May 2011 Archives

I had seen him several times at Café Central, a.k.a., Borrone, always vaguely associating him with someone else.  There was, after all, another guy I met through my first wife and have long associated with the place.  But he was clearly another guy.  This guy was this guy.  And what caught my eye, or my mind, was his frequent appearance at the café, coupled with his circumstances.  He always sits alone.  Frequently, he can be seen in the company of an iPod, or somesuch, wires dangling from his ears.  Something about him is slightly shaggy, although I'm not observant enough to provide details.  I would have to take a closer look, add up the haircut, any trace of beard and, of course, attire, before rendering an informed verdict.  Most importantly, he is disabled.  Not as much as I, let me be clear, but enough to be noticeable.  He walks with a limp that is more than a limp...a stagger, actually.  One side of his body curves and collapses with each step.  There may be a pigeon-toed component to his gait.  And his age?  Less than mine.  In short, he is physically better off than I, while noticeably afflicted.  My confusion with this other guy, approximately the same age and equally thin of face, makes little sense when one remembers that he is a runner.  As was the former wife.  She has run far away, that is all that matters.  What matters now is this guy.  The one I see at Café Borrone.

What startled me to alertness was seeing him stagger out of an apartment down the street.  We are neighbors.  And on this particular morning while I was heading for the library to drop off a book, the fact of our proximity made a certain impression.  And 15 minutes later we had both converged at the café.  There he was, sitting alone, wires dangling.  And what were we if not partners in middle-aged loneliness?  Disabled partners.  Driving me to the inevitable assessment and comparison.  Which has to do with losers.

Who is the loser?  Or who is the greater loser?  Surely this value system, and it is not much of a system, either springs from something deep within me or my childhood.  Whatever the origins, this construct or perspective has haunted me all my days.  I began to slip into loser status long about the third grade.  How could things go so terribly wrong for an eight-year-old?  The answer had to do with my parents' marriage.  As it collapsed and their bitterness grew, I developed the desperate belief that my role was central.  After all, I could temporarily brighten the mood of one or the other parent.  And in my childish egotism, this represented a sort of control.  It was up to me.  As things failed between them, something failed within me.  Which manifested itself in a simple fact of life.  I had fewer and fewer friends.  Moreover, I had fewer of the 'right' friends.  Which meant popular.  Well-liked, good achievers in either class or playground.  Fewer and fewer friends.  More and more of the few friends that remained being among the less popular.  On and on it went.  I was a loser, associating with losers, until....

Almost until university.  In the final term of high school I actually made some friends.  In the coming years I made more.  No longer a loser, although the shadowy memory remained.  And what remains today is a number of withering judgments of schoolmates.  This one was stupid, that one disabled (yes), that one poor, that one from a violent household.  Odd that it takes a lifetime to shake off such attitudes.

But there I was, St. Aubyn Trilogy in hand, rolling my way down Roble Avenue.  And there he was, the limping iPod guy from the café.  And there he was again in the café.  Which presented an opportunity.  For what, it wasn't clear.  There was nothing to lose by rolling over to his table and saying hello.  Hello.  At first, he seemed puzzled.  Was I talking to him, and if so, why?  Off came the iPod.  Hi, I said, we must be neighbors.  I explained that our paths had crossed earlier.  Sorry, he said, had he forced me into the street?  No, I assured him.  It took major effort to make sense of this, but I vaguely recalled rolling down the middle of Roble Avenue, something I do from time to time...mostly liking the smoothness of the pavement, the freedom of not having to scan bumps in the sidewalk.  I didn't elaborate.  What is your name?  Michael, he said.  I told him mine.  I said goodbye and rolled off to order my cappuccino.  No sense in making excessive chit chat.  One never knows.

One never knows what?  That I might get trapped.  Though Michael hardly seems like the trapping sort.  In fact, very much the opposite.  He seems to want to be around people, while wanting something to fill up the emptiness...like an iPod.  Perhaps I do much the same thing in bringing my latest printouts from Salon.com.  The latter, I tell myself, look vaguely like work.  Sheets of 8.5 x 11 full of printing.  Maybe I am employed, have whatever status goes with that.  I'm not wasting time just hanging around Café Borrone, not me.  I am not a loser.

In my best moments, I am aware of the social context.  If there was ever a nation based on winning, it is the US.  No country for losers, be they old men or young men.  Which is why one needs to create one's own country for learners.  Since as my deceased wife has shown, we lose everything, might as well pick up some knowledge along the way.  Including some knowledge of Michael.  What does he do?  He seems to be in the café fairly often.  Does he have a job?  Did he?  And all that is worthwhile knowing in these questions revolves around disability.  I never found it easy being a member of the disabled workforce.  Fulfilling in ways.  Certainly a pathway to social confidence, feeling included.  And learning about the world and its vicissitudes.  Human nature.  Losing a certain innocence.  Surviving.  Perhaps Michael and I can compare notes.  I am not sure that in all my days this has ever happened...comparing the employment experience with another disabled person.  

And what if he turns out to be someone I really don't want to know?  What if he crowds in at my table whenever I turn up here in the future?  Well, that would be a risk.  Also something to learn.  Even in conjecture there is a lesson.  That I value my privacy and I get tired of it.  That boundaries can be difficult to determine.  But maybe I am not alone in this difficulty.  Maybe the important thing is to keep taking chances, the only way out the past.

It is 25 May, and there is no excuse for rain.  Lunch date made infinitely more complicated, or easier, by taking the train all of 1.1 miles to Palo Alto.  On the platform, the tracks present their banal secret, an unimpeded vista.  Cars, ever smaller, appear at one point, then another and another.  The most distant ones are probably crossing the tracks in the next town, Atherton.  When the train's headlight sparks into tiny yellowish life, the locomotive may be in Redwood City.  It is on the way, and so is the rain.  

The train's invulnerable mass encourages me.  It will roll its steel weight southward, shrugging off what passes for weather in this mild region.  The conductor says rain was heavy in San Francisco.  No rain will reach us here at all, but only time will reveal that.  For now, the next two minutes, I am journeying, even crossing a bridge at a creek, the county line.  Tomorrow and tomorrow.

And then it is tomorrow.  And damned if I'm not railing minutes before my departure.  Virtual railing, that is, buying tickets on the East Coast Railway to Newcastle.  It's all very simple, but I am in something of a quandary concerning my disabled railcard, issued in 2006, and not renewed, owing to a request for my British social security number.  Fuck them.  Of course, I can always plead ignorance.  Say I was confused by the website, which is not entirely untrue.  The night before I checked out various possibilities, even first class, noting the remarkable difference in prices between departing Kings Cross Station at 10 AM, versus 10:30 AM.  Nor is it clear whether I should indicate two adults with railcards or one with and one without.  I slept on it.  

Incredibly eight hours later, the fares have changed.  Now, if I'm to believe this, every train I looked at the previous evening has soared in cost.  In the end, the answer seems clear.  Second class will do, especially since all departures cost the same...and choosing the fastest run will make the experience brief.  By 'brief' I mean that trains cover the 300 miles from London to Newcastle in two hours and fifty minutes.  No, they are not TGVs or bullet trains or rocket expresses.  Just trains.  They go more than 100 mph of course, which is what trains do.  Everywhere but here.  

And speaking of here, onscreen things have slowed down to a virtual standstill.  I am creeping from trains to fares to seating to entering credit card information...at an electronic snail's pace.  Each screen loads slowly, as though secretly conversing with Newcastle, asking if this is okay, that is all right.  Finally, it is done, but I am not.  Now I dial a remarkably long series of numbers to speak to this Geordie guy about special assistance.  Don't ask why this is required.  If I can pass myself off as a up-to-date railcard holder, surely I can reserve my own wheelchair space.  But no.  The guy in Newcastle does this for me.  And what with the phone call, the slowly appearing Internet screens, damned if I'm not pushing it regarding my next Caltrain departure.  I'm out the door.  Might as well deposit a couple of checks on the way.

After all, I really do have time.  Things occur swiftly at my bank.  Even so, I am getting a bit nervous as the teller types in one number, then the next.  I apologize to him, explaining that I must get to the train.  Perhaps I'll pick up my deposit receipt later, I say.  No no, he shakes his head, almost done.  Very well.  After all, once back on the street, the station is just ahead.  Still, I really must resist this habit of charging across busy thoroughfares when the traffic lights are not quite signaling me to do so.  El Camino Real, being the current example.  Not that I need to worry, for there really are enough cars to keep the signal sufficiently green sufficiently long.  And there it is, the station, just one block away, and no need to worry now.  Except that clang, clang, clang and hoot, hoot, the train is approaching.  Fuck.  This can't be happening.  

My wheelchair control is bent as far forward as a joystick can go.  There is nothing to do, except not stop, even though my current favorite novel is slipping from my lap.  Nothing to do but charge across the tracks, hoping that I'm not too far from the conductors to be overlooked.  I roar, at least mentally, up the platform.  One of the guards sees me, even waves.  Not at me, of course, but to the driver.  The train pulls away.  The station clock says that my train has departed two minutes early.  This can't be happening.  This doesn't happen.  Trains simply do not depart before, well, the time they depart.

Two women are discussing this very matter behind me.  Yes, one says, trains are allowed to depart four to seven minutes early.  I have never heard of such a thing.  But it has the ring of truth, some obscure fact buried in the fine print of the Caltrain website.  Fucked.  I am fucked.  I pull out my phone and leave a message for Leo, my lunch date.  He's not there.  At 88 years old, Leo is doing his thrice weekly Pilates.  He is a mensch.  He is a stud.  I am a fool.  I have actually missed a train.  Because I pushed things, pushed them too hard, trying to push one bank deposit too many into my aimless life.  And now I am fucked.  Stranded and fucked.  An hour, everything will be one hour later than I intended.  The two women are still talking, now about the Giants special, the extra baseball train that takes fans to the afternoon's game.  My breathing slows.  Reality, a reality that includes trains departing ahead of schedule, reorders itself.  In fact, I have fallen for this before, this rushing for an apparently early train that turned out to be a baseball train.  My train, it becomes clear, is still en train.

