising in mass culture that any variation stands out. Britain was full of variations, more direct, honest and closer to the truth of things. Jarring, it was. Of course, how little I knew. Babycham, for example, was the first alcoholic drink ever advertised on the single channel devoted to independent, non-BBC broadcasting in the late 1950s.
It was a good time to be behind the times. For there is no other way to see behind reality. Take my freezer. What on earth is going on there? It has become a repository of the past. Like frozen mammoths in Siberia. I buy food. And that is that. I have one mouth, one body that is supposed to ingest 1500 calories a day, according to the nutritionist at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I have the ocular proof. During our session, the nutritionist actually pulled out a plastic plate and dropped replicas of vegetables, meat and bread on the thing, apparently to illustrate. In its way, her presentation outdid British cinema advertising of the late 1960s. Not to worry. Her point seems to be a standard one, having observed something similar with one of Marlou's extended family in Iowa. You get old, you get 1500 cal a day, and that's that.
Of course, you can still go shopping. You can buy all the things you can't eat and, like the mammoths outside of Novosibirsk, the things you don't eat can last forever. Maybe you will last forever, albeit in a somewhat altered and colder state. The question, and it is an enormous one, involves essence. What is the need? Why purchase foods one can't eat?
Take today. Jane departs, I exercise, then find myself alone. The challenge being to find myself period. I attempt to find myself at Peet's, then give up and try Trader Joe's. There I find, if not myself, dinner. I will be dining alone. Not that I have to, friends being fairly plentiful. Still, having lined up no other dinnertime scenario, my mind was revolving around a small stainless steel pot in my refrigerator. The latter contains Mexican beans, homemade. Since they represent human effort, these frijoles, they have a special status. Also, they are richly endowed with fiber, a not small factor in my diet. So, widening the circle of imagination, I recalled that symbiotic food in my refrigerator, the package of multigrain tortillas. In other words, a meal was materializing out of the aisles of Trader Joe's, and with the purchase of some tomatoes...only one thing seemed missing. Something along the lines of complex protein. Something vertebrate. Fish tacos or fish enchiladas or fish burritos, that sort of thing. Which after a careful reading of the dietary analysis in several packages in the freezer section, let me to frozen battered halibut. A little halibut, a few beans, the tortilla, the cheese, the salsa, and there you are. And where are you?
First, you are still in the land of excess. In fact, you have penetrated to its heart. The freezer. The one above the refrigerator. Yours. Japanese. Indian. Mexican. The flavors and ethnic styles of the frozen boxes already there boggle the mind. The available airspace is almost nil. Simply opening the freezer door to stash away the frozen halibut for tonight's dinner triggered a minor avalanche. The thing was bursting to its frozen seams. Fitting all the boxes back into their frozen home was like a Chinese puzzle. I slammed the door, dreading what would happen when I opened it later in the day to retrieve the battered halibut.
When two things dawned on me. The first is that Jane makes this dish, the fish tacos/fish burritos/fish enchiladas. Whatever. The second was that it is a fine and noble thing to make food for oneself. Problem is that neither observation gets to the heart of the matter. What am I hungry for? What needs to be fed? And what ever it is, why is it apparently starving?
When I think about it, 10 years down the road would make me...damn, 75. I mean, how much time is there? And what am I supposed to do with all this frozen food?
And as a life? Well, there has been a lot of it. Death and loss dominating the most recent chapters, but with the other theme late discovered love there too. Jane. And I have seen eras. May you live in interesting times. Take a stroll down Santa Cruz Ave., Menlo Park. Businesses are shuttered. Although the word evokes none of the truth, none of the emptiness. Plateglass with realty signs. The Italian restaurant run by the Kurds does not appear to be faring well. Curious signs for cheap lunches, depictions of various plates of food for $7.99. Not promising in this town. For people don't want to be reminded that they have to save money, that lunch amounts to a plateful of food that looks like this. No, we are much more discreet and upmarket in Menlo Park. Still, the signs of the declining times are unmistakable. Marche', the pricey bistro, has closed. Just across the street a Subway sandwich shop is about to open. Why not?
Interesting times. And tonight I have to begin the process of Caltrain citizen advisor/service slasher. Fares are going up. Train frequency going down. And is the nation going down? Or, put more honestly, how fast? Interesting times.
