July 2011 Archives

Foggy will do, but slow might be better.  It is what happens when one begins a day with the effects of Walgreens sleeping tablets wearing off.  The good news is that this has been preceded by adequate sleep.  The bad news?  The fogginess, of course.  But above all, the night from hell that sparked it all.

That night being preceded by a day that left stuff behind the way election flyers, free bags of soap or breakfast cereal, not to mention coupons for the local pizza joint, tend to appear on my apartment door handle.  All because the Psychologist I Happen to Bump into on Mondays asked a simple question or two about my day-to-day experience of disability.  Suggesting that I might have a constant feeling of falling behind, not keeping up and so on.  Which sent me down another road of thought...the continuous frustration that I cannot do the manly household things.  Taking out the rubbish, pulling up weeds from the flower beds, putting a new light bulb in a ceiling fixture.  None of which is exactly news.  But this is the strange thing about everyday life.  How we miss the obvious.  We miss it, because we want to avoid it.

And because nothing gets avoided at night, damned if I wasn't groggily reaching for the urinal on the bedside table about 1 AM...when my hand missed, and the thing went toppling.  Spilling its contents on, of all things, my pillow, along with the mattress.  Altering bed conditions considerably.  

Altering everything, in fact, for now I am not only awake, but lying in a wet and odoriferous night world of shame.  Not to mention incompetence.  Which is more or less the same thing....  The latter judgments only serving to distract from that other thing slowly rising, which defies understanding, and so continues to rise...or one might say, fester.  For the ensuing hours.  The latter spent on the edge of sleep, the viewing area where visitors observe rest, but cannot participate.  The clock advances.  Life retreats.  Long night's journey into...more night.  There comes a time, somewhere south of 3 AM, when I drop my legs over the edge of the bed, sit up and consider next steps.  Both of them, the two steps it takes to get into my wheelchair and out of this horrible room.

Changing space, we call it in California.  Out to the other part of the apartment where we share space, my psyche and I.  And so it drifts back, this message from the day about disability and its frustrations.  Not to mention disappointments.  Burdens.  And simply a sense of loss.  As if loss is ever simple.  Oy.  And what does it take to get back to sleep under such circumstances?  For a two thirds-paralyzed person, being out of bed comes first.  Lying down only adds to the sense of physical helplessness and being trapped.  And once in the wheelchair, wheeling out in search of a piece of Belgian chocolate.  Who knows why the latter is just what the doctor ordered?  Endorphins, some say.  That and a few minutes of staring into the living room darkness, seeing what drifts in from the day.  And, yes, it does not take long for the psychologist's chitchat about falling behind in the race to be able-bodied, tangentially on to the failures to accomplish the tasks of a suburban householder.  After which something settles, bed seems possible - and a couple of hours of either light, or disturbed, sleep ensue.  Until the alarm sounds.

Which alarm?  They are going off all over.  The debt ceiling.  Haven't I been staring at it for hours?  No, that's the other one, in Washington.  Good thing I am now sitting in San Francisco opposite my friend Phila.  We do this occasionally, and not without considerable effort...which neither of us considers, or appears to.  There is my wheelchair, of course.  And Phila's 80+ years.  Fuck it.  Here we are, having our belle epoque breakfast at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, feeling like I'm in the Gare de something or other in Paris, such is the 100-year-old skylight decor.  And despite our mutual penchant for introspection and psychological self-evaluation, we are talking about that other thing, the outer world.

For it is there, and Phila is the living proof.  First, there is birdwatching.  Which is actually Phila's personal window on a larger natural world.  It is also of point of connection with a diversity of human species that never ceases to astonish me.  Northumberland?  Phila already knows a thing or two about it, including the tidal flats.  It turns out that I don't really have any sort of personal patent on Budle Bay, whose depths are revealed to be tidal shallows.  Birders, Phila explains, love such areas.  I don't recall noticing birds whether the tides were in or out at Budle Bay, but I also don't recall looking.  The larger point being that birdwatching must be all about looking.  Not to mention waiting.  Absorbing, being in the moment, noticing.  Phila has chronicled the face of nature in the East Bay hills for years.  She is one of those people who recognizes the unrecognizable, sees the odd in the predictable and can even make one sit up and take notice of the seasons.

We are into the crab omelette stage of things now, and this might be the midpoint of our brunch, but Phila has an appointment.  Actually, she has had a succession of these.  Phila is not only a nature writer, but a surprisingly effective advocate.  What is 'surprising' about such a combination probably says more about me, but this isn't about me.  It is about Phila.  And I am taking in the details of her role in a checkered, seemingly doomed effort to save the last semi-wild reaches of a canyon above the Berkeley campus.  She and a small group of fellow elders, all apparently women, somehow blocked development of a corporate research center slated for a scenic hillside.  Incidentally, researchers do not require scenic hillsides to do their work.  They are renowned for doing rather astonishing things in dark and dusty corners of warehouses.  But never mind.  Like so many things, this is not about the apparent topic, research, but about corporate America and what it wants.  It wanted a scenic, clubby spot with spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.  Incredibly, it didn't get this.

Instead, among other things, it got Phila testifying before the University of California Board of Regents.  Regents?  I was never entirely clear who they were, but I do recall picketing them in protest of whatever antediluvian policy was theirs in the 1960s.  As a late adolescent, the regents always seemed a faceless and intimidating set up power mongers.  According to Phila, my youthful experience was entirely accurate.  The regents listened, or appeared to listen to her testimony, then immediately voted against her.  Only to have the vote effectively overturned by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Which is still run by genuine researchers not corporate moneybags.  At least not yet.

With Phila in her mid-80s, and me in my mid-wheelchair, neither of us has a lot of tolerance for sitting.  Brunch is over.  Phila does have a meeting.  But even without the meeting we would be more or less on our way.  I follow Phila up to Market Street.  A hug, a goodbye, and we are both off.  In the days that follow, I get in touch with my inner cripple.  I become more vulnerable in the relationship, and then I become anxious.  I deal with my degree of self revelation.  Or lack of it.  And the beat goes on.  But there is another beat.  It has to do with something Phila said near the conclusion of our action-packed brunch.  I said, more or less, that despite the pressures of age, the gradual decline of her partner Les and the general facts of introverted life, Phila's degree of public involvement is admirable.  The response was immediate.  Under the circumstances, what else?

It was 1967, and it was the summer, and there is absolutely no mistaking this, because it was to be my last summer in a sense.  Late in the next spring, a bullet and six months in hospitals brought an end to summers.  And the following one, well, it also was not recognizable as a season.  So, this was my last normal summer, and how genuinely normal it was...that is an interesting, not to mention haunting, question.

August.  It must have been August.  And I am almost certain it was Point Reyes.  Certainly it was that month that the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page photo of South Beach at the newly opened Point Reyes National Seashore.  The photo showed an empty parking lot.  No one was coming to the country's newest national park and, dammit, the Chronicle was letting us know.  Foolish things, national parks.  Anyway....