The conductor thinks I'm mad.  He's right, in a manner of speaking, my fight/flight responses still geared.  For I have first told him that I am heading for San Francisco, then minutes later, announced my intention to jump train at Milbrae.  I have another plan.  Actually, this has been in the works for some while.  Every time I see Leo, who ceased being my college professor 36 years ago, the same plan occurs to me.  Thing is, I am a creature of transit habit and can't quite make the switch.  Never mind.  With everything in flux, adrenaline and various fear neuropeptides pumping about my brain, why not?  Yes, I roll off at Milbrae and roll directly onto the waiting Bay Area Rapid Transit train.  We set out, clattering north, disappearing in and out of concrete tubes, until at last my station.  I have to double check the map in the subway car.  After all, there is a Glen Park as well as a Balboa Park...and the San Francisco Muni tram system confuses me further by proclaiming the destination Ocean Park on some of its cars.  Not to worry.  Balboa Park it is.  Up the elevator and out to the world.

For all its imperfections, one of the signs that San Francisco clings to civilization, or vice versa, is the city's transit company, the Municipal Railway.  This area around San Francisco City College seems cut off, half forgotten, certainly far from the trendy neighborhoods and tourist haunts.  But not forgotten by the Muni, it seems.  One of the old tram lines used to stop about two miles away, perhaps even less, so it made sense to extend the rails here.  No BART station away from the city's center is busier than Balboa Park.  So, let's hear it for the Muni.  At least such was my thinking as I rolled out into Tram Land.

This is where some of San Francisco's trams appear to sleep at night.  The Muni has a large yard next door, wrought iron fences arcing into fierce points that hang over the parked trains.  I note that each of the trams curves into its parking space in a symmetrical arrangement that reminds me of wires fanning from a cable or bristles from a hairbrush.  Most impressive, but what's just outside the BART station is very much the opposite.  A single track curves along one side, derelict looking, like an occasionally used siding for freights.  I know better, of course and roll along the side of the BART station looking for a sign.  I see one.  Small and painted and with an arrow indicating J and K lines.  Yes, that would be me.  

I stare puzzled up at a waiting tram car.  Not only is it not clear how I board this thing in my wheelchair, but whether this is the right thing at all.  There are some indications that this is a Muni stop.  But the weeds and the crude pavement and the minimal signage do not augur terribly well.  Finally, a driver steps from a second tram parked on this siding.  He tells me to head for the ramp.  I haven't a clue.  He walks me down a sidewalk between the station and the train yard, weeds and rubbish blown gently in the Bay breeze.  I still don't see any ramp.  We continue, my doubts growing, the footpath lined by the sort of movable barriers used to control crowds.  Until, okay, yes, there it is.  Unmarked, in the middle of a post-industrial waste strip, a ramp to a wheelchair boarding platform.  I ascend as the driver departs, saying too bad but his tram has already passed this wheelchair launch point.  Give it another 20 minutes, he says.

I am now perched on a lonely urban outcropping, staring at parked trams, and realizing that disabled access is something of an afterthought.  Then revising my opinion, I decide that human access is an afterthought.  BART stations architecturally advance their cause with considerable force, not to mention expense.  They are all about decor, with brick concourses and ample platforms, electronic signs and surfaces that indicate where to board.  At Balboa Park two rail systems meet, exchange passengers, complement each other.  You would never know it.  Muni seems inadvertent, giving the station a glancing blow from an alley alongside it.

From my perch high above the tracks, obvious things begin to occur to me.  Why doesn't Muni have a platform, a concrete structure elevated to the height of the trams?  With things like ticket machines.  Signs that explain interesting details, like what it costs to ride.  Even a map or two that might show where you're going.  It is good that such thoughts fill my mind, for the surroundings are struggling hard to empty it.  A plastic bag blows through the weeds sprouting between tracks.  Everything else is abandoned, still and looking like some existential French film from the 1960s.  The end of civilization is at hand.  

But not before a tram creeps around the corner.  It stops at a switch.  Then it starts and, as San Francisco trams do, stops again.  Now, finally having achieved some resolve, it rumbles toward me.  I roll aboard.  The tram advances 50 meters then stops again.  The end of the line, the driver announces.  Five passengers straggle off.  The driver himself grabs a canvas bag and departs.  I hear him tell his replacement that the lone rider is heading for 24th Street.  Watch out for this guy, he adds.  I appear quite benign, that is the joke.  He checks to make sure I get it.  I smile.  Let's get the fuck on the road, I am thinking, having spent too much of my recent life here in Balboa Park.

When we get under way there are the usual tram-style starts, stops and starts.  Ocean Avenue appears.  Is this the same one I pass on 19th Ave.?  Doubtless.  This question might not occur to me if a roaring motorway had not scarred a course through the southern edge of San Francisco decades ago.  Too late.  The works of man are what they are.  Interstate 280 is not going away but for divine intervention.  The latter not be ruled out, tectonic forces being what they are.  No, I am not wishing for an earthquake, just a selective temblor that would sink 280's roadway beneath eye level.  The tram stops at the outer edge of Glen Park, confusing me utterly.  And now the predicted, anticipated straightaway, the run down the center of San Jose Ave.  We actually pick up considerable speed in this uninterrupted bit.  Except for tunnels, Muni trams rarely have such an opportunity.  We cover a long distance in short order, which is intensely gratifying.

We are approaching the final approach.  Turning up one of the neighborhood streets that comprise the Outer Mission District, the mixture of wooden Victorian and stucco post-earthquake houses combine pleasantly.  A sense of place.  A place my own senses are attuned to, recognizing the general feel of this district where I lived in my graduate school youth.  I am not surprised to see an espresso café at the corner.  On pleasant days like this one, can there be any finer place?  I wonder who frequents such a cafe these days.  People who make their money from high tech or real estate or investments?  Retired or working at home, a certain income level essential to what used to be a working-class neighborhood.  Even here, half a mile from the center of neighborhood action, 24th St., I would peg the smallest homes at a million dollars.  Everyone wants to live in San Francisco.  The good news and the bad.  Do I want to live here myself, I ask, turning the problem around in my mind, viewing it from all angles?  I am viewing the espresso joint from all angles to, such is the tram's cornering ability.  We seem to be barely rotating, a friendly sign directing the driver to 'LRV 3 Mph,' the light rail vehicle speed.

Then, as now, my life in Noe Valley was predicated on a series of landlords.  The first was a German-American who kept the place for his mother-in-law.  He loathed her, that was obvious.  She loved me, that was obvious too.  Minnie must have been pushing 80.  She was not exactly spry but compensated well enough.  When I returned from campus in the late afternoons, Minnie would often lift her window, sash weights rumbling, and offer a selection of freebies.  First, there was the advice.  Watch out for the boys.  The latter referred to roving gangs that Minnie was convinced had it in for her and, by extension, me.  In the 1970s, the only boys roaming the neighborhood were gay and looking for each other.  But Minnie had long ago retreated into her house and her worldview, so there was nothing to do but thank her for the warning.  At which point she would tell me to wait.  Moments later, a bag tied to a string would lower from her window.  Inside were a collection of sweets, dimestore stuff that was impossible to eat and impossible to refuse.  I would thank her profusely and go inside.

Then the owner died.  Minnie went to a nursing home.  I actually visited her there once, amid all the shrunken options of aging and dying in oddly provincial South San Francisco.  As for the house, the buyers were a young couple, more or less my age.  I expected a massive rent increase, but no.  The monthly charges went up a notch or two.  But that was all.  The husband and wife upstairs were both from San Francisco, they said, by way of explanation concerning the continuing low rent.  Whatever.  I was happy enough with the arrangement.  

But living conditions changed considerably.  Bill, the new landlord, began appearing regularly at my door.  A roaring extrovert, he liked to chat.  The latter was not helping my progress as a creative writing student, but he was oblivious.  Weekends were the worst.  On one occasion he knocked on my door to offer a bit of humor.  Having somehow learned of my origins, he brightly observed 'oy vey, Mrs. Boinsteen.'  I stared at him with incomprehension while he laughed at this, his favorite Jewish joke, certain I would share in the merriment.  I said ha ha and managed an aghast smile.  He was, after all, the landlord.

Bill took particular interest in the old garage.  It backed on an alley, a wooden clapboard structure low and narrow enough for a Model T. Bill spent every available hour there, hammering and sawing.  Soon lights blazed from the lone dirty window.  And in no time at all Bill let me in on his secret.  Actually, after some discrete probing, we inhaled his secret.  Marijuana.  A whole garage full of plants grown under lights.  I began trundling up the stairs to inhale Bill's crop along with his very silent wife, Joyce.  The conversations were not the most stimulating.  Never mind, for Bill's crop was.  When one factored in the pharmaceutical component of my rent, the whole thing penciled out rather positively.  

With Bill, Joyce and I in their unimproved, authentically 1920s living room, time and space came alive in characteristic ways.  Their home filled with a heavy crystalline quality, occasional lapses in conversation overlooked by the two of them.  After a few of these sessions, Joyce seemed borderline catatonic.  After a few more she was gone.  Bill announced that she had filed for divorce.  He was on his own.  The grow lights in the garage glowed all the more vigorously now.  Bill's comings and goings remained unaltered, his job being very regular.  He worked for one of the big airlines, doing maintenance on jumbo jets.  I made a mental note to avoid any plane he might have serviced.  Eventually, grad school over and a few jobs under my belt, it was time to move, and just as well.  Bill had begun renovating my apartment, a project that progressed in fits and starts.  For long stretches I found water turned off in the bathroom or lights out of order in the kitchen.  It was time to go.

And now, decades later, it is time to go from this Muni tram.  Amazing to have almost four decades of experience in this one neighborhood.  And to have the same lengthy history with Leo.  I tell him about my morning hours aboard transit.  Leo nods.  He has heard it all.  Our conversation ranges across Pilates and copy editors.  And when it's over, I make a dash for the Muni.  It seems possible, just barely, that with a bit of luck I could align my trip with the 2:07 Caltrain southbound.  Passing a bus shelter, I glance at the digital sign.  It promises a 17-minute wait for the next 48 bus.  I am an old and savvy guy now and understand what this means.  Gazing up the hill I see the fruits of my life's experience.  Yes, it is the 48 bus, arriving in 17 seconds.  The hydraulic lift angles me up and in.  We rumble downhill toward the nearest BART station...where miraculously a Milbrae-bound train is due in two minutes.  Life, all of it, should be like this.  Efficient, devoid of lost time and missed connections, one component smoothly fitting with the next.  True, the elevators at Milbrae require the patience of a saint, not exactly my forte, but it doesn't matter.  We are aligned, the 2:07 and I.  One wheelchair space is taken, but one remains.  I rumble southbound with no margin to spare.