And time is what I now have. The grief of the moment, or of the decade, must not overshadow the rest. A relationship. A book coming out. Friends, family, future. Still, there is age. And fuck that. The will to exercise, in particular. On some days, I do not know where it comes from. To rise from the wheelchair, grab crutch and someone's arm, and commence schlepping...I know it's essential, only for my neuromuscular good. But I've known that for a long time. It's become increasingly hard to summon the energy to do it. Yet I do. But for how long?
Still, many friends seem to have an even worse time as they age. At least, I got a lifetime of doing this, habituated to exercise. What seemed like a burden in my youth, now a badly needed pattern. Strange how loss can begin to pay off. And the lesson of sticking with the unbearable. There is no getting away from it. There is no getting away. Stick around for the interesting times.
Still, underneath it all, is there nothing but a panicky sort of emptiness? And if so, can the panic be taken out of it? A lifetime's work. All of it interesting times.
Behind the times, that's what Britain seemed like to me in 1969 while I arrived. Marketing was downright primitive. Take the advertisements that preceded films in the big West End cinemas. The alcoholic drink Babycham featured fawns, reminiscent of Bambi, modestly gamboling about the screen, and that was the most imaginative of the lot. The rest were silly or obvious or boring. In local, neighborhood cinemas, generic footage shared with screens across Britain advertised, say, a fish and chips shop. There they were, the same couple having a merry time of it seated across from each other in a place full of 1960s orange tones, followed by a slide for Neptune Fish Bar, High Street, Chiswick. One gets so accustomed to the incessant assaults of advertising in mass culture that any variation stands out. Britain was full of variations, more direct, honest and closer to the truth of things. Jarring, it was. Of course, how little I knew. Babycham, for example, was the first alcoholic drink ever advertised on the single channel devoted to independent, non-BBC broadcasting in the late 1950s.
It was a good time to be behind the times. For there is no other way to see behind reality. Take my freezer. What on earth is going on there? It has become a repository of the past. Like frozen mammoths in Siberia. I buy food. And that is that. I have one mouth, one body that is supposed to ingest 1500 calories a day, according to the nutritionist at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I have the ocular proof. During our session, the nutritionist actually pulled out a plastic plate and dropped replicas of vegetables, meat and bread on the thing, apparently to illustrate. In its way, her presentation outdid British cinema advertising of the late 1960s. Not to worry. Her point seems to be a standard one, having observed something similar with one of Marlou's extended family in Iowa. You get old, you get 1500 cal a day, and that's that.
Of course, you can still go shopping. You can buy all the things you can't eat and, like the mammoths outside of Novosibirsk, the things you don't eat can last forever. Maybe you will last forever, albeit in a somewhat altered and colder state. The question, and it is an enormous one, involves essence. What is the need? Why purchase foods one can't eat?
Take today. Jane departs, I exercise, then find myself alone. The challenge being to find myself period. I attempt to find myself at Peet's, then give up and try Trader Joe's. There I find, if not myself, dinner. I will be dining alone. Not that I have to, friends being fairly plentiful. Still, having lined up no other dinnertime scenario, my mind was revolving around a small stainless steel pot in my refrigerator. The latter contains Mexican beans, homemade. Since they represent human effort, these frijoles, they have a special status. Also, they are richly endowed with fiber, a not small factor in my diet. So, widening the circle of imagination, I recalled that symbiotic food in my refrigerator, the package of multigrain tortillas. In other words, a meal was materializing out of the aisles of Trader Joe's, and with the purchase of some tomatoes...only one thing seemed missing. Something along the lines of complex protein. Something vertebrate. Fish tacos or fish enchiladas or fish burritos, that sort of thing. Which after a careful reading of the dietary analysis in several packages in the freezer section, let me to frozen battered halibut. A little halibut, a few beans, the tortilla, the cheese, the salsa, and there you are. And where are you?
First, you are still in the land of excess. In fact, you have penetrated to its heart. The freezer. The one above the refrigerator. Yours. Japanese. Indian. Mexican. The flavors and ethnic styles of the frozen boxes already there boggle the mind. The available airspace is almost nil. Simply opening the freezer door to stash away the frozen halibut for tonight's dinner triggered a minor avalanche. The thing was bursting to its frozen seams. Fitting all the boxes back into their frozen home was like a Chinese puzzle. I slammed the door, dreading what would happen when I opened it later in the day to retrieve the battered halibut.
When two things dawned on me. The first is that Jane makes this dish, the fish tacos/fish burritos/fish enchiladas. Whatever. The second was that it is a fine and noble thing to make food for oneself. Problem is that neither observation gets to the heart of the matter. What am I hungry for? What needs to be fed? And what ever it is, why is it apparently starving?