I was there, certainly with a group of Berkeley student friends, one of whom must have had a car.  No one had a car.  So the car-owning one may not have been a Berkeley student.  Not that it matters.  I got out there, we got out there, and in its day, this was a place for the cognisenti.  Who had ever heard of Inverness, California?  Absolutely no one but people who knew.  People who knew important stuff.  A certain in crowd.  And a crowd it was, in whatever vehicle we shared.  No student car drove from Berkeley to the seashore on a Sunday in those days without being crowded.  Who knows?  It may have been a van, even a truck.  For me, it was an era of orthopedic nonchalance.  Who the hell cared if my leg was jammed under someone else's?  Or if I was rattling over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge in a posture favored by one of the contortionists on the Ed Sullivan Show?  In fact, aside from not caring, I may have achieved another level of oblivion by being loaded.  

Surely, on a trip like this, one got stoned going or coming.  Not to mention while there.  Which actually was truer in spirit than in reality.  Drugs had their downside, and stumbling into classes tired on a Monday morning was such a downer.  Despite the spirit of the times, I may have inhaled nothing on this particular Sunday.  Nothing except the marshy penetrations of the Pacific reaching into the boggy edge of dairy farms just beyond Point Reyes Station.  The little town seeming so silly compared to this, islands of grass or reeds, a mystery of botanical and marine sweetness at this end of Tomales Bay.  All of this hitting me as way beyond a day in the country or hippyish new-agey back to the land...no, a profound and calming force of water and wind and hills.

Was it a Sunday?  Why would such a thing matter?  It had the feel of a Sunday, and that I can recall the feel of such a day 44 years later...that is all that counts.  The only doubtful part of the story involves the Richmond Bridge.  Actually, we must have gone across the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge.  How else to account for Margaret?  For she, Margaret Cohen, stands at the heart of this story.  

Actually, Margaret stands in the surf.  She had waded into the waves pounding at South Beach, lifting her skirt slightly to feel the ocean waters.  This made an indelible impression on me.  She did not have sinuous model-type legs, but rather full ones.  Womanly thighs, one would say.  Furthermore, she had not really come attired for the beach.  What was she expecting, what sort of dress-wearing experience?  In any case, it was the way she held her skirts, making way for the sensuous feel of water, the gentle smile on her face...the gentle everything...that must have struck me.  Who knows what touches a human heart?  Or why?  But there was something endearing about her unpreparedness for the beach and the way she adapted.  Something revelatory about womanly, non-movie-star thighs that got to me.  It was so embarrassing and confusing being a 20-year-old virgin at Berkeley...which had more to do with being a recovering member of the Bendix family.  But that is another story.

In any case, there is Margaret wading in the Pacific surf, holding her skirt, water swirling about her ankles and her legs, and proceeding with warmth and serenity.  As though she had something to propose within her.  Not to mention the suggestion of a loving, open heart.  And we were talking.  I was saying something to her.  She was saying something to me.  And what was it?  It was serious, that's what it was.  For once, I was not clowning around.  I was not being witty.  Something about her made me serious.  I was speaking as much from the heart as was possible for me.  I was too frightened of women to converse easily and unguardedly, but this exchange felt like a step in that direction.  Again, I do not recall the subject matter.  But surely we were talking about relationships.  Which must have made me feel utterly at a disadvantage.  Nonetheless, that was the approximate topic.  For I do recall Margaret saying something.  It was the hippie era, after all, the summer of love, to be precise.  Margaret lived in the epicenter, San Francisco.  And she was talking about her peers, the people around.  They don't know, she said, the tragedy of love.

She had hit pay dirt, without knowing it.  Margaret was speaking my language.  Of course, it was a secret language, most of it not even known to me.  But these words of hers struck me hard and deep.  A trenchant, preternaturally adult insight, spoken by a woman who had raised her skirts to allow the Pacific Ocean to swirl about her legs...all of this more 19th-century than contemporary.  Some of us are born old souls, they say.  None of which I knew at the time.  Only that she was a woman of substance, and soon she became an obsession.  We must have driven her home, this gaggle of Berkeley students, dropped her off in San Francisco.  And I almost recall this.  Furthermore, I almost remember promising to get in touch, to see her again.

Which I did, but not without some prodding.  We had a mutual friend, after all.  Who this was...well, that detail has long since evaporated.  Surely it was a woman.  And she let me know that I had made some sort of impression on Margaret.  Which was almost inconceivable to me.  After all, she was a real woman, this Margaret.  And I?  Obviously incompetent, a 20-year-old virgin and so on...the debased level of my self-image cannot be exaggerated.  Still, there she was, Margaret across the bay.  So what was there to do but call her?

The plot immediately thickened.  She was quite friendly, our Margaret, but full of additional information.  She was going with a man.  But this man could not have children, and their future together was unclear.  Yes, she would love to see me.

Now the stakes became enormously greater.  Margaret loomed across the bay.  She was a woman with a lover.  She was a woman with a lover who wanted a baby.  I was a baby myself, most of the time, wasn't I?  So what on earth was I doing getting on the F bus and heading for the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco?  Not to mention getting on the N Judah streetcar and heading for the Inner Sunset District?  I was a doomed man.  I was doggedly in pursuit of...well, a miracle.  Women, alluring and frightening, one of whom I had talked to in the Point Reyes surf...and whatever boyfriend she had, I couldn't hope to compete with...and surely I was a fool.  The streetcar, green and curvilinear from the 1940s, trundled through the tunnel near Buena Vista Park.  Were the brakes blocks of wood that smoked during use, or were those the cable cars'?  Who knows?  Margaret lived on Baker Street.  I vaguely recall that she was a schoolteacher.  Again, this must have been a Sunday.  I knocked on the door of a Haight neighborhood house, and Margaret let me in.  She ushered me into a kitchen, and introduced someone, someone who was just leaving.  A young black man, although I say 'young' from today's perspective.  Actually, he was older, perhaps mid-20s, which must have made him seem very grown-up.

Once he was gone, I felt myself shrink into my true boyish stature.  After all, this woman had a man, a black man which meant...who knows...that he was more earthy, more streetwise, more something...she wanted children...he shtupped her and everything...and now she was entertaining me.  There was no way I could hold my head up.  There was no way I could compete.  Why even try?  I didn't.  I began acting silly, boyish.  It would be interesting to recall the details here, but they have evaporated.  Still, I can feel the approximate outlines, me at her table, talking about myself as though I was somewhere between foolish and clueless.  Ha, ha.  I had come to see her to...ha, ha.  Time passed.  Our visit concluded.  I don't believe I ever saw her again.  

I don't believe I really saw myself again, at least not very much, until I met another woman that December.  Another warm, sensuous Jewish woman with a certain repose.  With that woman, things worked out even worse, more traumatically.  Yet there was to be even another Jewish woman, only a year and a half later, who was 70 years old and lived in London and had a photo of her pipe-smoking instructor on a bookcase, Carl Jung.  I shook her hand, sat down, provided an overview of my shooting, divorced parents, this and that.  After which there was a long silence.  Yes, she said, when mother is sick, life is very difficult.  

Boy, you can say that again.

The day dawns grim.  Distances between all points have stretched and loosened at the same time.  A clear syrup fills all spaces.  I rise from my bed and commence swimming through it.  I don't want to make tea.  I don't want to drink tea.  I don't want to do anything I am currently doing.  Hibernation, suspense of time and animate world, that would be good.  Still, the tea is good.  And incredibly, I do find myself under the the showerhead, which is also good.  What I don't want is anything else, particularly anything involving movement, and most specifically mechanical movement, vis-à-vis my exercycle.