Rolling down my wheelchair ramp at 7 AM, the wind overwhelms my bodily defenses.  The latter must be scant in the temperature sensing and regulating departments.  Only a few hundred meters from my home, the whole expedition seems marginal.  Turning around could be wise.  I don't, of course.  This is supposedly May, and by all accounts this is Central California, renowned for its late spring warmth.  Unless I have forgotten.  What I do remember is to make sympathetic remarks to Tom, my landlord, concerning the wind.  He doesn't like it.  Because of the cold, I assumed, the first time he complained about the breezes.  But no, there is more to it.  The wind, I think, unnerves him.  It's that simple and uncomplicated.  What's really complicated is why this thought even enters my mind.  What do I care about Tom and the wind?  I care, because simply put, Tom is part of my current support system.  I exist atop a house of cards.  My aging landlord who was not raised the rent in something like 17 years.  My tenant whose rent on one of my two apartments actually pays for both.  Essential to keep Tom going.  And being the child of divorced parents whose earliest job description involved the soothing, placating and harmonizing of two battling adults...well, this makes my current work rather easy.

Thing about rolling into my local supermarket at the excessively bright hour of 7:15 AM is that one can experience the brightness virtually alone.  The staff seem surprised to see me.  They can barely see each other, such is the hour.  I practice my Spanish in the delicatessen department.  Pavo being the word for turkey.  I sail out the door with half a pound.  Which leads back into the blustery day.  The latter being the stuff of Winnie the Pooh.  Such a day is neither hostile nor frightening in the hands of Milne.  Yet the author's embrace is not excessive.  We shall hold, but not smother.  Don't worry.  Also, don't stay home.  Yes, there's a bit of discomfort.  So what?  The only alternative would be a Disney Day, all rounded edges, even horizons and characters without genitals.  No, we'll have a bit of wind.

Good to consider that all of the winter's rains have sunk directly beneath my tires, down through the specially permeated surface of Menlo Park's eco-friendly asphalt.  Yes, our cars now park on this experimental pavement, somewhat coarse looking stuff that allows water to run directly through it.  Better, our cars now park elsewhere, the hour being what it is.  The parking lots shimmer like deserts, all expanse.  My wheelchair zips from one to the next, out one driveway, up the next, and into another asphalt vista, an empty apron of diagonal parking spaces.  This world is mine.  It is the realm of the exposed, single-occupant vehicle, batteries roaring, distance melting.  On and on through the carless deserts of early-morning Menlo Park.  On to Café Borrone, or maybe not.  Something in me is slowing.  I have, after all, reached Trader Joe's, one axis in this morning's triangular trade.  And the bakery is just up the street.  Furthermore, I am getting a sort of read from the café that indicates 'no.'  Maybe just a bit too hip.  Not anonymous enough.  Somehow, people notice each other there.  My failure...while unspecified...seems too prominent this day.  Besides, the café's redoubtable oatmeal, the stuff of an aging person's health...on this day it promises one oat too many.

What does it mean that all of the young women behind the counter of Le Boulangerie are Hispanic?  Are they particularly skilled at baking?  Or skilled at working for low wages?  My morning's copy of The Nation is full of articles about the loss of the two-wage household.  The collapse of higher education for the masses.  What can I do but give these women a good tip?  In cash.  I can't finish my omelette sandwich, that is for sure.  I box the thing to take home.  I shall take myself home.  I shall wear my trousers rolled.

But not before scoring some freesias at Trader Joe's.  Out of them, says the clerk, and not in season, and I am out the door.  But not before a chat with Marty.  I always have time for Marty, the only authentic Nepalese in my world.  He tells me about a local fair, a green expo of sorts in nearby San Mateo.  I know this is one of those moments when there is a chance to make contact, older man to younger one.  He has a lot on the ball, Marty.  He has much to do with Trader Joe's store layout, it's signs and painted announcements.  I also sense that he is frustrated.  In his early 40s, this isn't much of a job.  I could easily try to expand the topic, getting beyond the fair to the life beyond, even hinting at something else...what I have learned about solar installations in the Bay Area, for example.  But not now, and the reasons are not clear except that I have to go home and...be at home.  I wish Marty well.  Later.

Jane has given me a very eco-shopping bag, all recycled and probably biodegrading as well.  Which I know stashed in the kitchen, right next to the salad bowl and tinned salmon and the velvet bag in which the mortuary packaged Marlou's ashes.  To be precise where precision is due, her remains were in a plastic box, encased by a tough plastic bag, and then handed to me and to her father in this maroon velvet bag with a rope drawstring.  And like everything else about my Miss Haversham life and times, yes, even this ceremonial sack is floating about my apartment.  How has landed on a kitchen shelf is anyone's guess.  For a while it was by the front door.  Now it is here.  And now as though awaking from dream, I am here with it.

My first thought is that this bag has, by dint of its position, achieved the status of the other bags in the kitchen.  Why not use it as a shopping bag?  My next thought is to wonder how or why someone chose maroon velvet.  Are they thought to be religious or regal?  In our modern world, with everything given over to commerce, even sincere efforts at recapturing the ceremonial or trying to be respectful seem hollow.  Not to mention suspect or even tawdry.  Which gives us the constant challenge of reinfusing everything around us with significance.  Or trying to.  Which means I can't go shopping with this velvet bag.  Nor leave it there.  Or throw it out.  And because there is no rule, I must make a judgment.  A lot for one day.

Also too little.  I know that without enough walking, my sense of balance and ambulatory confidence declines.  I fear being on my feet.  It is very easy, even natural, inevitable, to grow accustomed to the ease of the wheelchair.  Infinitely faster, requiring much less concentration, and I can grip things other than my crutch.  A book.  A cup of tea.  Walking takes everything, including concentration.  Although more walking takes less.  The problem is that with long stretches alone in my apartment, my fear of falling deters me from getting up on my feet and hobbling about.  An effort of will.  And with Perry, physiotherapy assistant, on his way, I decide this is the moment, a relatively safe one.  If I fall, I won't lie alone for too long.  At this juncture, it is not clear if I can get off the floor on my own.  I haven't tried this in years but can imagine the approximate sequence.

I would slide across the carpet.  More precisely, I would attempt to drag myself over the rough ribbed woolen surface, traction unknown.  Dragging would actually mean pushing with my one functioning leg, pulling with my arm, digging the elbow into the fabric.  Dig, push, dig, push.  And my destination?  Perhaps I would try to get close to the grabber, the trigger-action hook device I use to reach things.  Trouble is, this rests on my desk.  Getting to it might be difficult.  And even if I did, what would I do?  Use it to grab the phone?  A nice idea.  But I can just imagine somehow getting the phone off the hook, its cord dangling...only to have the dialtone disappear.  And how what I dial anyway?  No, I would need one of the cordless phones.  Possible, might be possible.

Even more likely, I inch myself over land, cross-carpet, to sofa or bed.  Try to get my back against one end, then shut myself up, mostly with my good leg, working the shoulders higher, the upper back, sliding and sliding until I somehow get my butt over the edge and reached the stage of sitting.  Anyway, this is the general specter that precedes any rising from my wheelchair.  I am already exhausted just sitting and thinking about the prospect.

But not now.  Look at me, up on my feet, crutch in hand, taking the first step along my office wall.  The first being the most dangerous, and not because of anything philosophical, but sheer neurology.  My leg spasms with unexpected force.  Which may sound like something bad, or at least unpredictable, but it isn't.  This is how I walk, if one can use the word.  Step, spasm, step, spasm.  In this fashion I make my way out of the office, down the hall, and into my bedroom.  The terrain varies wildly.  In the office, there's a wall to my right.  So a fall in that direction, toward my paralyzed unprotected side would leave me leaning against a safe surface.  Very reassuring.  This abruptly changes at the entrance to the living room.  The wall gives way and dangerous space opens.  Never mind, for I continue, more wall now to my right, reminding me on one of those rare moments when I see them at eye level, that my hallway has become a gallery of Marlou's family photos.  Which no longer seems appropriate, out of balance.  But soon out of mind, walking requiring everything.  On the way back, the end of the bed is on my right, more hallway.  And I'm glad I've done this.  It seems a metaphor for aging.  Everything feels more dangerous, takes more effort...yet has to be done in the service of living.

Ah, yes, I thought, parting the curtains that slightly conceal the shelves just inside my kitchen door.  The perfect thing.  Cinnamon bars or seed-and-nut bars or whole-wheat bars, whatever they were called, they seemed the perfect, slightly healthy, complement to a morning cup of tea.  Why not?  Because there is always just the slightest possibility that they are past their pull date.  But aren't we all, I tell myself, rolling into the bedroom where Jane awaits the day's first tea infusion.  Leaving her the package, I roll back to the kitchen, retrieve my cup.  And by the time I have returned to the bedroom, Jane has found the expiration date.  More than two years previous.  The same month as Marlou's death.  Time flies.

And when time isn't flying, it is lying around being uncooperative.  It is not healing all wounds, that is for sure.  Or is it?  Perhaps slightly.  For although the passage of time may accomplish nothing on its own, having a sense of time makes a difference.  Children famously have no sense of time, for they have had little time to sense.  When I think of the most grueling and protracted periods of childhood trauma...my parents' bitter arguments and that I must do something to stop this collapse of everything...there was no end in sight.  What I learned to do was to hang on.  In the absence of any conceivable point in time when conditions would improve, something in me learned to clutch at the present.  There was a now, then another now, then after that yet another now.  Often the underlying constant was fear.  Which presented my moment-to-moment approach with a challenge.  One could get from this moment of fear to that moment of fear, but beyond?  Somewhere over the rainbow.  Tomorrowland, as Walt Disney called it in his themepark.  The sun will come up.

This will get better, a friend told me as we shared my one evening of Shiva just after Marlou's death.  Yes, this seemed entirely possible.  And why?  I'm certain that time has no magic properties on its own.  But by then I had had the experience of making use of time, opening up, however difficult.  And however long it took.  The point being that healing takes time.  But time can be taken.  Which contrasts with my childhood sense that horrible events would have a storybook ending of some kind.  Until which, one hung on.