When I think about it, 10 years down the road would make me...damn, 75. I mean, how much time is there? And what am I supposed to do with all this frozen food?
Saturday's stormy ride on Monterey Bay featured one particularly exciting moment. It came about midpoint, just off the pier at Santa Cruz. And oddly I would not have missed it for the world. For it was one of those special quadriplegic moments, one known to only a select few, hard to comprehend, impossible to observe. And composed of the most utterly simple fact of human life. I had to pee.
The logistics did not amount to much. Seated outside in the boat's aft portion, it was a matter of standing and walking about five meters. The complication being the stormy sea, of course. The fact being that at such points in life experience I simply want the problem to go away. The problem seeming insurmountable, but really just insurmountably annoying. With the secret belief that tackling the situation will both gauge my physical state, and perhaps improve it. And knowing that the obstacles are largely sensory. Though they keep nipping at my heels. That is to say, whatever musculoskeletal pains go with standing and schlepping across a moving deck, not to mention the psychological stress...falling is to be avoided at all costs. And yet the alternative? Immobilization and drawing in the boundaries of the possible. Retreat. And the boundaries being tight enough as is, thank you very much, let the process begin.
Doris, the sturdy middle-aged oceanographer, grabbed me under the wrong arm but asked the right question. What should she do? For which I had the wrong answer. Don't know. It is all uncertain, this sort of thing, for when was the last time I tried to crutch across a pitching boat deck? Jane had a reasonable idea based on normal terrestrial experience. Hold the paralyzed arm while the good one fitted into the crutch. And we had a shot at this, but a couple of tossing waves changed my mind. I sat down again. Doris departed for a chat with the skipper. Try to turn the little boat leeward, see if this had a calming effect. And then try again. The critical factor here being the lack of dire urgency in the urinary department. I could wait. Makes all the difference, trust me.
In the end, I had to trust the two of them, Doris and Jane. Abandoning the crutch, I gripped their arms, explaining when to back off, let go. For my walking requires lots of leaning. Tilting here, lifting a foot, inclining there and raising the other. Knowing all the while what was coming next. Doors on boats do not fit flush with the deck, flush being what waves tend to do across flat surfaces. So, there was a threshold of several inches. The two of them got me standing on it, descending from it. And damned if we weren't on a neuromuscular roll. Inside the cabin, I grabbed at a table, someone opened the door to the toilet. And there we were again. Another massive threshold, but surmounted however unwillingly, and the door shut behind me.
The last time I encountered a similar situation Northumberland was hurtling past. The train from Edinburgh was shooting along Britain's eastern coast at an easy hundred miles an hour. And while I had gotten my wheelchair inside the toilet, just barely, now there was a staggering problem. That is to say, staggering and peeing at the same time, holding on to...well, what? The handrail or myself? The handrail, of course, which does nothing for the male aim. The sort of experience one does not want to repeat. But must, life being what it is. Fortunately, shipboard toilets seem to have a small hole in the floor for swabbing the deck or whatever the expression is. One does one's best. After all this, I collapsed on a bench in a corner of the cabin. Oh, I must go down to the sea again. But not anytime soon.
Which makes me wonder about what it was like, really like...oh, about 35 years ago. In retrospect, I really must give myself credit. At a time when I had no money, I still found a way to have a most pleasant holiday. And on my own, for I was utterly single. Tassajara. The Zen retreat in the mountains behind Big Sur. At that point when I could still walk everywhere and got around entirely by crutch.... Still, what was it really like? How hard? Difficult to say. Difficult to forget, also. Most memorable was the drive. The first time I did it, surely I had little sense of the difficulties.
The natural hot springs at Tassajara have drawn people to the site for...well, without recalling the history, I would estimate at least 100 years. The road to the modern Zen retreat is actually a wagon road. Steep, narrow. And dirt. One leaves the paved highway at Carmel Valley and starts over the Santa Lucia Mountains. Surely I was not expecting the heat. After all, Big Sur, which is only a few miles away as the crow flies, spends its summers in fog. Funny thing about California, though, just go a few miles away from the ocean, particularly over the coastal mountains, and it's another world. Certainly another climate. In any case, the ocean breezes may waft up and down Carmel Valley, but they say goodbye at the Santa Lucia Range.