Rationally, and there is much in me that remains so, there is nothing to do when one falls in the course of exercising, except to.... Do what I am doing minutes later, feet hooked into the great pedals of life, and going around and around, just as the digital readout is...three and a half virtual miles speeding by.  In fact, there really should be no end to this, for my stamina seems to come back and my fear of exercise machines has abated.  What hasn't changed is my bladder capacity, and in the end, this is what brings things to a halt.

My nerve is back, that is the thing.  Later in the day I can almost envision using the rowing machine again.  Why not?  I see the error of my ways.  I need not fall off the seat again.  I also see things that aren't there, as the day ends.  While they are there, and over the years they appear there, but only in moments of...stress?  Yes, that is the simplest word, but more to the point, moments in which I face a particular kind of public exposure. 

So at the monthly Caltrain meeting, at the very moment when I decide to hold forth on the topic of wheelchair boarding - it starts happening.  An optical migraine, appearing as these have every few months.  And if I think back, often appearing in similar settings.  Such as before or during meetings.  Situations in which I am going public, as it were.  And since publishing a book means going public in ways and on a scale I cannot really anticipate, well....  I don't know.  Stay tuned, that is what I say.

Because there is a tomorrow.  And tomorrow is now.  And now, as I head for a final pee, it hits me, how tired I am.  In fact, I am bone weary.  I have no stamina whatsoever.  My balance probably isn't that good if I think about it, which I am.  Of course, what I am really thinking about is the next step, getting on the rowing machine.  That is to say, getting back on the rowing machine, the horse that threw me, as it were.  I am determined.  Menchu is following me out to the carport, planning to busy herself in the kitchen while I row, row, row my stationary boat.  And oddly, once I am strapped in, and the process commences...yes, I am tired.  I woke up way too early this morning.  But as with yesterday, I have the stamina and will to do this rowing. 

And once I get into it, I have more than stamina.  I have drive.  There just aren't many situations in which I can expend so much physical effort, throw my bodily energies into an all-out physical endeavor.  This is not just good for the abdominals and the back.  It is good for the spirit.  And we need all we can get.  Particularly for this next thing, the one gathering its energies into the occasional optical migraine.  The latter being a geometrically patterned interference with vision - just as one is attempting to walk on stage.  The next stage being on stage.  Oh, my God.  As I say, stay tuned.

Wow, but it's a long way up the Hayes Street hill.  This is the slope made infamous in San Francisco's Bay-to-Breakers marathon, annually the site of tens of thousands of runners, some costumed, a few nude, all winded...laboring up this infamous hiccup of the San Andreas Fault.  Not that anyone struggling up this incline has a neuron to spare for geology.  It's all about getting to the top, staying alive to the top, staying power being all there is.  Though I do have enough energy to ride up a driveway, along the sidewalk and through the pedestrian markings at an intersection, before swerving back into the street, climbing and climbing, my legs beginning to fail on the bicycle pedals, for foolishly I am not in a low gear.  In fact, this is high gear, or damn close, and there's no possibility of stopping, downshifting, and making this ride a little easier.  For the simple fact is that I am going too slowly, and the only way is forward.  And the only action is hanging on, hoping in the essential matter of will, and things are balanced on a knife edge.  Yes, the summit is within sight, but not necessarily within reach, and falling short, is a definite possibility....

Even though it is a dream, and the alarm radio is now waking me to the true nightmare of the day, the nation's Republicans screwing with the debt ceiling.  I listen to the thing unfolding.  My legs are still pumping a bicycle up Hayes Street.  And which nightmare is worse no one can say.

The morning wheelchair waltz ensues.  That is, once I am in it, and although parked right next to the bed, it does seem a long way.  But, okay, I whir into the office to turn on the computer, arc into the hallway and unlock the front door, even as I am banking toward the kitchen, slaloming around the end of the counter to the tea kettle.  I click the thing on.  It begins to roar.  I stare at it stupidly.  Hard to say if it was wise or unwise to have taken a Walgreens sleeping tablet.  Quality of sleep being a complicated, issue.  But for now the only issue is tea.  And yesterday.

The dream tells part of the story, perhaps the most important part.  I hadn't slept well yesterday, was quite exhausted.  And now, at the end of the day, there was the matter of exercise.  In my mind, physical activity rotates from walking up and down the footpath in front of my apartments leaning on whatever available arm, or having a five-virtual-mile go at the exercycle or, as somehow suited that day, having enough of a bout with the rowing machine to get through 'From Our Own Correspondent' on BBC Radio 4.

It is a perfectly adequate arrangement, this rowing machine.  The actual device hails from my first marriage, which means that it has lasted for a highly successful 25 years.  In fact, the rowing machine is in such robust mechanical health, that I really should will it to someone.  So, speak up.  If you would like me to insert a personal line or two into my will, do get in touch.  The rowing machine is yours.  

For now, it is mine, and Jane has strapped me into the thing.  Although 'strapped' hardly does the situation justice.  Yes, there are the usual foot straps.  But in my case there is also a special physiotherapist's hand strap to hold my paralyzed right limb on the rowing machine's handle.  Row, row, row yourself gently up the cardiovascular stream, merrily, merrily, merrily...and this dream is already becoming something of a nightmare.  I just don't have the strength, it becomes clear.  I can barely hold my torso up, such is the condition...of what?  My general stamina?  The late afternoon heat?  No, this is a condition of the mind.  I am defeated, this cannot be happening, and the long slide toward incapacity has begun.  The antidote?  I shall prevail.  I shall conquer this thing, this triple-headed enemy of neurology, stamina and age, the thrashing tail of fatigue not currently acknowledged.

I get in about 50 rowing strokes.  Jane, currently vacuuming her car, must be able to do something...and that something amounts to a shove.  I want the rowing machine shoved closer to the stucco wall.  Jane balked at this suggestion earlier, but now the matter seems urgent.  I cannot support my torso, stamina and/or heat being what it is.  Leaning against the wall is now essential.  Jane pushes on the wooden platform, then the actual steel rowing machine.  This takes a few tries.  She is having a few middle-aged aches and pains these days, and hoisting me out of various recumbencies can only add to this effect.  Never mind.  I am at my wit's end.  I ask her to push, she does so, the rowing machine slides closer to the wall, and now I can lean my shoulder against the stucco.  But this hardly matters.  I am still exhausted.

Which is why only minutes later, I throw in the neuromuscular towel.  And having decided this, I stop fighting the weak abdominals and let the torso fall backwards.  Why not?  I sort of wonder what will happen.  Jane helps me sit up.  I undo my own foot straps, grabbing at them in the usual way, using a stick with a hook on its end.  Although something most unusual happens.  I drop the stick.  Usually, I tell myself that this is impossible, must not occur, for there is not much back up.  Without this stick-metal-hook approach, quite standard in the world of quadriplegic occupational therapy, there is not much.  Except for the other stick, which has lost its hook, but I do keep in reserve.  Why I do not simply replace the hook on the empty wooden dowel, well that is a matter for another time.  For now, Jane is yanking my legs out of their foot straps, grabbing my legs, and turning me to stand.