And speaking of storybooks, what is the story behind this package of breakfast bars unearthed just hours ago?  Actually, I see some of the same childhood quality.  Letting things stand still, hanging on and on, while secretly despairing that the passage of time would bring nothing better.  My friend Laurel was talking about getting beyond the horror of a death to begin true mourning.  To me, this means regaining a sense of time.  Which includes the knowledge that there isn't all that much of it.  Bad news, one might say.  So, am I at the post-horror stage of grieving?  If so, what got me there?  Again, I don't buy that time itself is responsible for such a shift.  But something has shifted, and what is it?

Was it for Jane and her daughter Eleanor...or some Christmas party I was attending...that made me buy too many books in December?  Hard to say, impossible to remember, except that the books are still sitting in my living room, wrapped.  True, I'm not quite certain what to do about them.  But one thing is clear.  They don't belong on the chair.  Soon half a year will have passed.  I complain that I have become Miss Haversham, living a life surrounded by remnants.  But I must like things this way, pretending that the past isn't.  Actually, I don't.  It only takes a second to stash the books in unavailable space in my bedroom.  As for the ones that are gift wrapped, trouble is that by now their titles are forgotten.  I will unwrap them someday and surprise myself.  Oh, you shouldn't have.

In retrospect it must have been one of those times, faintly bleak, that seemed to go on and on without hope of improvement.  I was living in San Francisco, occupying an apartment that owing to the city's sloping terrain was half on the ground floor and half a basement.  Entering the place required one step up.  And at the other end of the apartment I could stare directly at people's feet mounting the hill on the sidewalk outside.  As for the slope of my life, it all seemed uphill in those days.  I was on my second job out of graduate school and, my God, it wasn't much.  I worked part time in a hospital, some sort of outreach project for the disabled.  Basically, my job was to garner more patients.  Ostensibly, the work had to do with acquainting disabled residents of San Francisco with the many services at their disposal.  Whatever.  I was making enough to qualify for food stamps.  It was both enlightening and embarrassing to get to the checkout in my local Bell Market and whip out these coupons.  But everything was enlightening and embarrassing.  My life.

My sister stayed with me part of the summer, sleeping in my front room.  It was great to have someone around.  Quite pleasant to come home from work and have another human to talk to, share meals with, exchange a laugh or two.  Certainly, at home there was more room.  At the hospital, my office was at best designed for two.  Four of us had been crammed into the space.  I had no desk, but a typing stand.  Also no phone.  When my boss was out, I borrowed hers.  San Francisco.  A long cold summer.

Every day, arriving home, I would extract my key and open the mailbox along the side of the building.  Carrying the mail inside must have been a chore, and my strategy eludes me.  After all, my one working hand would have been on the crutch I used in those days.  I probably wedged the mail against my chest, my right arm being much stronger then.  What I do recall is hobbling inside and dumping the mail on my dining table.  The latter was covered in a cheap batik fabric bought from one of the burgeoning Asian import stores.  It was probably not a tablecloth originally but now sufficed.  Dumping the mail also sufficed.  It gave me a strange pleasure not to deal with it.  Fuck the mail.  In fact, fuck the mail tomorrow and tomorrow.  It built up.  It built up amazingly fast.  And why I allowed, or encouraged this remains somewhat unclear.

Except that I was fed up and couldn't be bothered.  Mail?  There was nothing there.  I would get to it.  I would get to it when I got to it.  Meanwhile, daily existence was getting to me.  The next thing, was there another?  How did one progress from this pathetic part time job in a hospital to something else?  Was there something else?  How had life wedged me into this corner?  What was the next step?  Actually, there were many steps, one after the next, around my apartment.  Down the hill to go shopping on 24th St.  Out to my 1968 Plymouth Valiant and up the hill about four blocks to my nearest cappuccino outlet.  It was my golden age of ambulation.  A physiotherapist or two had warned me it would end, but I couldn't quite believe them.  For the time being, I was happily schlepping about, without being happy.  There had been enough losses in my life.

As for the mail, it proudly built up in its pile of dereliction.  Until Judgment Day.  That came in the form of a notice from a bank in Port Townsend, Washington.  I had paid off my five acres.  Fortunately, this envelope caught my eye.  Unfortunately, it caught it too late.  I began digging through the pile of mail in search of the deed.  My one piece of property.  My one piece of anything, it seemed.  With the small amount of money left over from my father's death, I had invested in several acres of forest.  I had no plans for the land.  Doubtless I would sell it someday.  And meanwhile, after years of payments, it was finally over.  Now I actually owned something, something substantial.  Except, that I had fucked up.  Surely it was in there somewhere, an official notice from Jefferson County, Washington.  Surely.  Weeks, perhaps months, of postal history passed before my eyes.  But no.  There was no deed.  I phoned my uncle in Washington and asked what to do.  A deed, he observed incredulous, could not disappear.  

He didn't know me.  He didn't know my life or my dining table or my futureless existence.  For the next years I relied on the Jefferson County property tax statement to provide a legal description of my five acres.  They were mine.  Twenty years later, Marlou parked our rental car outside the County office building in Port Townsend, went inside with the tax bill, and emerged with a copy of the deed.

And then she lay dying.  And how one thing led to the next, I do not know.  Nor do I know how her dying led to the next...whatever.  What I do know is that Marlou's horrifying last days brought her to the company of a hospice nurse who talked about the ocean.  How the sand felt on the North Shore of Oahu.  A recollection Marlou quite willingly took part in.  Lulled and encouraged by the hospice nurse.  Until she shut her eyes.  Forever.  She had another 18 hours to go.  And what looked horrifying to me from the outside, the lid hanging open on one sightless eye, may have been quite different from the inside.  Perhaps Marlou remained on the warm Hawaiian sands, the waters lapping, time passing as she was.  Perhaps the body knows when it is defeated, gives up and surrenders to time.  However much or however little.

I have a way of opening the front door to my apartment almost any morning, including wintry ones, though the practice is more frequent this time of year.  At night, the warm duvet that sufficed through April has begun to overpower me.  I am slightly too warm.  It is almost pleasant to throw the thing off and feel May.  Which is finally what it should be.  The morning air does not assault.  In fact, I welcome it in the open door, a temperate breeze wafting through the screen while I make tea in the kitchen.

This open door policy says much about my circumstances here on Roble Avenue.  Fifty meters off the street.  The direct view of traffic largely obscured by a big blue spruce.  Quiet.  Off-the-beaten-track.  Straight down the wheelchair ramp and across the sidewalk that separates my four-plex from the next my neighbors present a blank stillness.  None of them seem to depart for work at an early hour.  At least not at this hour, 6:30 AM, the kettle roaring and tea imminent.  What I can hear, even from the kitchen is the sound of morning nature.  Once the water has boiled and splashed into the cup, the whole apartment fills with squirrels rustling in the overgrown hedges, the wind swinging a rusty gate, birds cawing and crying.

"Paul, I need assistance.  I need some assistance here."  My tea is half brewed, but I am complete in my nakedness.  It says something about my state of emotional preoccupation these days that the sound of the voice at my front door asking for help sends barely a ripple through my being.  It is Jules, from across the way.  I not only recognize his voice, but in a general way, recognize his situation.  Which always seems precarious.  I ignore him for a second.  "Paul, I need assistance."

Okay.  Without much thought, I throw a tea towel over my crotch and roll to the front door.  Yes, it is Jules.  He says his boyfriend pushed him down.  His words are slurred and distant, and he seems reluctant to look too long at the naked old man in the wheelchair.  At times like this, I wish I knew a bit more about alcohol and drugs.  Just enough to understand what's going on in the outside world.  But I know what I know.  Jules is here, and now he is opening the screen door to give me his keys.  He wants me to have his keys, he says, without further explanation.  I do know one thing, and this is either the consequence of high emotion or being high period.  That everything transpiring by my screen door is symbolic.  There is no assistance that can be exchanged here, except in the broadest sense.  These keys, which are attached to what appears to be a large and elaborate bottle opener or knife, have no useful purpose residing with me.  Jules tells me he is heading up to San Francisco.  I have refused to take his keys.  He seems very disappointed, not to mention abandoned and bereft.  When he wanders away, I do not close the door.  Which surprises me.  I mean, why encourage this, whatever this is?  The latter question seems tantalizing and just.  People get into various states of crisis.  I see this in Jane's work on a regular basis.  Nothing odd, and no reason to close the door.  I am safe in this apartment.  But safe does not mean immune from life.  My open-door policy.  Why not?

Once the computer is warmed up, another door opens, the one that leads directly to Britain.  Some part of my mind is always given over to this portal.  Why, is not entirely clear to me.  On this particular occasion, I scan my e-mails for word from a man in Newcastle who sells disabled vans and, after a successful prodding from me, has agreed to rent one for a week in June.  The next UK trip.  And at this juncture it does appear that all the foundational structures are in place.  Wheelchair transport being the most tricky.

I have a pleasant moment contemplating our June morning departure from London.  How we are wisely staying almost next door to Kings Cross Station.  How with the greatest of ease, and at minimal expense, we can pop across the street from our Novotel to have perfectly acceptable coffee and granola at the Pret a Manger.  'Which one' being the logical question, and this does not detract at all from the pleasant anticipation.  For there are so many things bound up in this.  That I love both Jane and London, and here these experiences are combined in a pleasant history.  Also, that I have managed to make travel easier on both of us.  Hell, I can even operate the wheelchair lift at the entrance to the Novotel St. Pancras myself.

And the future.  Oddly, there seems more of one in Britain.  I do regret not being able to begin this Newcastle trip at St. Pancras Station, the one that has been tarted up beyond recognition, the old Northern Hotel finally reopened as a sort of restored palace.  But maybe not.  Maybe I will get even more of a charge out of seeing Kings Cross under construction.  The area around it is already revitalized, the office-canal-restaurant-theater development next door signaling what will happen when the station is complete.  Not that it matters.  All that counts is that the thing is the object of love and investment.  Yes, Kings Cross is a soot-blackened relic of the 19th century.  And now, in the 21st century, Britons took 1.3 billion rail trips last year.  Since they all crowded into stations, why not make the experience slightly more pleasant?  Yes, there is a future.  And as for the present, there are 300 miles between London and Newcastle and the trains cover them in less than three hours.  Which isn't about the future but a better present, as far as I am concerned.  And I am thinking of having a pre-trip pain au chocolat that fine morning in the Euston Road.  Heated.  