What got me through most of the 1970s was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Something about the car was indomitable. In fact, it was known for its robust mechanical design. I once met someone who had driven a Valiant through Central America and back, still rolling around San Francisco with 250,000 miles on his car. For now, the only issue was the road and the heat. However robust, within a few miles of the beginning of the dirt track, the route turned vertical. Up one impossibly steep dirt hill, over the top, and down another. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to check the gauges. Not that there were many on a Valiant. But the engine heat indicator caught my eye, and just in time. It was hard to the right, into the red, and I was almost into big trouble. After all, a solitary quadriplegic driving a lonely mountain road that only sees a few cars a day and is also overheating, the quadriplegic, that is, well...he is not in a good situation.
I don't sweat normally, that is the problem. What quadriplegic does? We are all undersupplied with sympathetic nerves. So in hot weather, the body doesn't get the message. Mine certainly wasn't, but I did have all the windows open. And now with the engine overheating, a brilliant stroke. I turned on the heater, of course. Now I had not only the 100°F blast of August weather blowing over the arid mountains, but Chrysler's fine engine warming me as well. I continued on, frantically watching the gauge, stopping now and then at the summits to see if the engine would cool. It did. I was all alone. There was no automobile club that even knew about this road. Mobile phones were still a decade away. And Tassajara? Still miles away, and I continued my lonely drive. Hot and getting hotter, both the car and me. On and on. Until other cars appeared. Stationary ones. Parked. The end of the dirt road.
The other end of the back of nowhere, in fact. Tassajara being that remote. At night, much of the place was, and probably still is, lit by kerosene lanterns. Tassajara is off the grid. It is practically off the map, but not quite. Someone showed me to my room, which I shared with another man about my age. Odd sharing a room with strangers. But not at Tassajara. The whole experience was so odd, everyone having come so far, and the atmosphere so extraordinary. Such trifles did not matter. During the hot days there was a swimming pool. The vegetarian cuisine was stunning. And, of course, in and out of the hot baths. How I negotiated the sulfur springs, well, that has slipped my memory. People must have helped. The environment was not an easy one, I am certain of that. Old railings, steep steps, and it all added up to something wonderful. A holiday. Broke and single and none of it mattered. I got there. I turned up.
The logistics did not amount to much. Seated outside in the boat's aft portion, it was a matter of standing and walking about five meters. The complication being the stormy sea, of course. The fact being that at such points in life experience I simply want the problem to go away. The problem seeming insurmountable, but really just insurmountably annoying. With the secret belief that tackling the situation will both gauge my physical state, and perhaps improve it. And knowing that the obstacles are largely sensory. Though they keep nipping at my heels. That is to say, whatever musculoskeletal pains go with standing and schlepping across a moving deck, not to mention the psychological stress...falling is to be avoided at all costs. And yet the alternative? Immobilization and drawing in the boundaries of the possible. Retreat. And the boundaries being tight enough as is, thank you very much, let the process begin.
Doris, the sturdy middle-aged oceanographer, grabbed me under the wrong arm but asked the right question. What should she do? For which I had the wrong answer. Don't know. It is all uncertain, this sort of thing, for when was the last time I tried to crutch across a pitching boat deck? Jane had a reasonable idea based on normal terrestrial experience. Hold the paralyzed arm while the good one fitted into the crutch. And we had a shot at this, but a couple of tossing waves changed my mind. I sat down again. Doris departed for a chat with the skipper. Try to turn the little boat leeward, see if this had a calming effect. And then try again. The critical factor here being the lack of dire urgency in the urinary department. I could wait. Makes all the difference, trust me.
In the end, I had to trust the two of them, Doris and Jane. Abandoning the crutch, I gripped their arms, explaining when to back off, let go. For my walking requires lots of leaning. Tilting here, lifting a foot, inclining there and raising the other. Knowing all the while what was coming next. Doors on boats do not fit flush with the deck, flush being what waves tend to do across flat surfaces. So, there was a threshold of several inches. The two of them got me standing on it, descending from it. And damned if we weren't on a neuromuscular roll. Inside the cabin, I grabbed at a table, someone opened the door to the toilet. And there we were again. Another massive threshold, but surmounted however unwillingly, and the door shut behind me.
The last time I encountered a similar situation Northumberland was hurtling past. The train from Edinburgh was shooting along Britain's eastern coast at an easy hundred miles an hour. And while I had gotten my wheelchair inside the toilet, just barely, now there was a staggering problem. That is to say, staggering and peeing at the same time, holding on to...well, what? The handrail or myself? The handrail, of course, which does nothing for the male aim. The sort of experience one does not want to repeat. But must, life being what it is. Fortunately, shipboard toilets seem to have a small hole in the floor for swabbing the deck or whatever the expression is. One does one's best. After all this, I collapsed on a bench in a corner of the cabin. Oh, I must go down to the sea again. But not anytime soon.