Normally, I am rather picky about this maneuver.  I insist on having one leg moved at a time.  So the first is dropped to the concrete carport floor, enough to brace myself while the other gets swiveled around.  But not this time.  I am exhausted and quite happy to let Jane maneuver me her way.  And so my legs are turning, and so is my torso, and now everything, as I turn, turn, turn, to everything, my entire body, butt first twisting, then falling onto the wooden platform.  And incredibly turning some more, now tumbling off the entire apparatus and onto the concrete.  

The scariness of which I am fully aware, in mid air, my neck being the orthopedic disaster area that is, stenosis putting an unknown degree of squeeze on my spinal cord at all times.  And who knows what I do, whatever it is being automatic, but my arm probably does rise to block the fall.  And what hits, and hits hard, is mostly my scalp.  I lie on the concrete in a twisted mass.  First issue: check for movement.  The leg moves, the arm, and there has been no flash of light or other telltale sign of head concussion.  Now, there is only the issue of verticality.  And Jane and I are both talking quite calmly considering the circumstances.  She speculating on ways to lift me up.  Me telling her to summon a neighbor.  Which happens.  The young Asian couple from across the way both appear.  Jane backs the wheelchair out of the way, and after some instruction to pull here, and let go there, I am up on my feet, twisting and now sitting back in the wheelchair.

Traumatized?  Somewhat adrenal?  I suppose.  Mostly shaken, reminded of the fragility of my state.  Balance minimal.  Control inadequate.  And the ultra-cautious way in which I proceed through my days, well, there is a reason.  Thing is, there is also a psychology.  Jane and I being close these days, there is a tendency to get into the general need for mothering and take one's hand off the quadriplegic tiller.  

There is a way to get me off the rowing machine.  Only I know it, and there are times when I can only nurture myself, this being one of them.  Throughout the evening I brace myself for some unexpected soreness, a bruise rising.  But it doesn't happen.  Life is fragile.  Life is good, although it does demand alertness.  And there is growth.  Go no further than my raised beds, where Agronomy in Action has outdone any lyrical the-corn-is-as-high-as-an-elephant's-eye whimsy, replaced with tomato plants...that are about as high as a brontosaurus's ear.  Only this morning volunteer Paul and I purchased three-meter stakes from the local hardware store.  They were barely adequate.

What sort of California summer day is this, gray as London and about the same temperature?  It is, of course, the day of the Menlo Park summer festival.  No, it is not called that.  Actually, the thing is a street fair.  And what fare of the streets?  Oh, paintings of Venice.  Olive oil pressers.  Corndog fressers.  Hand puppet makers.  And the San Jose Tamale Company.  I find them last, at the end of the road.  The closed off road, our main street, today's Street of Dreams.

While it is not uniquely American, it is highly American, the fact that we celebrate our town in this annual and most elaborate of fêtes, by selling each other stuff.  Which for me gives the weekend street fair and attendant closure of the main shopping thoroughfare, a dreary feel.  Oh, there are a few noncommercial endeavors.  The Menlo Park Police have a stand proclaiming something about Child ID.  Whether this deals with kidnapping or simply getting lost, I have no doubt that it's real enough.  The Fire Department, across from the cops' stand, has information on poisoning, disaster preparedness and, of course, immolation.  The crowds are not flocking here.  In fact, I am not sure what they are doing, except drifting.  I wonder, really wonder, how many people are buying anything.  This era being our Less Great Depression.

The truth is that on this particular Saturday morning I am whizzing through the stands and shoppers, looking at very little, mostly in search of food.  Knowing the town center awfully well, one easily runs out of options.  Especially at my age when calories count and one counts calories.  I can quickly rule out the usual choices on the fingers of one paralyzed hand.  Once or twice a month Alan and I share a Jewish pizza.  Various soup titles rotate in and out of Borrone's, and the leitmotif of minestrone has worn me out.  Chinese is too greasy, Mexican too insistent, and the Japanese place is too dark and at this particular hour, closed.  So variety, street food, what an adventure, right here in my own town, no driving required, not even a train.

At the very end of the closed street, just before car traffic recommences, an assemblage, a canvas-and-aluminum-frame village of food vendors.  I eyeball them cautiously.  I sniff the air, then scan the signs.  Gyros, falafel and Philadelphia cheesesteaks?  A suspiciously broad menu, although there is a substantial queue, and people emerging from the stand seem quite happy munching into aluminum foil wrapped sandwiches with substantial vegetable content.  Teriyaki chicken over rice?  Doubtful.  So, already noted and briefly considered, The Tamale Company.  I go for the single tamale and beans/rice, hold the rice.  A large plastic plate of food emerges through a square opening in the burlap wall of the establishment.

I have been breathing carefully, preparing my spirit Zen-style for the experience to come.  It is happening now, the transition of able-bodied food object to cripple's folly.  This was a plastic plate of food, but it is now a warm and liquid peril, not to mention a seeping fountain of shame.  There is some small danger of burning myself with the hot contents, a much greater probability of embarrassing myself with the spilled contents.  I have made some modest preparation, arranging two recent copies of the New York Times on my lap.  And now the steaming plate settles upon its newsprint lap cloth...and we progress to the next step.

A plastic table in front of the stand holds bottles of hot sauce, paper napkins and disposable forks.  I roll close carefully.  My paralyzed hand can do no more than brace the plate, and weakly at that.  I must not bump anything or anyone.  Drawing close to the table, I turn the wheelchair off as a precaution, lean over and grab some hot sauce.  Napkins, one fork and I am safely away.  But to where?  There is no where.  There is nothing but street pavement with various constituents wandering about.  That and a large stand, complete with stage, from Radio KJOY or some such.  Loudspeakers on the latter proclaim a broadcast coming to you directly from the Connoisseur's Marketplace in Menlo Park.  Yes, this is the name of the street fair, and it embarrasses me, embarrasses me even more to hear it proudly proclaimed.  And what is worse, there follows very loud music, insistent, a membrane of bass pumping through the pavement, repetitious and proof that I am very old.  Yet there is really no where to go.  I turn my back to the radio stand, getting to work on the tamale plate.

First, there is the cornhusk.  Anything like a real tamale comes wrapped in one.  I consider it a mark of high quadriplegic achievement that I grasp one side of the husk, lift it in the air and watch the tamale tumble out.  The thing is pleasantly small and soft, the faint aroma of masa, Mexican corn flour, wafting.  The problem remains the cornhusk.  It is soaked in sauce, dripping and red.  The larger game plan should be simple enough, but the smaller moves are terribly complicated.  Trash receptacles abound, but all have lids.  They cannot be lifted and kept open with one hand while tossing out the cornhusk with the other...because there is no other.  I consider this quietly.  I scan the street for other rubbish options.  Returning to the stand's hot sauce-napkins-forks plastic table, I quietly deposit the cornhusk to one side.  Someone will deal with it.  I am still annoyed that the City of Menlo Park has arrayed street fair porta potties across several disabled parking spaces.

Still, what is odd is that I do not ask for help from anyone.  Raising the lid of a rubbish bin, for example.  In truth, I feel the eyes of the town upon me.  I have failed with the high school foundation.  I have failed to get published, at least until now.  I frequent this downtown street daily, roaming like a homeless person.  Or, at least, an aimless person.  My wheelchair makes me visible, recognizable.  And now I am eating with one hand and doing everything not to screw up.  