As for Budle Bay, Northumberland...I anticipate something wilder and quieter than much of my UK experience.  More remote than in Gloucestershire, my travels being rather limited.  Colder than Somerset, I suppose.  Either way, it's good to have a partner who is a built-in guide.  It's good to have a partner period.  Since living there in my 20s, I have vaguely wondered if I might return to Britain.  Now with Jane around, I return to Britain at home.  The point has become moot.  The door remains open.

My neighbor's little girls are running from the hail.  How there can be hail, let alone precipitation of any kind in this part of California, in this part of May, eludes me...just as the girls elude the hail.  Thing is, they aren't.  They are screaming and yelling for their daddy, and at the same moment they are running in the opposite direction, away from his front door.  Now they are screaming and running back toward it, now running away.  It helps that there are three of them.  Things make sense in a mob mentality that would otherwise appear loopy.  Together, one can be frightened and play at being frightened and seek escape from danger while seeking more danger...all at the same time.  

The ice pellets of hail bounce on my windowsill.  They hit the window glass and disappear, probably to melt on the concrete below.  The girls are running back and forth, daddy, daddy.  This is the ultimate excitement, to experience something new and frozen in these warm California environs, to do so on one's own, within hailing distance...no pun intended...of a protective human presence.  

I have planted tomato seedlings in their honor and intent to label each with a girl's name.  They will move in the not distant future, and I will be sad.  Perhaps with plants named in their collective honor, they will return to watch the tomatoes grow.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a tomato in Menlo.  And the process of healing is endless, not much like the event described in books.  I am being healed.  Yes, their parents are getting divorced, the father currently living near me.  But they are not divorced from reality, this I can tell.  It's going to be very different for them, compared to my own childhood experience.  Good.  Hang in there, kids, and might as well have your own tomatoes.

Unless you are Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and whether it's tomatoes or something else, you can never have enough.  Some people are like this, I know, but fortunately not all people...though people like this are either more empowered than ever before in this country, or the condition is simply become more apparent.  Rolling out of the Menlo Park Hardware Store, it occurs to me on this bright wheelchair morning that Strauss-Kahn's arrest was all a mistake.  Normally, the powers that be make sure that such things simply don't happen.  However, in this case, the International Monetary Fund isn't the stuff of mass media, and interviews with the IMF chairman aren't really the stuff of Oprah, so the New York City police cranked up the wheels of justice as they would for any guy staying at the Midtown Sofitel.  Especially a French guy.  And now, dammit, it's too late.  How do we undo this, now that we know that this isn't just any old French guy, but a Somebody French guy?  Damn.

Thing is, the separate justice systems for rich and poor are so entrenched in this country that when the public really sees the law working equitably, well, it's a little scary.  The prisons are a little scary.  The idea that a rich and powerful person could ever find himself in one, quietly drifts from unthinkable to occasionally, remotely possible.  Still, no reason to worry, you just need a backup plan.  You just need a way to let someone know Who You Are, before the wheels of justice drag you conveyor-belt fashion into Rikers Island.

Empty storefronts along Santa Cruz Ave.  Loss brings change, that is the good news.  And when those at the top demand that those in the middle absorb too much change, especially the negative variety, the natives get restless.  Or at least twitchy.  As for this native, change is in the air...along with Armageddon, the latest world's end slated for this weekend, according to one religious group.  The next world's end will also be scheduled for a weekend, I predict, America being the practical workplace that it is.  Might as well get product out and profits up before it all ends.

And what is the take away regarding Strauss-Kahn?  Know what's important in life, of course.  Power and your impact on the world being both ephemeral and hollow for its own sake.  Don't be intimidated.  Any man is weak if his feeling of strength relies on sexually subduing chambermaids.  But that's a bit extreme.  What if one's feeling of strength relies on anything physical?

Not very wise, either.  I am ahead of the curve in the physical deterioration race, it seems.  More exactly, the race to accept the fact of bodily decline.  Information helps.  At one point, it downright panicked me, the notion that getting out of bed and standing up have become so fraught.  My balance wavers, the possibility of falling feels real.  Which is real, I learned, thanks to the normal cycles of the human body.  Balance improves in all of us as the day goes on.  I noticed this more, of course.  I fear it more, unless I have a bit of information.  Even a sketchy sense of endocrine cycles helps.  Take it slow, that is the upshot.  Try not to succumb to fear, that is the other.  And, now and then, another, third upshot...that the world's religions share a common thread about looking beyond the body.  Which means?  Stay open, I think.

Overall, be grateful that I am not Strauss-Kahn.  Yet does a part of me still want to be like him?  To be handsome in a graying sort of way.  To command attention.  To command anything.  To get attention.  To find others giving you attention, at attention.  Actually, I would settle for recognition.  In the eyes of the locals, for example.  Recognition of what?  Since I can't quite recognize what I want recognized, maybe it's time to look within, where so much is always unrecognizable.  

And as for Strauss-Kahn, cool it with the schadenfreude.  Kill the pig, slit his throat, spill his blood...being a rather poor recipe for accomplishing the big picture.  Such as working with Angela Merkel.  What are we trying to do, after all?

Jane and I are learning how to be together.  Being rather on the high energy side, our circuits can easily spark...both positively and negatively, to extend the electrical metaphor.  And at times the whole relationship evolution leaves me anxious.  In terms of both fear and anticipation.  To quote a song currently under development with the Menlo Park Chorus, I'd say that I have spring fever, but it isn't even spring.  

So what is it?  Some believe that we earthlings have within a remarkably short space of time knocked the planet out of the Holocene era and into one yet unnamed.  No, it isn't even spring, or just barely.  I keep turning the heat on in the mornings.  While I slide into a stage of life that is either beyond seasons or composed of all four.  While the inner and outer worlds converge.  How many more overnight flights to Britain can I stand?  Simultaneously, how many more can the planet stand...or the fuel markets stand?  Everything seems to be ending or beginning, flipping over into the next.  May you live in interesting times.  Both mine and everyone's.

I have a cold.  Which is to say, a cold has me.  It has crept among my cells with little cats feet, infiltrated me with viral toxins.  I am sobered, more convinced than ever of my own mortality, not to mention age.  What else can one say about the strange and sudden draining of the human body's essential forces?  This is the second cold I have had in short order.  I don't get colds.  

My Tuesday volunteer Paul has arrived on a Thursday.  It is the sort of change that Proust's indolent characters could have spent 50 pages anticipating and 50 more recounting, such is the pace of my life.  Which turns out to be the topic of today's brunch conversation.  We seem to have hit a stride in terms of meal location.  They are getting used to us at the local crêperie, and today we sit in the actual sun.  Spring's gusty days have given way to this, unexpected warmth and calm.  As for me, the viral presence brings cold and calm.  The sun feels good.  I am just ill enough to have the occasional swoon in between my latté and gallette.  No matter.  I am automated after all, and hitting the tilt switch on my wheelchair, pleasantly recline into the morning.  The sun.  I decide it is making vitamin D, not melanoma.  When I tilt back into action, Paul and I resume our discourse.

Life has given each of us the time to enjoy it, that is the gist.  To me, this is newfound riches.  I'm not yet comfortable with a life of regular Social Security and unfettered time.  Paul's workday at a local nonprofit gives him freedom.  We are, I decide, nonproductive people who produce quite well, thank you very much.  I drain my latté.  The virus has drained my solar plexus.  Time to head home.

And finally watch the DVD that has been sitting on my coffee table for weeks.  Paul wants to see it.  I am happily reading Edward St. Aubyn and feel inclined in that direction.  But I just confessed to Paul over brunch that I feel guilty opening books during the day, the workday.  So, what the hell, why not a film?  No one has to know.  And if someone discovers me watching my 50-inch plasma screen in the middle of a beautiful day, I will deny it.

A friend loaned me Departures.  Japanese.  An Academy award for best 'foreign' film.  Okay, let it roll.  Love and death.  Connection and loss.  Strange to see so much of my recent experience, but gratifying to feel it articulated.  The film's hero encounters a horrifying death early in the plot, comes home and tries to wash his hands, then grabs his wife's hands.  He clasps her body, then pulls away her clothes, desperate to maximize available skin.  I know this feeling.  Only incidentally a prelude to sex, the visceral need is solace, comfort and pain-obliterating connection.  Good that I know this feeling, because what I don't know...without watching this film...is that it's okay.  How needy am I?  How desperate am I for solace?  We all need mothering, and those of us who have been shorted in the experience, don't have much sense of appropriateness or of proportion.  

Need.  It's okay, it's normal.  So is dying, but this is easy to say and infinitely complex to experience.  This film portrays many deaths.  Each is equally blank and final.  It is the families and their responses that differ, the many ways in which death reveals life.  Jealousy, quiet joy, bitter accusations, peace, honor, intense grief, warm appreciation...all the mourners at all the 'departures' in the film react as they do.  Death strips away constraints, pretense.  People show themselves.  Revealing what is beautiful and ugly.

Then, there is the past.  The film's protagonist has been cheated of a childhood.  He knows it and can't forget.  As the film unfolds, death makes him remember, and more fully.  Dying sharpens the outlines, life becomes stark...and more comprehensible.  Bringing me back to St. Aubyn.  There is a gross injustice at the heart of his Trilogy, the first novel of which I'm reading.  And for the first time ever it finally dawned on me that I cannot get through such passages without stopping and musing in a certain direction.  Revenge fantasies.  I simply have to imagine how the wronged character gets his payback.  Which definitely interrupts the flow, halts the plot, sending me into my own stuff and away from...the real story which is always about something else.  As for my story....

Anger at being shot.  Anger at my sick parents.  Payback.  Which a friend in a writers' group quietly observed to me, years ago, doesn't happen.  Payback, it turns out, is a feeling, not an event.  Revenge fantasies are a sop to grief and hurt...and they are fantasies.  Remarkable how they can occupy my brain, however.  In the summation that is death, something more balanced, more human, can emerge.  Another message from this film.

It is Saturday now.  My cold is getting better.  Am I getting better?  Perhaps.  Or perhaps not.  Either way, there is something of cold consciousness, that light flirtation with death, worth hanging onto.