Which makes me wonder about what it was like, really like...oh, about 35 years ago. In retrospect, I really must give myself credit. At a time when I had no money, I still found a way to have a most pleasant holiday. And on my own, for I was utterly single. Tassajara. The Zen retreat in the mountains behind Big Sur. At that point when I could still walk everywhere and got around entirely by crutch.... Still, what was it really like? How hard? Difficult to say. Difficult to forget, also. Most memorable was the drive. The first time I did it, surely I had little sense of the difficulties.
The natural hot springs at Tassajara have drawn people to the site for...well, without recalling the history, I would estimate at least 100 years. The road to the modern Zen retreat is actually a wagon road. Steep, narrow. And dirt. One leaves the paved highway at Carmel Valley and starts over the Santa Lucia Mountains. Surely I was not expecting the heat. After all, Big Sur, which is only a few miles away as the crow flies, spends its summers in fog. Funny thing about California, though, just go a few miles away from the ocean, particularly over the coastal mountains, and it's another world. Certainly another climate. In any case, the ocean breezes may waft up and down Carmel Valley, but they say goodbye at the Santa Lucia Range.
What got me through most of the 1970s was a 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Something about the car was indomitable. In fact, it was known for its robust mechanical design. I once met someone who had driven a Valiant through Central America and back, still rolling around San Francisco with 250,000 miles on his car. For now, the only issue was the road and the heat. However robust, within a few miles of the beginning of the dirt track, the route turned vertical. Up one impossibly steep dirt hill, over the top, and down another. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to check the gauges. Not that there were many on a Valiant. But the engine heat indicator caught my eye, and just in time. It was hard to the right, into the red, and I was almost into big trouble. After all, a solitary quadriplegic driving a lonely mountain road that only sees a few cars a day and is also overheating, the quadriplegic, that is, well...he is not in a good situation.
I don't sweat normally, that is the problem. What quadriplegic does? We are all undersupplied with sympathetic nerves. So in hot weather, the body doesn't get the message. Mine certainly wasn't, but I did have all the windows open. And now with the engine overheating, a brilliant stroke. I turned on the heater, of course. Now I had not only the 100°F blast of August weather blowing over the arid mountains, but Chrysler's fine engine warming me as well. I continued on, frantically watching the gauge, stopping now and then at the summits to see if the engine would cool. It did. I was all alone. There was no automobile club that even knew about this road. Mobile phones were still a decade away. And Tassajara? Still miles away, and I continued my lonely drive. Hot and getting hotter, both the car and me. On and on. Until other cars appeared. Stationary ones. Parked. The end of the dirt road.
The other end of the back of nowhere, in fact. Tassajara being that remote. At night, much of the place was, and probably still is, lit by kerosene lanterns. Tassajara is off the grid. It is practically off the map, but not quite. Someone showed me to my room, which I shared with another man about my age. Odd sharing a room with strangers. But not at Tassajara. The whole experience was so odd, everyone having come so far, and the atmosphere so extraordinary. Such trifles did not matter. During the hot days there was a swimming pool. The vegetarian cuisine was stunning. And, of course, in and out of the hot baths. How I negotiated the sulfur springs, well, that has slipped my memory. People must have helped. The environment was not an easy one, I am certain of that. Old railings, steep steps, and it all added up to something wonderful. A holiday. Broke and single and none of it mattered. I got there. I turned up.
By the time I get to my Sunday morning bowl of oatmeal at Café Borrone, the stuff practically makes me choke. Strange days. Emotions overtaking me, the body reacting oddly. Nothing wrong with the oatmeal. Something very wrong with eating oatmeal this Sunday morning. Anxiety, or something like it, rising out of my double cappuccino. Frank Rich, I learn reading a New York Times now three weeks out of date, has hung up his editorial hat. Strange the things one misses when one is missing everything. Mostly missing the point. Pent-up emotions are strangling me at my wooden café table, people drifting in for their Sunday morning. I down the cappuccino, inhale the glass of water and hit the fucking road.
At least the yahrzeit candle is out. Last night it was still burning, albeit feebly, at 10 PM. How annoying, it seemed, and how fiendish. For I would like the whole unpleasant chapter to magically go away. Which is why the tradition of the candle, I suppose. Not to forget, and not to avoid. Two years would seem long enough. Apparently not. The physical reactions remain, fear and panic and revulsion. But less. Or not all the time.