Which, it seems, I have accomplished.  No, not quite.  Sure enough, there is a red schmutz on my lap.  I dab at this rather frantically.  I drop small globules of spit, finger by finger, over the offending spot.  Out, damn schmutz.  It is hard being disabled and neurotic.  At times, the combination is too much.  Actually, at most times it is too much.  Today is no exception, but at least the experience is brief.  I leave the street fair, heading across El Camino to Borrone's where I am known.  No, they have no chocolate biscotti to accompany my cappuccino today.  They do have these chocolate-on-chocolate cookies, however.  I have one, or one has me.  Somehow, only in early afternoon, it has been a long day.

Hello, Paul, hello, Paul.  Thus we greet each other, doppelgänger style, helper and helped.  I make it a point to go out on mornings when volunteer helper Paul is here.  We take a break from chores and head for one of Menlo Park's few breakfast options.  But this morning is different somehow.  Perhaps something in me has settled down.  And down is good.  Down to earth.  Down to business.  Down to basics, including those in the kitchen.  

I admit this was all borderline, the staying-at-home approach to breakfast.  Still, there we were, Paul quickly unearthing the sad facts of domestic reality.  Such as the rottenness of two of the four nectarines purchased only on Sunday.  Off in a couple of days?  Thus fruit, thus summer, thus Paul toasting English muffins and slicing tomatoes.  All of Europe being represented in our repast.  English muffins, that is to say, Trader Joe's whole-wheat satire on the crumpet, hothouse tomatoes from the Netherlands, hummus inspired by the Mediterranean.  And the two Pauls.  

We eat.  Paul asks me an earnest question or two...when did you decide to focus on inner work?  I respond straightforwardly.  Little choice in the matter, I tell him.  Something about his question wearies me...but that may have something to do with the epic nature of my life, much of which I would prefer to forget at this breakfast moment.  But I do not forget.  I remember at this juncture, for Paul's sake.  I needed to talk to someone older when I was his age.  My annoyance is about me, not about him.  We agree that the hummus/tomato/muffin combo is good.

Breakfast concluded, Paul washes the dishes, both of them.  I wander into the kitchen, wondering at the State of the Fruit.  There are additional nectarines, after all, my shopping being a sort of stream of consciousness.  I examine the plastic pack from Trader Joe's.  Precisely as I thought, more nectarines.  Paul tells me these are still not ripe.  Splendid.  I ease away from the counter.  Bam.  The wheelchair has collided with, and exploded, something at the same time.  Quick visual check.  Fuck.  The wheelchair light.  The same wheelchair light I broke six months ago.  Broken again.  A $150 repair, if the wheelchair shop is to be believed.  It is not, of course, but the service staff did have a go at charging me this amount...and not for repairing the actual light, just the clear plastic lens that covers it.  Cracked twice in as many months.  Owing to the fact, I later realize, that these lights are mounted where they should not be mounted.  

Still, this is not 'later,' but now.  And I am angry.  Initially angry at myself, of course.  But I put this response on 'mute,' partly owing to the presence of Paul.  Partly owing to an accretion of wisdom, unintended.  For what has happened defies understanding, challenges description.  The light has inadvertently hooked itself on the wooden edge of a kitchen cabinet.  How is such a thing possible?  One may well ask.  Really, the answer has much to do with the maneuverability of my Swedish wheelchair.  The thing has managed to work its way cleverly around a tight kitchen space.  And in backing up, the wheelchair's headlight simply got too close to the wood.  The simple message: lighten up.  Reinforced by the discovery that the lens is not smashed, but cleanly cracked in two.  Paul and I repair to the Romanian hardware store.  We buy a bottle of, yes, Plastic Surgery...a substance that proves so virulent that Paul quickly glues two of his own fingers together.  Not to worry.  The wheelchair headlight lens is soon fused together, likely to remain that way for years.

And all is right again with the world.  The truth is that however much I joke, 'these things' as I am wont to call them, do bother me.  The sense that I am losing control of occurrences that should be mastered, subdued.  After all, it does not require a license, the driving of a wheelchair.  You get in the sucker and go.  

And later, lunch concluded at a Menlo Park eatery, I do go, homeward bound with maybe a quick stop at the Trader's.  You never know.  I might need something.  Also, I might not.  Either way, I do need to pee.  There is that.  And there is the light changing from red to green, the familiar assisting-the-blind device squawking instructions about the safety of crossing now.  Me heading across El Camino Real, nearing the concrete median strip...bam.  A Ford minivan rockets through the intersection.  Seconds have passed since the light changed, far too many for this to be happening...a green-light-obeying Mercedes skids to a halt, its driver saved by German brakes...having missed a side-impact collision by inches.  I stare down the street trying to remember the van's description.  The Mercedes is still there, stopped in the middle of the intersection, cars behind it now honking.  I do understand.  We are both stunned, the Mercedes driver and I.  This is the sort of thing that doesn't occur, not in Menlo Park.  I would have been close enough to get cut by flying glass, had the cars collided, but nothing worse than that.  Mostly I am shaken, adrenaline spurring me across the intersection now and toward the Trader's.  A minivan.  Maroon.  I stare idly at the frozen vegetables, then depart.  I am wondering if I should wheel directly to the police station and report this.  No, I have to meet a handyman at home.

Still, I do call the cops.  Nothing much they can do, the receptionist tells me.  Maybe the traffic cameras caught the incident, and, at least, the mad driver will get a ticket.  There is a pause.  Any sign the driver was drunk, she asks.  No, I tell her, realizing there is not much I can do either.  Still, drunkenness seems a distinct possibility.  Not that it matters, for the way I barrel across El Camino, getting hit by such a nut seems a distinct possibility too.  And what makes one possibility more distinct than another?  Being in a wheelchair makes them all distinct, that is the thing.  There may be another thing, but for now, this will do.

Jane says it is a Northumberland day.  I know what she means.  We are in the small park across from Peet's.  All of us.  Two dogs, two recently transported cappuccinos, one scone, one bran muffin.  In short, life is good.  And the breeze from Northumbria?  It is warm enough to be pleasant, cool enough to be stimulating, and above all, moving.  Like the maritime weather churning off the North Sea, the Peninsula air is restless.  We are planning our day.  

There had been talk of driving over the coastal range to the wild San Mateo beaches, but that plan has been abandoned.  Jane is fighting a cold.  I am fighting the sense that I must keep doing things.  Whereas, by any decent measure, I have recently done a lot, including a first-hand experiment in the Mercator projection, accompanied by bad movies and the observation that Greenland is icy and Iceland is green.  Meaning that at this particular moment it is rather pleasant to be in Menlo Park.  Jane has suggested quite reasonably that we might want to load the dogs in my van and drive to the nearby shore of San Francisco Bay.  Too much effort, I tell her.  Still, I like the idea as an idea.  Even better, I like the name of the rough, reclaimed edge of the southern Bay, which is actually an estuary.  Baylands.  I am baying for Baylands.  I am staying put because I am an aging quadriplegic.  And I am baying, because at heart I am a dog.