I estimate that the small arrow on the side of the rail car parked across the platform from mine is about two inches long.  With Caltrain about to slide out of its berth in the San Francisco station I am in an excellent position to bear witness to the gradual.  An opportunity to catch the very first, barely discernible moment when inertia turns into movement.  I watch and watch.  The car jerks into action, the two inches on the car opposite yanked north while I leap south.  Nothing gradual or subtle.  It seems this train is either moving or stopped.  Nothing in between.  How disappointing.  To witness the very start of movement would seem revelatory.  I knew it wouldn't happen.  Life does not reveal its processes, thereby keeping us both confused and engaged.

This is the secret behind the HP Solution Center.  Every time I turn on my computer, and many times in between when I don't, Messrs. Hewlett-Packard burst into action.  What they promise is most tantalizing.  Solutions.  Centered solutions.  Just watch the screen as it transforms itself from the site of word processing and vacation plans to this, a small box that announces...not very much, except that The Solution Center is loading....only it isn't.  It is searching for files.  It is not finding them.  It has been doing this loading and searching for the many months since I purchased my HP printer, of course.  One would think the company would be embarrassed, but no, it obviously isn't.  They are immune to irony, these American companies.  A solution that is actually a problem, for which there is no solution, bursting into on-screen life right before the customer's eyes again and again.  Fuck it.  HP neither cares nor notices.  While I expect to see the veil of Maya pulled away at Caltrain's starting.  Go figure.

Just don't go away.  There is more, I swear.  And what if there isn't?  Then I shall swear all the harder.

One of the reasons I roam around Menlo Park, stopping at Peet's for coffee, Café Borrone for lunch has to do with the sheer laborsaving nature of the exercise.  It is a hassle making anything at home.  Yes, it may be little work but still a drain on energy, particularly that most essential of quadriplegic experiences, focus.  There are many times a day when even a subtle wavering of attention can spell disaster.  Keeping my balance.  Keeping my tea in its cup.  Keeping my wheelchair on its perilous course between home furnishings.  As for the kitchen, far too much activity in that place involves sharp edges or boiling liquids.  Which is splendid, but not all the time.  Time being all that one has.  I get by with relatively little home help.  I outsource my services, just as HP has done with its Service Center, that particular software effort now a training project of the Ulan Bator Boy's Club.  As for me, getting out has to do with escaping the home.  And getting out of the confines of my own disability.  Any onlooker can probably see this.  I can't, of course, being an inlooker.

There is something looming on the weekend horizon.  In fact, two things.  Both involve driving.  They seem like major undertakings.  First, the bass section of the Menlo Park Chorus is gathering in someone's home for, well, remedial work.  No, this assessment is too scolding.  Members of chorus sections do get together to rehearse.  Let's leave it at that.  Peter's house is less than a mile distant.  I could, depending on my belief in battery technology, motor there overland.  But I decide to drive.  It seems an enormous undertaking.  I doubt that I will be behind the wheel for five minutes.  Yes, it's partly the loading of my wheelchair into the Van, conducting the unfamiliar behemoth a few blocks westward.  Then lowering myself to the ground.  And what ground?  What will it be like getting inside Peter's house.  I have already dismissed this complication in my discussions with the basses.  I shall take my crutch.  No big deal.  Crutch inside, have a seat and have a sing.  What if I need the toilet?  How far will it be?  What about the home itself, symbol of material attainment and my lack thereof.  Or have I gotten past all this?  A big undertaking.  Imagine.  One mile.  Something new.  Out there.  And then, twice in the same day, loading myself into the early evening van to head for Jane's concert.  What is my last coming to with all this motion and extroverted activity?  Too much, that is the answer.

By the time Saturday arrives and wheels are quite literally in motion, what transpires is quite different.  Seated on Peter's sofa, John, the Menlo Park Chorus accompanist, not to mention bass, pulls strands together.  These are vocal things I have been taught, should know already, but it all happens here.  No need to keep singing the Hallelujah Chorus as though Handel was a terminal condition.  One can lighten up.  Reduce the volume, let the voice float into the head's upper cavities, and take it easy.  Count the Brahms more carefully.  Count yourself lucky that you have John.  It's all going to work out, that is the upshot of this practice session.  I have been worrying, but now I can brood less, enjoy more.  Singing isn't all about torture, after all.  Hope.  There is hope.

And there is the past.  Distinguished from the present by not very much, it seems, and that is the problem.  Take my kitchen.  Take it, as Henny Youngman is alleged to have said, now.  My sister-in-law is quietly placing jars of Trader Joe's finest French peaches and pears on my kitchen counter.  I don't know why I thought they would last forever.  My brother points out that they have rubber gaskets in the lids which no one wants to guarantee.  Their purchase dates from one of Marlou's rounds of chemotherapy.  Fruit, that is fresh fruit, being unsafe for the immune compromised.  Catch the joy as it flies, Blake's all-purpose advice for the living, now applies to my kitchen, my pantry.  For even the cans were flying, my sister-in-law points out in the use-before the date stamp on the bottom of a tomato paste tin.  All these foods were flying.  Even the canned ones, faintly hovering, their time running out too.

I struggle mightily to maintain the illusion of permanence.  The sense of becoming slightly ossified with age, for example, beginning to fear short drives around my own town....  What is the purpose except to make me feel safe in my bodily permanence?  Things are failing.  Balance, reflexes, general alertness perhaps.  It takes more and more work to keep these faculties going, which is itself an admission of mortality.  It takes more and more work to learn.  Some bass notes in Handel.  New software.  Satellite TV.  Yes, anything technological.  Hebrew without a doubt.  We have this limited shelflife.  But we are not limited to the shelf.  That is the thing.  There's another thing, probably, but I can't remember it now.

I am uneasy about my wanderings, uncertain as to their purpose, queasy about their evasiveness.  Not that it matters, once I and my motor neurons are up and at it for another day.  They are anxious moments, those first ones.  The human is, after all, vulnerable on so many fronts.  Just kicking my one working leg out from the bed, in concert with an abdominal heave ho, to get me sitting upright...well, that is an existential shock in itself.  I don't sit up in the middle of the night, not ever.  Well hardly ever.  It is hardly worth the effort, a mighty effort, to untangle feet from sheets...only to reposition them later.  The concentration involved in such tasks tends to wake one into a startled state that does not encourage slumber.  The added annoyance mixing in a batch of anger neuropeptides that can guarantee 3 AM alertness.  

No, I am either up or down.  And on this morning, just after 6 AM, I am trying to fit myself into up.  Seated on the edge of the bed, balance seems tenuous, further activity futile.  6:13 AM, according to the clock, but who's counting?  I stand, swivel, drop into the wheelchair to head for tea.  The latter tips the balance, of course.  Things are possible with tea.  There is a long tradition behind this beverage and its drinkers.  By the time I've finished a cup, the thought has occurred to me that the conquest of India would be easily possible.  Play Mughal against Hindu, install a viceroy, build a few railways and Bob's your uncle.  Sam's your real uncle, but never mind.  All this planning is only going as far as the bathroom.

When I emerge, I am not alone.  Good to have Menchu applying talcum powder here, socks there.  More than good, reassuring, my abandonment anxiety lapping about like tiny waves on a cold shore.  What is she up to this weekend?  Work.  Menchu tends to the children of the ruling class.  She succors their aging and dying.  And they need her all weekend, not to mention all week.  She will be working until midnight this night, Friday.  Parents are going out.  Kids are staying in.  And so is Menchu.  Sobering to consider my life of options.  Sobering to pause as I leave my office for the day.  Right by the door, Marlou and I pose in eternal photographic embrace.  It pulls at the heart, how love can be ripped from us.  But in this moment I realize the feeling is more expansive.  I have felt bereft much of my life.  Such was the family experience.  And Marlou?  After much living, after many years, decades, I was able to open my heart to her.  The specter of loss spurring me along, perhaps both of us.  At least we got here.  Got to where we are in this picture.  Her warmth tangible, for Marlou had a glow about her.  Perhaps I am glowing too.

Puzzling to hear the Caltrain conductor mention that he has boarded me twice this week.  It isn't true.  It feels true to him, and this is not an entirely bad thing, I decide.  Too bad that all the bran muffins are gone at The Creamery, the San Francisco café where I am meeting a rabbi from Jewish Family Services.  Over our cappuccinos, we work it out, that it's been more than a year since we last did this.  I make a banal reference to time flying...with echoes of something else there, particularly with Daniel, who lost his father last year, and me.  'Who are we kidding,' this is the natural starting point for anything we say to each other.  And I like this.  For he is a gentle, lighthearted and young person, at home with death and mortality and life and me.  He has a background in James Joyce, including graduate studies in Dublin, all of which led him to Hebrew.  Which I quite understand.  Discoursing in the way I do, Daniel points out, I might enjoy learning a bit of Hebrew myself.  I tell him I am too old.  He laughs and gives me a certain look.  I'm glad that I know this guy, very glad.

Why me?  I know that the San Francisco Municipal Railway is not all about me, but at the moment it feels that way.  The Muni Metro, the name for the light rail lines converging under Market Street, has ground to a halt.  It does this periodically, infamously.  Minutes tick by.  I ask the driver if he has any idea....  No, of course, he has no ideas.  Trains ahead of us, he says.  I already have my mobile phone out, hoping that we are not too far into the tunnel for reception.  No problem, for here is Jerry, my lunch date.  Yes, he sighs, the Muni Metro.

Funny thing though, about things mechanical.  There are like things political.  Squeaky wheels suck in energy.  The Muni Metro and its ills have become the focus of news coverage over recent years.  Which may explain why a surprising number of transit guys in brown uniforms have appeared on the platform at the next station.  We get going in minutes.  I am deep underground in minutes too, phoning being useless.  Up the familiar route through the center of town.  Then Church Station.  Castro Station.  These stops are underground.  Which, Jerry explains over lunch, has been true for over 30 years.  Has it been that long since I journeyed to this part of San Francisco on the trams?  Apparently.  Certainly, I took the old streetcars out to San Francisco State University as a graduate student a time or two.  But mostly I drove.  So.  Here it is, for the first time, Muni modernity.  I am most impressed.  In San Francisco, the public transport system carries the equivalent of the entire city population every day.  In this best of transit moments, I can see why.  I breeze off the tram at West Portal, phone Jerry, and we arrive at the restaurant simultaneously.