I am generally so oblivious that just the other day I noticed the watercolor on my bedroom wall as though for the first time. Old sailing ships, sails furled, the silhouette of their rigging standing out stark and black against what might be a sunset but is too fierce. No, the clouds are whipped into an orange fever by something else. With the ghostly ships at the edge of things, riding a horizon, there is a sense of the glowing, impersonal light of death. The ships aren't going anywhere. And at one moment the scene has a quality of desperation about it. Then desperate sadness. Then sadness. Then something more objective, larger and uncontrollable. Inevitable. The changing scene.
This hung on the wall opposite Marlou as she was dying. Did she look at it? Could she even see it with her pain and her brain tumors and her fear? Had she chosen it unconsciously in anticipation of such a moment in extremis? And now I have finally seen it myself. The changing scene.
Naturally, I was unclear about the rituals. Okay to say Kaddish after the first year? The keddem Rabbi filled me in. Jane helped me light the yahrzeit candle. I downloaded an English version from the web, read the Kaddish...a maddeningly general, seemingly all-purpose invocation if there ever was one. Then went to bed. Naturally, I awoke in the wee hours. But did all the right things. Sat up. The general change of body posture making this quadriplegic feel less helpless. Jane fetched some chocolate from the kitchen. And the next thing I knew, I was sliding through suburban Redwood City on my hand splint. The uphills being rather difficult. And then, incredibly, we were not dreaming but awake and on the road. The southbound US 101 road, then over the hills, past Santa Cruz, and down to Moss Landing where Marlou's ashes were scattered last year. In fact, aboard the very same boat.
It promised to be a source of renewal, this going upon the fertile and protected waters of Monterey Bay. The fertility stems from a strange accident of nature, that a deep undersea canyon pulls in very close to the coast. Pacific Ocean life swells up from the depths right by the sea's edge. Whatever. The crew got me on board with remarkably little effort. And then Jane and I were seated side-by-side on a fiberglass bench, chugging through the harbor, heading out to sea.
Everything was very much as it was last year. Except the weather. The oceans are known for this. Suburban landlubbers like me are not, by contrast, known for their nautical sense. Which explains my surprise at finding the entire experience so radically different. The skies looked on the verge of rain. The wind blew. The boat bounced, rocked, tilted and began the cycle again. At sea, in a craft from which one is able to observe the watery surface well, the stormy ocean looks much like a landscape of small valleys and ridges, moving of course. That, the whale-watching oceanographer explained to those of us aboard, made such an experience rather difficult. For sea creatures were the object. Gray whales, blue whales, dolphins, orcas, we were here to see them. But they had no interest in us. The spouts of the largest whales would have been lost in the frothy tumult. The fins of dolphins or killer whales equally hard to see. Still, these Moss Landing folks were determined to give their passengers a good run for the money. And run we did, from the middle of Monterey Bay to the northern end beyond Santa Cruz. Then southbound. Four hours altogether. When it was over, Jane, as stalwart a creature as I know, remarked that the cold had driven the feeling out of her feet. We kept our jackets on for lunch at a terrace restaurant. Then drove home.
The hours of harsh elements, even the drive there all added up to a ritual of remembrance. I said Kaddish again bouncing over the waves. No more meaningful than before. Except that I had tried. And Jane was there. More than there, a partner in everything. Now it is all over, except that it isn't, of course. The revulsion and the wish to escape the horror of it still warring inside me. A good battle to fight and lose. Sadness waiting for the armistice.
At least the yahrzeit candle is out. Last night it was still burning, albeit feebly, at 10 PM. How annoying, it seemed, and how fiendish. For I would like the whole unpleasant chapter to magically go away. Which is why the tradition of the candle, I suppose. Not to forget, and not to avoid. Two years would seem long enough. Apparently not. The physical reactions remain, fear and panic and revulsion. But less. Or not all the time.
I am generally so oblivious that just the other day I noticed the watercolor on my bedroom wall as though for the first time. Old sailing ships, sails furled, the silhouette of their rigging standing out stark and black against what might be a sunset but is too fierce. No, the clouds are whipped into an orange fever by something else. With the ghostly ships at the edge of things, riding a horizon, there is a sense of the glowing, impersonal light of death. The ships aren't going anywhere. And at one moment the scene has a quality of desperation about it. Then desperate sadness. Then sadness. Then something more objective, larger and uncontrollable. Inevitable. The changing scene.
This hung on the wall opposite Marlou as she was dying. Did she look at it? Could she even see it with her pain and her brain tumors and her fear? Had she chosen it unconsciously in anticipation of such a moment in extremis? And now I have finally seen it myself. The changing scene.