With Jane slowed by her cold, this morning I had some unusual one-on-one time with my adopted canine offspring.  Isabella, part boxer, part love goddess, could not get enough of inserting her canine tongue deep into my nostrils, seeking my mouth.  There is something inherently disturbing about this cross-species brand of French kissing.  Except that is routine Isabella behavior, and she cannot get enough of it, or of me.  Fortunately, she also cannot get enough of Jane, currently crashed out on the bed.  Isabella may extend her tongue in my direction, but she tends to keep her feet where they are, Janeside.  I roll out to the kitchen to make tea.  I shower.  Time passes.  Bixby, the spacey post-traumatic dog rescued by Jane about four years ago, is on the prowl.  His movements and purposes conform to no apparent pattern, except a few neurotic learned behaviors.  Eating, for example.  Years after his liberation from neglect and bad treatment in a mad person's madhouse of dogs...30 or so...he still treats dog food warily.  That is to say, kibble is something to snatch from a bowl in the kitchen, convey a full mouth of to the dining room for chewing, then back to the kitchen for more.  There is a reason why Pavlov worked with dogs.

There is also a reason why humans found his work so fascinating.  In any case, look at the unexpected joys of these, my moments as primary canine care provider.  Rolling my wheelchair out of the office, Bixby comes bounding out of the kitchen.  He even completes the action, admittedly running just slightly out of nerve as he gets close to me.  Nonetheless, he comes more or less within petting range, and I scratch and ruffle his long fur.  He is mostly border collie, if I recall correctly, hair absurdly long in places.  Particularly his feet, where an overabundance of fur creates clown shoes.  He holds his head up approaching me, his look cheery and noble.  

I sense, or project, the courage behind this.  For Bixby is a dog who simultaneously loves and fears affection.  For most of the two years I have known him, he has progressed from shying from me, approaching tentatively, approaching less tentatively.  But never approaching openly, in the affection-consuming style of his canine partner, Isabella.  Now, he is almost there.  Bixby lets himself be petted, not overly long, but enough.  He even stops by my wheelchair almost close enough for a full man-dog embrace.  Not all the time, of course.  Often, particularly just after he has arrived at my apartment with Jane, we go through a considerable stretch of approach-and-retreat behavior.  But on this particular morning, I have actually seen him bound to me.  Head high, tail wagging, and doing his signature prance.  The latter may not have much to rival it in the canine world, at least from what I have seen.  Bixby, long-haired clown feet and all, in moments of exuberance lifts his legs high, as though he is in one of the most sprightly, well-trained marching bands.  

It is joy, arising from deep pain.  And I am familiar with this response, because it echoes my own.  My life, most of it if I am honest, has been about finding the ability to love.  Overcoming the fear of love.  Living with its associated vulnerability.  Living with its associated opposite, hate.  Living a life that is truly a life.  How can it take so long to accomplish something so basic?  More to the immediate point on this Northumbria-in-California day, how can it take so long to appreciate something so basic as now?  A cup of coffee.  A walk with some dogs.  The secrets of life as contained in Menlo Park.

It is the mystery of the stones.  Like all mysteries, it has several layers and fuzzy boundaries.  And right at this moment the boundary, fuzzy or not, is everything.  For that was the purpose of these stones.  For the Romans, this was it, their northern boundary.  From here on out, abandon hope.  Give up on sub-floor heating, olive oil or mosaics.  Expect to rub shoulders with Picts who were still dressing in skins and hadn't even heard of the Kilt Factory.  Enough to make a man build a wall, keep his tunic pressed and keep his eyes peeled.  

Never thinking that 2000 years later, more or less, Britons would be drinking tea and staring at Hadrian's Wall and drinking more tea.  Me among them.  The mystery?  How these stones were fitted together in a way that endured two millennia.  Were they cut?  If so, how?  As for Hadrian's Wall, portions of which actually followed us through Newcastle, one mystery has been partially solved.  How could such a structure keep out the Scots?  It didn't, I now understand eyeballing the Roman garrison's fort to the west.  The wall was patrolled, a point of defense.  It was Hadrian's legions in conjunction with this stone structure that did the job, or tried to.  In fact, my question proceeds from a very American source.  The assumption that a physical barrier, a thing or a technology, could suffice to control people.  Such as to keep the Mexicans in Mexico.  No, this wasn't just about stones piled atop stones, but Romans piled atop stones.  And now only the stones are left.  And that they are left seems remarkable.  They don't build walls like they used to.  They don't build stones like they used to.  I'm going to have another cup of tea.

Northumberland rolls in the most pleasant of ways.  It rolls with the vales and the rivers.  It rolls with the punches, historical and otherwise.  I confess to never have heard of the Battle of Flodden.  But even I can grasp what it must have meant to lose 10,000 lives, including the king and ruling class of a small country.  And, okay, so today's Scots have not been defeated by the English but by their secret weapon: fried food.  Never mind, for there is no evidence of fried anything making our green and gentle way toward the Northumbrian coast.  Man's relationship to this land is old and rich, that is the point.  And it continues to be, that is the other.

Jane says she likes islands.  Which brings us to Lindisfarne.  Separated from the mainland by the tides which rhythmically cover, then uncover, a half mile causeway.  I kept thinking about the tides during the hours we spent there.  What if we were cut off?  What if the causeway became submerged, having got our signals crossed regarding the tide schedule?  What if we were trapped here, gentle breezes blowing off the North Sea, a ruined castle shaking its fist toward Denmark and beckoning a long line of tourists out to view it?  What if we were stuck among the ruins of the ancient monastery?  What if?  What if?  We would have to sit and stare at the gentle place and take it in, that is the what-if.  We would talk to some people, such as the National Trust man who showed us the wheelchair route into the monastery ruin.  And showed us where seeds planted decades ago had sprouted in a recently tilled garden.  The vibes are good on the holy island of Lindisfarne.  And from the point of view of an ever-nervous quadriplegic, my anxiety may bring me closer to the real experience of those who conducted their lives on this island.  Mind the tide.

The feeling is still there off the island, looking at it across the coastal plain from the restaurant that faces Lindisfarne on a slight promontory.  The terrace is long, the diners are few and the weather is perfect.  The views of the island are unobstructed.  No buildings or even people separate us from Lindisfarne.  In fact, we can see the tide moving in, even tell when the roadway has been covered and the last car has made its way toward us.  If we came another time, we could almost see the green algae that cling to the pavement after the tide recedes.  For now, we have this time.  In fact, we have all the time in the world.  The peace of this place, on or off the island, lingers.  In crowded England, it is not to be taken for granted.

Which is why I have mixed feelings about the newspaper clipping posted near the front door of the restaurant.  The owner has a dispute with the local council.  It involves a sign.  He has proclaimed his restaurant in the usual fashion, its name set in stones in a wall just outside the car park.  His problem, according to the Council, is the sign that precedes it, 100 meters or so from the entrance.  Why not?  He wants approaching drivers to know where to turn.  The 'sign' couldn't be more environmentally attuned, made as it is of Northumberland stone set into a wall.  Still, signs of this sort just don't happen here.  A sign outside a pub.  A sign proclaiming a greengrocer.  But all just in front of the business premises.  Signs warning of the advance of the business...well, there just are not very many.

And here we see in this Northumberland microcosm a battle between the proud British entrepreneur and what he doubtless perceives as a stodgy bureaucracy.  Whatever the outcome of this dispute, I admire it.  People love this region.  They want to preserve its essence.  They also need tourists, for the local economy seems pretty thin.  It's a necessary tension.  This sort of battle that must be fought, pushing and pulling, regardless of who wins.