It is an oddity of America, wide streets like this one.  West Portal does not have enough traffic to warrant such a massive boulevard.  The street's excessive width does make it possible to park in front of businesses.  Perhaps this is the purpose.  The downside, and surely this affects businesses as well, is the loss of intimacy.  I journeyed here for the very purpose of experiencing a San Francisco neighborhood.  Jerry says there is still a shoe repair shop on the street.  I passed an actual news agent.  The parking, it seems to me, should go behind the shops.  This would pull everything and everyone closer.  Perhaps at the stage of traffic planning, no one knew that West Portal ranked, in today's parlance, as a transit-friendly neighborhood.  Even wheelchair-friendly.

It seems to me the finest achievement of a city that such a neighborhood is linked by swift trains-in-tunnels to, say, the Opera House.  Much of this being news to me.  Don't get around much anymore.  Should know better.  Particularly about the wind, which is blowing bitter.  Everyone knows this about San Francisco, everyone but me.  Yes, I did the weather forecast for this postal zone just this very morning.  But I didn't factor in the wind.  The locals are wearing jackets.  I am cold.  I am heading home.

On the way out of Café Borrone, at the very spot where the concrete allotted to metal tables and chairs gives way to that provided for parking signs and bus stop benches, it hits me.  The oddity of bouncing around town seated in this vehicle.  That some of my mind still has me walking, like patrons heading to and from the café.  The wheelchair, or my low position in it, seems new.  It creaks slightly moving on the sidewalk, a platform pitching on a concrete sea.  Ahead, I can see the morning's first failure, the result of this, my slow-motion reverie on the way out of Borrone's.  The pedestrian crossing light on busy El Camino Real has changed, and had I maintained anything like speed, my wheelchair would be safely and efficiently halfway across the street by now.  Why not rush to catch it?  Catch what?  The green light, the next thing, this burg's traffic being notoriously scant and lackadaisical.  And what is such an impulse, if not mildly suicidal?  I have barely a schedule.  Nothing to rush for on this particular day.  Nothing.

Nothingness being something of a problem in this, my first Medicare year.  It is everywhere, this absence and its opposite.  From my vantage point on the floor of the church where the Menlo Park Chorus temporarily rehearses, I have a full view of sopranos and altos.  They, and we, are mostly middle-aged, and tonight we are striving.  Performance-sobered, one might say, our concert date imminent.  Parts are getting squished around, this to be a solo, no, maybe not, that a men's choral snatch...no, let the women take it.  And in the midst of all of it, a woman who is new to the group, late 50s, I would say, big hair and earnest extroversion...well, she bursts into song.  In her last-minute solo assignment she surprises, and with more than her voice, now revealed to be of performance quality.  It is her reach, the striving sincerity of her in this moment.  I can see the starkness of it now in her face, how as life wanes we reach for more of it.  Futile and admirable, doomed and courageous...our lives at their best.  Hardly a surprise.  A yawn, in fact, to anyone even mildly philosophical.  And yet here it is, in the soprano section, a woman's youthful beauty and vitality draining in one direction, her spirit straining in another.  Is it poignant or inspiring or both?  It is now 9 AM, all that is certain.  Why head home when I have my nails?

Actually, I don't have all that many, which poses a problem.  My fingernails grow like weeds on my one underused hand.  And beset with neuromuscular clumsiness and sheer lack of sensation, they quickly snap off on the other.  None of which matters.  They look better cut.  And now I am having another conversation, this time with a person not myself, a woman in her 40s and far from her native Vietnam and having a go at my cuticles.  We make valiant efforts to bridge the language barrier, the two of us.  What are we doing with our respective summers?  Any travel?  No, she is staying put.  Her annual visit to Vietnam takes place in January.  She times it to avoid regional heat and the Chinese New Year's which somehow spurs airfares.  I nod, as though this makes sense to me.  Does this mean that the Chinese are everywhere, or do the Vietnamese celebrate the holiday themselves?  

Rolling into the nail salon first thing on a Wednesday morning, I wondered if I hadn't come too early.  One of the women was combing the hair of a tall teenage girl, the latter somehow not a customer.  They disappeared mysteriously while I maneuvered my wheelchair into place.  One other women stepped forward, a professional face and glass bowl of water signaling that she would address my fingers.  And here we are, the oddness of the first moment being replaced by the weirdness of this one.  I am welcome here, but still, this isn't guy territory.  Which only adds to the conversational awkwardness, the searching for common ground, the long silences.  Travel, trips.  This is all I can think of.

She has eight siblings, this woman.  When she goes home to Vietnam, she says, she stays at least a month.  The trip takes an entire day.  One changes planes in Taipei, and now this tangled fabric makes a bit more sense...the Chinese New Year's fare bump.  Do her brothers and sisters ever visit her here?  No.  What I understand, if I understand, has something to do with visa problems.  Ours is a privileged life in Menlo Park, we native born white people.  

I complain that the veneer is peeling from the 55-year-old cabinets in my kitchen.  But it isn't my kitchen, is it?  It isn't my priority, either.  I haven't noticed for years even as the lacquered wood splinters, mostly under the impact of my plastic leg brace.  The disabled world being full of unintended consequences, one of which is the rigid right angle of my paralyzed ankle.  The brace holds it there, allowing the toe to slip under the kitchen cabinets, right along the baseboard.  Rolling the wheelchair back can easily lever my plastic-braced shoe under the edge of the splintering cabinet doors.  The wood, desiccated over the arid California decades, flips off like matchsticks.  Under normal circumstances, whatever those are, I might react with self-flagellation over my destruction of hearth and home.  But not today.  For recently, it has been occurring to me that while this place on Roble Avenue has served me well for almost two decades, providing my longest and most stable place of residence...the cozy predictability of the place, well, it has become cloying.

It came to me just the other day.  I have this strange habit of peeing in my landlord's garden.  Like all strange habits, it was born of necessity.  I found myself caught short a time or two, and rather than negotiate the wheelchair slalom up the ramp and through my apartment to the bathroom entrance, where I stand and walk for the last distance to the toilet...why not just motor around behind the raised beds, peeing in the shady patio obscured by decades of overgrown shrubs?  Only, of course, when one of my landlord's big cars is known to be absent.  Which is fairly often, particularly in the mornings.  So it didn't take long for things to sort of escalate.  I found myself peeing out there, behind Tom's splintering fence, more and more.  Why, but why really?  Marking territory is probably the best, most honest explanation...the illusion that the place is mine and I can roam free and primal upon the land.  Just observe Jane's dogs.  This practice ground to a halt one day when looking up, I realized that any of my upstairs neighbors could easily see me.  A wake-up call?  Or just another spur in the direction of moving, letting go of life here and allowing the next thing to come along.  

My nails are done.  No, I do not want them buffed.  Yes, this pleasant Vietnamese woman can leave the lotion on my arms.  And I can leave her premises.  For I have options, more than many people have.  And if life can seem burdensome and hyperconscious, at least I know this.  I am free to roll around.

Step #1

Fall in love with Jane.  This is simultaneously easy and difficult.  Jane being easy to love, but love itself being difficult.  Note the instruction to 'fall' in love.  This implies descent, and equally stumbling, perhaps tripping.  For the course of true love never did run vertical.  And after the fall comes the winter...remember that too.  Remember the Maine.  The latter is important in doing battle with the forces arrayed against one in any love struggle.  Also, memento mori.  Actually, start here.  Lose your wife.  Lose your way.  Lose the plot, as they say in Britain.  What they don't say is that you don't need the plot, only the dénouement...and you never know what that is anyway...so while you're worried and anxious, be grateful that you're not alone.  You have Jane.

Step #2

Go to Harbin Hot Springs, order one of the vegetarian delights of the evening, and be grateful that you have found someone who (1) doesn't feel obliged to have a ribeye with every meal and (2) doesn't feel obliged to have a meal with every meal.  Sharing one ample serving with Jane, at your age, will suffice.

Note that the Red Bean Stew on the menu is touted as Jamaican.  Remember, you are reading a book about a Jamaican slave uprising.  Take this as a sign.  Take it easy...this is the next thing.  Although you appreciate everything in this Red Bean Stew, particularly the sauce that binds the thing together, and can see the wholesome constituents...the sweet potatoes that, according to the novelist, practically spring from the Jamaican earth...the red beans that also figure prominently in New Orleans cooking, less known in California, but probably in some corner of Safeway...even the brown rice that makes the whole concoction seem healthier than it probably is...despite these vibrant images, think simple.  In particular, think about the sweet potato you see two days later in the Menlo Park Farmer's Market.  Do you really have the will to slice and dice this thing in its natural state?  Maybe not, which leads you to that other natural state, Trader Joe's.

Step #3

This is the source of all things good and easy and cheap.  Take the curry powder you just purchased two blocks away at Draegers Market.  It cost seven dollars.  Here, the Trader sells curry powder for two dollars.  Remember, Trader Joe's is owned by Germans, land of my forebears, currently home of the 35 hour work week.  They know about curry powder, these Germans, understand its true worth and have decided that the five dollars you just spent elsewhere can easily be captured here.  This, after all, is the home of the pre-sliced sweet potato.  No such thing exists at Draegers.  In fact, truth be told, you don't really need to slice anything at all.  See Step #4.

Step #4

Why are you doing all this?  In some way, the cooking activity, the making of one's own food, represents a reaction to Jane's absence.  This is good.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Absinthe makes the heart grow much fonder, but that is another story.  It is important to make one's own food, that is the point, to nurture oneself.  So while you're at it, buy your weekly batch of flowers also at Trader Joe's.  Buying flowers for yourself is a good sign, particularly if you are a male.  The role reversal is a good one.  Flowers are good.  Besides, after cooking your curry-powder-laden stew, a little natural floral scent won't hurt your apartment.

Furthermore, in this very act of domesticity, this making of the red bean stew, you are remaking your apartment as your own.  There was a helpless phase, after all.  

In the wake of Marlou's death, an army of helpers and advisers had a go at the place.  The siblings tossed out old food, for the pantry and shelves had fallen into neglect.  They roamed the aisles of IKEA in search of practical improvements.  Above all, they reorganized.  Things rarely used went to areas rarely seen.  Which made sense.  Or did at one phase.  This is a new phase, and the surest sign is that you are actually, seriously contemplating the home slicing of vegetables.  Which requires the Cuisinart slicing blade.  Which you cannot find.  You know where it was, but this 'was' refers to more than two years ago.  That is how long you haven't bothered slicing much of anything.  But a new day has dawned.  Fact is, you have all vegetables yoy need, all the cans, spices, and even the will.  But no quadriplegic sets aslicing without automation.  Yes, there are knives.  Quadriplegics are not licensed to use them.  See appendix.