Naturally, I was unclear about the rituals. Okay to say Kaddish after the first year? The keddem Rabbi filled me in. Jane helped me light the yahrzeit candle. I downloaded an English version from the web, read the Kaddish...a maddeningly general, seemingly all-purpose invocation if there ever was one. Then went to bed. Naturally, I awoke in the wee hours. But did all the right things. Sat up. The general change of body posture making this quadriplegic feel less helpless. Jane fetched some chocolate from the kitchen. And the next thing I knew, I was sliding through suburban Redwood City on my hand splint. The uphills being rather difficult. And then, incredibly, we were not dreaming but awake and on the road. The southbound US 101 road, then over the hills, past Santa Cruz, and down to Moss Landing where Marlou's ashes were scattered last year. In fact, aboard the very same boat.
It promised to be a source of renewal, this going upon the fertile and protected waters of Monterey Bay. The fertility stems from a strange accident of nature, that a deep undersea canyon pulls in very close to the coast. Pacific Ocean life swells up from the depths right by the sea's edge. Whatever. The crew got me on board with remarkably little effort. And then Jane and I were seated side-by-side on a fiberglass bench, chugging through the harbor, heading out to sea.
Everything was very much as it was last year. Except the weather. The oceans are known for this. Suburban landlubbers like me are not, by contrast, known for their nautical sense. Which explains my surprise at finding the entire experience so radically different. The skies looked on the verge of rain. The wind blew. The boat bounced, rocked, tilted and began the cycle again. At sea, in a craft from which one is able to observe the watery surface well, the stormy ocean looks much like a landscape of small valleys and ridges, moving of course. That, the whale-watching oceanographer explained to those of us aboard, made such an experience rather difficult. For sea creatures were the object. Gray whales, blue whales, dolphins, orcas, we were here to see them. But they had no interest in us. The spouts of the largest whales would have been lost in the frothy tumult. The fins of dolphins or killer whales equally hard to see. Still, these Moss Landing folks were determined to give their passengers a good run for the money. And run we did, from the middle of Monterey Bay to the northern end beyond Santa Cruz. Then southbound. Four hours altogether. When it was over, Jane, as stalwart a creature as I know, remarked that the cold had driven the feeling out of her feet. We kept our jackets on for lunch at a terrace restaurant. Then drove home.
The hours of harsh elements, even the drive there all added up to a ritual of remembrance. I said Kaddish again bouncing over the waves. No more meaningful than before. Except that I had tried. And Jane was there. More than there, a partner in everything. Now it is all over, except that it isn't, of course. The revulsion and the wish to escape the horror of it still warring inside me. A good battle to fight and lose. Sadness waiting for the armistice.
You can tell when things are askew, for a Peet's cappuccino seems downright calming. Not only that, but you roll aboard Caltrain for a routine trip to San Francisco, get as far as Redwood City five minutes north, and stop. With various announcements promising to, bear with us, we need to reset something. We are still working on that. Still trying. Until, after almost an hour has elapsed. Please get off this train and board the next. Naturally, everyone complies with this request, but with a certain collective proviso. For everyone has been drinking. This is the first day of baseball season, and people have been drinking a lot. By the time they board the next train, now cramming two passenger loads into a single space, they are in a party mood. They are all extroverts. While I am jammed into a corner and trying to read a book of columns by the former editor of Punch, a woman actually leans over me to ask if I have gotten to the good part.
Extroverts are like this. They believe that if you're not talking, you are somehow deprived, and it is their generous spirit that offers you this chance at conversation. Incomprehensible, but there you are. I told the woman that the good part was just coming up. Hard to say if this silenced her or she tired of trying to lean over a large steel wheelchair, but that was that. Minutes later, a young woman felt obliged to scream from one end of the car to the other that she was born a Giants fan, was always going to be a fucking Giants fan, and so on. By now, virtually all of the available air had been sucked out of the train, upwards of 700 people were sitting, standing and jostling, and I had been aboard for more than two hours. As I say, things are askew.
You also know things are askew when the IRS announces that you owe them $16,000. Thus, the day's mail. I stared at this missive, and seeing no particular reason to panic, actually went to bed. And even slept. Why not? This is traditionally what one does at night. Furthermore, I had been anxious in one form or another all day. I do qualify the observation, noting C. S. Lewis' observation that 'grief is so much like anxiety.' And who knows what it is like. I don't like it, that is the point. And at the end of the day, dining with old friends, Laurel reminded me that one must get past the horror of death and experience its sadness before one can really grieve.