And as though to comment on the whole proceedings, every few minutes we hear a whoosh.  Sometimes we barely hear it at all.  And we never hear from very far away.  In fact, from the restaurant terrace we sometimes see the trains before we hear them.  Or see them and barely hear them at all.  We are a quarter-mile away from the main north/south rail line in Britain's Northeast.  From London to Edinburgh and on to Aberdeen.  This is what trains, some of them very long, sound like doing more than 100 mph.  Without knowing it, beneath our eyes, in the last hour 10,000 or maybe 20,000 people have hurtled past us en route to Scotland or England.  The electric rail line barely makes a dent in the landscape.  The trains barely make a sound.  Right here in the shadow, in fact the orb, of Lindisfarne.  

Back home in Menlo Park, the locals are in an uproar over just this sort of thing.  Electrifying the existing rail line.  Running trains at this speed.  They all need to come here, spend an hour on this terrace, and talk to the owner about his sign.

Did I see him in the airport lounge?  Going through security?  Or did we bump into each other in the boarding queue?  Whatever the encounter, he must have offered to help me in some way...and doubtless I declined...and now here we were, Jane and I, in the final moments before the 12 sedentary hours separating Heathrow from San Francisco, waiting outside the aircraft door for whichever ground crew was going to stash my wheelchair in the hold.  And this man walked by.  Tall, about my age, conveying himself with an easy, loping gait, turning to talk to his wife.  And now in this pivotal moment between realities, when long hidden truths emerge like old stains in a carpet, it was all so clear.  How much of my body and its capabilities have been literally shot away, and for so long, and what life, at least physical life, would have been like.  This man has a normal life, and yes, there is no such thing...and yet there is.  He seems unconcerned, artless and uncomplicated, walking toward his plane.  Which is also my plane.  And I will do a bit of walking too, thank God.  This being what is required to get to my seat...not to mention the loo a couple of times during the flight.  And for this little bit of ambulation, I am in the odd position of being grateful.  Things could be worse.  Or as Jane points out, they will never be better.  And my life is so far removed from that of the tall man who has now disappeared down the jetway....  

Well, I do not know what to think.  Except that I do think, all the time, about everything, especially everything trivial.  Such as 'jetway.'  The word, I have decided, has its origins in some marketing department somewhere and has been catapulted into popular usage in ways I find unsavory.  Having done my best to do the same during my years shilling for the computer industry.  And now, I have decided to go straight.  Straight to my seat.  Straight to California.  Straight to the truth.  Which includes the pleasant realization that at 40,000 feet, there is no pollen.

Hayfever, normally an annoyance at best, has at times assumed center stage on this trip.  The allergy experience is not one I associate with Britain.  Okay, eyeballing the fields of Northumberland, logic would dictate that something among the grains of this green and gentle land, undulating and pollinating...that sheer agricultural activity was doing my sinuses no good.  Odd, because we were right on the coast, after all, all the motifs being Vikings and kippers and feudal seafaring kings.  Proving that despite their proximity, human brains and sinuses are not in frequent contact.  Days of sneezing, nights of coughing, repeated trips to Boots the chemist and on and on it went.  Until my cousin's husband bought me an over-the-counter remedy containing cortisone.  Whatever.  The pleasures of Britain distracted me enough to pay relatively little attention, even if my hacking and sleep disturbances kept Jane awake many a night.

And one of those pleasures is observing Britain and its changes.  The populace has a natural skepticism regarding the effectiveness of public services.  But as an occasional visitor, much of what I see looks awfully good.  Take wheelchairs and railways.  For years the two have been an awkward fit, and on many rail lines they remain so.  But not the London-Newcastle run.  First, note the stunning reality behind this particular rail experience.  One travels about 300 miles in as little as 2 1/2 hours.  Rolling along at 125 mph much of the way, stopping occasionally, stunning me completely.  An electric railway, of course.  Blink and you'll miss the famous cathedral at Durham.  Stopping at York, you had better know where to look or you will even miss the Minster pulling out of the station.  Oh, well.  Still, this is actually a digression from the real point: wheelchairs.  Coming and going, at Kings Cross London and Central Station in Newcastle, railway staff easily found my name in their computer system.  And there in carriage J or whatever was a wheelchair space and a seat for Jane...at least in theory.  The southbound trip was impossibly jammed...and mercifully short.  The bad news and the good news.  And damned if we weren't back in London in time for a most pleasant Italian meal.

I have pleasant memories of Veneto II in Wigmore Street, but these do not include the entrance and exit.  The restaurant is up one step, and the simplest of ramps...even something homemade out of a small sheet of plywood...would make all the difference.  Instead, it takes three serving staff to lift the front of my wheelchair, push from behind and generally expend a lot of wasted effort to get me indoors.  All so unnecessary.  The same is true a couple of nights later at the edge of Soho in the Rasa Samudra, my favorite South Indian restaurant.  Again, a small army assembles to pull the wheelchair this way, wedge it that way...the whole experience reeking of inefficiency.  No one quite understands what to do with the wheelchair.  And nothing short of a PowerPoint presentation would really help me communicate what needs to be done.  Actually, I am in defensive mode during these maneuvers.  In restaurants I am generally providing both an English-as-a-second-language tutorial combined with a flash course in structural stress loads.  My wheelchair, however sturdy, does not respond well to having its arms and seat yanked about.

Yet I always respond to being in Britain.  I want to get involved, that is the thing.  Involved with what?  Well, for example, what is happening and not happening around disabled access.  To compare notes on American and British efforts along these lines.  Get West End restaurants to buy portable wheelchair ramps, for example.  Why not pursue a similar worthy cause in my own nation?  Perhaps there is too much baggage.  Better yet a fresh start, pick up the pieces and start a fresh conversation with people who do not know me.  A curious impulse.

Or is it?  I had to do a lot of growing in the years after my shooting, and those years happened to occur here in London.  My father's brain tumor brought things to a sudden halt.  I flew back to the US and that was that.  Not surprising that I still have the sense of unfinished business in Britain.  For I was getting used to a new body, as well as a new self, in a new country.  Then home.  Perhaps what I recall in visiting the UK is the unfinished business.  The sense that I still have things to say.  What are the lessons of the disability movement of the 1970s and 80s?  Well, they are what they are, wherever I say them, whoever is listening.  My belief, or fantasy, is that people would not be listening so critically in Britain.  Go forth and express, that is the message.  Deal with the critic, the bad mother, wherever she lurks.  Go forth anyway, that is the real message.  There are things to do, chances to take, and they do not all require jetlag.

Where was I headed on that particular day?  A government office?  A medical appointment?  Or even one of my rare job interviews?  I could not have been anticipating much reward at the end of my schlep through Soho.  Yet in 1971, I was still walking everywhere, the wheelchair two decades away.  London's maze of narrow streets and theaters and pubs and restaurants was not the ultra-pricey place it is today.  In fact, the district had some authentically seedy and risqué elements.  Which was actually rather pleasant, for the whole experience was safe.  The naughty parts of London joined hands with the respectable bits in a way that was both comfortable and blasé.  The neighborhoods and their purposes shrugged at each other, stepped aside and made room.  Chandelier-laced hotels were just a couple of streets away, as were fancy shops and consulates.  Stockbrokers could nip over here for lunch...particularly if they were schooled in the brisk pace of British walking...to get lunch or to get laid.  In Soho, old-style specialist shops selling umbrellas and door knobs, coexisted with whorehouses.  One of the main thoroughfares, Wardour Street, was still headquarters of the British film industry, or what remained of it.