In the fullness of time, you may see this red bean stew experience as an easing back into one's own kitchen.  Yes, you have made a familiar soup or two over the last years, but here you are forging new culinary ground.  Time is wasting, so it's time to proceed with the vegetables.  Only two cloves of garlic are actually required, according to the recipe on the Internet.  So, knowing the world to be timid regarding garlic, it's best to multiply by a factor of five.  Naturally you roll over the head of garlic with your wheelchair, until you can count on finding 10 or so mashed cloves in the debris.  Olive oil?  Triple that.  This is going to be a roaring good stew.  Remember that the sweet potatoes arrived cut in a plastic bag.  The same cannot quite be said for the carrots, although they have been circumcised, let us say.  They have been shaped into baby-like carrots, rendered pleasantly oval.  Which is to say, they are a dead giveaway in terms of origin.  No sense in looking packaged, even if you are.  So, it doesn't take long to come to a strategic decision.  Chop every baby carrot twice.  And jokes aside, a knife will do.  But that would involve standing up from the wheelchair and hovering over tasks at the counter.  Fuck it.  Why did God give you teeth?  Two quick bites renders every baby carrot prenatal.  The chunks fall into a bowl on my lap, the bowl goes into the slow-cooker, and the beat goes on.  And the heat goes on, first to high, then after a couple of hours, to low.

And in the end, one confronts a mystery.  First, the little red beans famed in Louisiana do not feature in any recipe for the Jamaican stew.  Kidney beans, that is the thing.  Furthermore, kidney beans in cans.  Why?  I have no fear of beans, actual dry ones, having soaked quite a few in my day, and boiling them into all sorts of edible forms, mostly refried.  At one point, living in London, I decided to introduce family and friends to the wonders of frijoles.  I soaked the pinto beans purchased in California overnight in my London bedsitting room.  A sound awakened me in the night.  Mice?  No, it was the sound of swollen pinto beans falling over the edge of my tiny sink to the linoleum.

For now, I am following instructions.  I drain each can of kidney beans.  Must I really rinse them, however?  Oddly, running cold water inside the cans produces frothy suds.  Are they packed with soap?  What are these things?  They are frothing, sudsing kidney beans, thank you very much, and in a can, yet.  Which is enough to push one over the edge.  Which explains why despite the fact that I have an actual rice cooker, have cooked many a brown rice kernel in my day, and so on, I revert to the source.  Trader Joe's.  Supplier of one of the laziest convenience foods ever, pre-cooked brown rice.  Just peel back the cover slightly and microwave moderately.  The result?  Convenient.

Jane is tied up with other things these days, and my emotional maturity being whatever it is, I get tied up in feeling deprived of attention, and so a certain tenseness pervaded our northbound journey.  What to do about such things?  Let time pass.  Time, and that other thing that comes with travel, distance.  North to Harbin Hot Springs.  That is to say, north into the past, this destination being what it is.  My own personal past pushing me down into the seat of Marlou's extant PT Cruiser, the purchase of which seemed inexplicable at the time, my dying wife with barely two months of existence left, posing with a bottle of champagne and the open door of this, her last car.  Me quietly shaking my head in disbelief.  Why, oh why?  And yet every time Jane and I set off with my late spouse's vehicle in tow, there is little doubt.  An easy car to drive.  With unexpected room in the back for a folding electric wheelchair, a nuance that even the long-range-planning Marlou could not have envisioned.  And if something in me has stiffened and withdrawn at the recent absence of the love provider, at least my transport is comfortable, not to mention possible.  

I haven't driven this route myself in three years.  Doubtless I could do it again.  But not without some strain on my shoulders.  Actually, some rather dire stinging, something that comes of having scapula locked in place, one arm immobilized too long, the other overworked to compensate, while the disabled driver hunches, bracing against turns that hurl the torso this way and that.  Which smacks of justification, that better serves as a reminder.  Partly that whatever the cost in shoulders, I need to do this sort of drive now and then.  Acknowledging that then is preferable.  And now Jane is at the wheel.  For which I can only thank the higher powers.  The ones that are leading us higher into the dry forests of southern Lake County.  At an elevation of botanical mixed statements.  California oak and grassland.  And not a few pines.  An even smattering of Madrone.  Cottonwoods mixing in with the rest.  The result being a forest, but a dry one.  Which, this being spring, means that the spaces between trees are green.  Grass is briefly sprouting everywhere.  In California, this phenomenon does not last long.  But Jane says it best.  Nice to have a forest open enough to see the ground.

It seems an affront that others have gotten here before us, occupying the scant spaces reserved for the lame, halt and blind.  Although at Harbin Hot Springs, little is reserved except rooms.  It takes some maneuvering for Jane to find a good place to abandon the car and assemble the folding wheelchair.  And within seconds I have motored my way down the familiar path to the Harbin restaurant, maneuvered between the plastic rubbish bins and stoves and out into the evening's self-service dining options.  Usually good.  The chicken curry quite pleasing.  I rush and try not to rush at the same time.  The same time running out, regardless.  I am aware that it is getting dark, we have come here for the hot springs, and we had better get cracking.  

Up the long Harbin slope, infinitely easier to negotiate in the current dry weather.  Off with the clothes.  And now I am facing the hottest of the resort's springs.  Clinging to the iron railing, staring down the steep concrete steps and at whatever lies beyond.  The cardiac mortality inherent in the hyperstimulation of overwhelming heat.  The neuromuscular folly of descending slippery steps with feet that cannot feel, on limbs that move and support insufficiently, not to mention the unknowns of crazed and abandoned neurons that can jerk my legs in any direction, at any provocation.  And there is plenty of provocation, unseen and unknown, in this cauldron.  Not to mention drowning, a possibility not remote from my mind.  All this, and I am only poised at the top step.

Jane and I have done this before, but how?  Funny how a memory clouded by age reawakens at a moment like this.  The first step is a long one.  I recall that.  On the last visit, encountering this first-step problem saddened and demoralized me.  For I can remember a time in my life when stepping into a swimming pool or a hot spring posed little challenge.  No first-step problem then, just a general concern with not drowning.  This does represent some loss.  Probably orthopedic.  Something that with age has become much more difficult.  But little of this occurs to me at the moment.  Which is good.  I set out, am set back, both happening at once, but the combination being too much for the human mind to grasp.  Setting out requires everything.  Including Jane.  For I remember and so does she.  Within seconds, we have it.  I lower my paralyzed right foot straight down to the step, while she pushes up under my descending shoulder, bracing the paralyzed foot as it alights.  Repeating this with the next step, and next, each move getting easier as we move deeper into the buoyant mineral water.  Until I am clasped in warm liquid embrace, floating and surrendering, while privately monitoring my respiration.  

The hot water clamps and insinuates, squeezing and melting its way into a maze of aching musculature.  In my back, my buttocks, legs.  Neck and shoulders equally surrendering.  In this hottest of hot pools, an elaborate warning sign posted at the entrance, a human can only take so much.  Do I last five minutes?  Impossible to say in such an environment, damaged neuromusculature notwithstanding.  Standing being the next impossibility, for now I make my wavering way to the bottom step of the pool, then the next, Jane following and skillfully wedging my paralyzed foot into place on each tread.  As the buoyancy diminishes, the effects of gravity and overheating increase.  The physiological work grows heavy, the head light.  The latter induces a mild panic, for what if I faint?  Each step is an unknown.  At the very top where the railing ends, so does hope.  Which is replaced by Jane, who slithers under my arm gripping the steel.  And offers her own.  Relying on Jane's arm both as railing and hub, I step, swivel and drop to the stone bench.  Now a trick recalled from last time.  Jane elevates my legs, blood returning to my head, panic abated.

In short we are back in touch.  Me and Jane.  Me and my body.  We have gotten into hot water.  And come out of it.  We retire to our room and read and sleep in a building that is curiously anonymous for being about a century old.  Our room, the springs, everything at Harbin nestles up the slope of a canyon's side.  All pleasantly apparent the next day with the sun rising on the Valley's western slopes.  The same dry forests, some trees coming into leaf, still more branches showing than greenery, all are revealed.  They are at all stages of experience, these forests and slopes.  Dying bark and rotting branch, budding leaves and sprouting stems.  It's going to outlast me, that is for sure, in spite of man's best efforts to undo all of it.  And you can hear everywhere the trickle of water.  This has been a wet year.  California's long drought is officially ended.  My mind is already bracing for the next dry year, but that is me.

Who are these people breakfasting in the dining room?  Did I see them and their pubic hair last night in the baths?  There are remarkable in their variety of attire.  Some wear what is probably fashionable and sportif, others don the capacious shifts of the 1960s.  Not to mention the occasional tie-dyed T-shirt.  The man sitting next to us, long-haired and muscular, ostentatiously making out with his girlfriend at this early hour, is wearing a sort of skirt.  Actually, it could be classed as a tunic or Greek chiton, quite sensible for this in-and-out-of-the-baths environment.  No one notices, no one cares, and this is Harbin.  Breakfast is also Harbin.  One of my faves.  The Chinese breakfast, so-called.  Masses of greens, soy sauce ginger, and so on, eggs and brown rice.  Jane and I cannot finish a single serving.  Who are they feeding?  Us.  Thoroughly and on every level.  For what awaits but more of the same, in succession?  Up the Harbin slope, down the steps into the cauldron, out and lightheaded, resting and down again.  Will this kill me or cure me?  All that is certain is that while the live sperm count is down, the spirits are up.  My body has so long adjusted to its aches, that when relieved, the remaining ones spring to odd prominence.  Pain melting, spilkes obliterating, the day advances.

And as it does, I read more, get more into my novel about a slave rebellion in Jamaica.  Periodically I look up and imagine myself there.  Human beings treat each other abysmally.  Similarly, I look up during dinner, our best meal.  A Jamaican red bean stew, ironically.  I see the other diners.  All of us are destined for the briefest of mortal stays.  Will anyone die in the baths?  How many will be back next year?  Their lives are easier, of that I am mostly convinced.  Perhaps lonelier too.  I have Jane, after all.  I am not rolling and limping along the road of life without loving companionship.  I return to my red beans.  It has been a long road, no question.  And here I am.  And here is Jane.  And with one night remaining here, there is every chance of of us being here together tomorrow.