Which is all much more complicated in its execution, emotions piling atop each other as they do. A certain manic, slightly chirpy hysteria, underlying these days. Which is perhaps the horror, perhaps the beauty, of Marlou's day of dying. That it was either the earliest, or one of the earliest, days of spring. Warmth and promise and kids outside making noise. Ironic and redeeming. The truth being that we are all headed for the compost tumbler. And it could be worse. At least after some decomposition, I do have the possibility of being consumed by a lettuce root. Forming part of a brussels sprout. There are worse fates.
1 April, the day of fools. And I am just foolish enough to be up literally at the crack of dawn. A rare event, but I have been early to bed, and now I rise. The rosy-fingered dawn is reaching Menlo Park. The pink and salmon blazes in the wisps of clouds hanging over downtown. The dark blue of the fading night's sky confuses everything. It is almost morning, but not quite, and I am almost at Peet's. Oddly cold. For that is the other thing, that it is a California spring in moments, winter in others. Overhead it is all turbulence and transition. Below it is much the same. For within minutes of awakening, I shift from post-sleep to a state of shivery fear. Or something like fear. Why not? The yahrzeit approacheth. Tomorrow.
I am even equipped. Turns out there's nothing mysterious about yahrzeit candles. Aisle 5 at Safeway. And why such observances? Not to make us remember, but to help us with something we cannot forget. Forget that we are next? The essential injustice and cruelty of death? She didn't deserve this, I say to myself. And in the end, as the grief-fear subsides, what remains is the sharpness and the poignancy. Without which the luminous pink of dawn clouds would never give its miraculous pull at the heart. So brief, almost disappearing as it arrives.
Extroverts are like this. They believe that if you're not talking, you are somehow deprived, and it is their generous spirit that offers you this chance at conversation. Incomprehensible, but there you are. I told the woman that the good part was just coming up. Hard to say if this silenced her or she tired of trying to lean over a large steel wheelchair, but that was that. Minutes later, a young woman felt obliged to scream from one end of the car to the other that she was born a Giants fan, was always going to be a fucking Giants fan, and so on. By now, virtually all of the available air had been sucked out of the train, upwards of 700 people were sitting, standing and jostling, and I had been aboard for more than two hours. As I say, things are askew.
You also know things are askew when the IRS announces that you owe them $16,000. Thus, the day's mail. I stared at this missive, and seeing no particular reason to panic, actually went to bed. And even slept. Why not? This is traditionally what one does at night. Furthermore, I had been anxious in one form or another all day. I do qualify the observation, noting C. S. Lewis' observation that 'grief is so much like anxiety.' And who knows what it is like. I don't like it, that is the point. And at the end of the day, dining with old friends, Laurel reminded me that one must get past the horror of death and experience its sadness before one can really grieve.
Which is all much more complicated in its execution, emotions piling atop each other as they do. A certain manic, slightly chirpy hysteria, underlying these days. Which is perhaps the horror, perhaps the beauty, of Marlou's day of dying. That it was either the earliest, or one of the earliest, days of spring. Warmth and promise and kids outside making noise. Ironic and redeeming. The truth being that we are all headed for the compost tumbler. And it could be worse. At least after some decomposition, I do have the possibility of being consumed by a lettuce root. Forming part of a brussels sprout. There are worse fates.
1 April, the day of fools. And I am just foolish enough to be up literally at the crack of dawn. A rare event, but I have been early to bed, and now I rise. The rosy-fingered dawn is reaching Menlo Park. The pink and salmon blazes in the wisps of clouds hanging over downtown. The dark blue of the fading night's sky confuses everything. It is almost morning, but not quite, and I am almost at Peet's. Oddly cold. For that is the other thing, that it is a California spring in moments, winter in others. Overhead it is all turbulence and transition. Below it is much the same. For within minutes of awakening, I shift from post-sleep to a state of shivery fear. Or something like fear. Why not? The yahrzeit approacheth. Tomorrow.
I am even equipped. Turns out there's nothing mysterious about yahrzeit candles. Aisle 5 at Safeway. And why such observances? Not to make us remember, but to help us with something we cannot forget. Forget that we are next? The essential injustice and cruelty of death? She didn't deserve this, I say to myself. And in the end, as the grief-fear subsides, what remains is the sharpness and the poignancy. Without which the luminous pink of dawn clouds would never give its miraculous pull at the heart. So brief, almost disappearing as it arrives.