And so I made my way, the most direct route from a tube station or a bus stop...I cannot recall...to wherever I was going.  An older woman stood in a doorway.  By 'older' I mean that she was probably in her late 30s.  She said hello, looking me up and down.  I raised my eyes to hers.  In Britain people simply did not say hello to each other in this fashion.  Unless they knew each other, of course.  Did she know me?  I stared at her for a moment trying to work out the connection.  'Oh,' she said.  She had recognized something in me, something that was not looking for a prostitute or even aware that one might be looking for me.  Oh.  This knowledge, of not only my naïveté, but my deep belief in my own sexual unattractiveness, made me cringe.  I continued on.  Oh.  I was headed somewhere, but I existed nowhere.  Oh.  I knew that what my unguarded glance had conveyed to the doorway prostitute was something pained.  Oh.  I limped on to wherever I was going.  The destination is long forgotten, but the troubled young person remains vivid.  This was, in fact, one of the most vital periods in my life.  Troubled or not...or even because.

On our last morning in London, Jane and I had decided to have one of those sturdy English breakfasts that can keep a person going for days.  Inversely, each of these meals probably takes years off a human life.  Particularly a older human life.  Never mind, we had yet to sit down to bangers, fried eggs, baked beans, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, that triumph of British cuisine.  But it was going to happen now.  We had gotten up early enough, bags packed, and now I was sitting on the wheelchair lift of Chandos House, Marylebone.  Inching upward from the basement level to the sunny London street above.  The place is really a club, not a hotel, and how this came to be my home away from home in this particular city is another and rather boring story.  Suffice it to say, Chandos House went up about the time of the American Revolution, and we can forgive it for having an ancient retrofitted lift for wheelchairs.  Besides, going up, the ride is only slow.  Going down, mildly terrifying.  On descent, I hang the front wheels of my chair right at the edge of a very steep drop, inching ever forward to make the thing fit aboard the lift platform.  Every inch closer to the point where the wheelchair and the occupant supposedly controlling it will roll right off, bouncing and plummeting a good 15 feet down some very ancient steps.  Never mind.  We are ascending now.  No, I lie.  We are stopping.  Why?  The young man operating the lift tries the usual remedies.  Raising and lowering the safety bars.  Trying to bring the platform back down to ground level.  Folding up the side rail.  None of this works.

And yet this is a glorious London morning.  Surely this thing will get fixed.  It has acted up before, been balky.  And Jane is waiting at the top.  She is cheering me on by her presence.  We are off to breakfast, nothing can stop us, and somehow we have done it.  Fit together the extremely complex pieces of wheelchair travel virtually the entire length of Britain...while fitting in family and friends, admittedly sometimes a tight fit...and on this glorious day we are headed off to the finest sort of British meal in Wimpole Street, two blocks away.

I suppose I should have grown alarmed when the Chandos House manager began offering us coffee.  This did, after all, suggest a rather long stay aboard the wheelchair lift, five feet off the ground.  He has made calls, he tells us.  An engineer is coming over from Wimpole Street headquarters.  Meanwhile, how do we like our coffee?  The answer is that we like it absent.  Not that I can speak for Jane in this matter.  She does have a cup of coffee, doubtless brewed expertly by the Italian manager.  My bladder is working on a different assumption, the notion that I'm not going to be here very long and soon using the modern loos in the Wimpole Street building.  I surreptitiously give my bladder a diagnostic poke.  Things do not look good.  The engineer is coming, the manager says.  I don't want to look at my watch.

Until I have to.  We have missed the breakfast hours at the Wimpole Street dining room.  We have not missed our plane, however, and for this we must be grateful.  Furthermore, these are my final moments in London.  I am surrounded by people, admittedly rather concerned ones, but they are Londoners nonetheless.  We are having a sort of unscheduled festival, all of us.  

Yes, at the heart of things, a growing number of people are showing signs of agitation over the American guest in the wheelchair who is stuck in the air and not moving.  Oddly, I like having everyone around.  I am leaving, after all, and what is there to do but enjoy this final sunny moment?  The engineer is an older man, which is to say about my age, and he is utterly unperturbed by the situation.  He has no real solution, that is the other thing.  The 'works' as they are termed in this nation, are built into the stone wall to my left.  Actually blocked by the lift, which has stalled in the worst conceivable place.  The Chandos House manager is actually getting a little too Italian by now, borderline operatic, such as his anxiety.  Will I be here forever?  No.  

I instruct several of the staff on how to help me stand up, stepping from the lift onto the steps it traverses...for this is an industrial version of one of those stairglide elevators.  Now I usher everyone away, Jane hands me a plastic urinal, having literally scaled the stone steps and wrought iron railing from below.  This completed, I lean on an arm, while my helpers lean the wrong way, such as the way of these things.  Soon I am at the top of the stairs, sit down in a chair and more or less direct the next stage.  I explain how the wheelchair can be disengaged from its brakes.  The engineer assembles five strong young Chandos House staff...a proud assemblage of Commonwealth and Eastern European participants...and incredibly my chair is lifted, rolled away to the internal elevator...then carried by the same five-man team down the front steps and deposited at my feet.

We are almost there, I tell myself as the Chandos House crew lifts one arm, then another, all to no effect.  I give them mild instructions.  The sun is bright, today is my last in this town, and whatever the moment, I am savoring it.  

'Sir, you are a gentleman.'  This from the junior engineer.  I am surprised at his remark, while quite flattered.  Hard to say exactly what it means, but this is praise.  Praise for not going ballistic or even getting anxious.  For handling everything with good humor...and in the final moments doling out tourist advice to the senior engineer who is bound for San Francisco next month.  The general attitude that, of course, Jane manifests more consistently.  And now we are teamed in gentlemanliness.  

Jane says that everything, the good spirits of the misadventure, the morning, our involuntarily early departure for the airport, has much to do with grace.  She explains the concept to me, and although I do not quite understand, I recognize that something is going on.  Even at the last moment, a cab appears from nowhere.  Chandos Street is nowhere, at least in a taxi sense.  Furthermore, particularly in high tourist season, London cabbies have a way of pretending not to see the passenger in the wheelchair.  Loading me is time consuming, what with the ramp that must be unfolded and the bulky wheelchair that must be guided inside...at least, that is the perception.  But this cab driver sees Jane, sees our bags, and even sees me.  He stops.  The curve is a little low, making his ramp a little steep.  Not to worry.  For Team Chandos has gathered on the sidewalk to see us off.  A couple of team members lift the front of my wheelchair, and I sail up the ramp.

Grace.  I shall think about it and try to better grasp the concept.  For now, I am thinking of the journey.  The long one, the one that brought me across Soho - to here.  Wherever 'here' is.  Too bad we missed our bangers.  English breakfast sausages are without equal.  Strange that we get them anyway, in the United Airlines club lounge.  Why are we here?  Because Jane amassed so many miles flying to and from her ailing father in the last year or so.  That and, for all I know, grace.