August 2011 Archives

With life reduced to few options, all of them pleasant, why not hit the deck?  At Inverness, our rented house is all deck, yet the deck is not all sun.  This is why God invented fog, not to mention trees, their combined impact making the deck experience somewhat elusive, at the very least, fleeting.  One can sit in the sun to read, but the sun itself will not sit still.  Ever moving, it is, ducking behind trees, sailing over the rooftop, the resulting pattern never fully grasped within the week.  Downright Proustian, the sort of speculation, utterly idle and decadent...and setting me up for, well, what was to come.  For now, it is lunchtime, and a hornet or yellow jacket or wasp...I cannot tell the difference...is divebombing our smoked salmon.  Angrily, I bat that the thing away.  It refuses be batted, of course, barely altering its flight pattern, getting more aggressive, while Jane is getting annoyed with me.  She wants me to settle down, I can tell.  I want the wasp to settle down.  And, worse, I am afraid that she has some benign talk-to-the-animals tactic in mind.  I am not entirely mistaken.  I watch as Jane takes a morsel of smoked salmon, places it on an empty saucer and...expects what?  Is the yellowjacket going to grab a fork and napkin?  No, but after a second or two, it does grab a salmon flake.  It even comes back for another, sawing away at the thing until the bit becomes small enough for air transport.  The hornet departs.  It does not come back.  One must give her credit, our Jane, she is good with species other than dogs and cats.

They are endless, these days, these Inverness days, except that they are ending.  And I am already starting to worry.  How did I get here?  It seems that I drove my car.  This is hardly credible, yet there it is, a memory of driving north on a succession of motorways, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, the longest drive I had had in...who knows?  Marlou and I did make it to Mendocino, long about 2007 or 2008?  Years ago, in short.  And now, homeward.  I don't like to think about it, I really don't.  And what I really don't like to think about is that...I don't like to think about it.  My reduced driving has become one of those jokes that isn't.  My reactions are slower, the physical challenge of holding my body in the right position has become more difficult.  And the concentration.  All in all, I would rather do something else.  Which is why my 1995 Ford Econoline van is approaching its 60,000 mile service point.  All its mechanisms appear more or less intact, but the Ford logo is falling off the back.  By the way, the thing is plastic.  Silvery plastic, but plastic.

In anticipation, the homeward journey already seems impossible.  In fact, now that it is beginning on this particular Friday, I am describing the immediate perils to Jane.  And actually, this is good.  It is very good, for this is what makes things possible these days.  Getting it off my chest.  The immediate challenge, negotiating the slanted roadway where I have parked my van, the pavement tilting one way, the wheelchair lift not tilting at all.  The result is that rolling from street to lift looks more or less impossible.  One end of the wheelchair's elevator platform is hanging four or five inches in the air, the road inclining in one direction, the van and its lift the other.  And yet, yet what?  Nothing, really, except that Jane and I are going at this together.  I do know that the weight of the wheelchair will help tilt the lift downward, so if one wheel can make it onto the steel...the rest should be possible.  I have done this before, Jane is holding the wheelchair from behind, so who cares if several hundred pounds of human and batteries and metal lean and yaw precariously?  

She does, it seems clear from her muted observation that my wheelchair is leaning rather heavily to one side.  And yet I know, know this chair and its propensities.  And now I know something else, that two people are not necessarily afraid of the same thing at the same time.  Which is fortunate and underlies teamwork.  And must be relied upon and exploited, this fact of human life.  And damned if I'm not telling Jane to lift, to pull up on the wheelchair's right side, one wheel climbing the slope, and now another and now more on the lift that off.  I gun it, pulling the maximum from the batteries.  The wheelchair slides under the safety bar, as it should, Jane starts the engine as a precaution...after all, I haven't driven this thing in a week...and I'm up, rising toward the van's interior.  We have launch.  Soon we will have lunch, that is the other thing, the Pine Cone Diner in the town of Point Reyes.  A pilgrimage of sorts.

Not that we are there, for we are still here.  And with Jane's help I am backing this Ford behemoth down the street.  It is so embarrassing, all of this.  I used to drive this truck, and that is what it is, with relative abandon.  Partly the problem is that I now use it so infrequently that even modestly challenging maneuvers like this one seem immense.  I could berate myself over this, and probably will, but for now Jane is saying okay, okay, okay, me checking and double checking whether her right is mine, the left-versus-right thing always challenging when moving in reverse.  Mercifully, there are no cars.  The van is so wide, the position of its wheels so indefinite, the parameters all so vague...hard to say how any of this is happening.  But it is, and now it has.  While I park, facing in the general direction of an oyster sandwich, Jane throws a few last things in the back of the van.  And I am off and she is off.  And the oysters, plucked from the very bay I circumnavigate on the way to the diner, well they are never even faintly off.  They dazzle with their freshness.  And after lunch, I try to do the same, but this is not possible.  Many miles to go.

We proceed in convoy.  I had wanted to drive over the hills, crossing via Lucas Valley Road, but was easily talked out of this.  It probably is a bit slower.  Less traffic, though, and it seems daunting, almost impossible, my driving this thing through the stop and start of congested roads.  But less time behind the wheel seems good.  And why are people flashing their headlights on me as I drive south along Nicasio Reservoir?  I pull over, ask Jane if people see something on the van that I don't.  No, she explains, it's motorists' way of explaining the presence of a Highway Patrol car a half mile behind.  I don't drive enough to know these things.  We continue on.

I have accomplished something else in pulling over to have a quick chat with Jane.  I have gotten myself out of fear mode.  For there was a moment, braking and turning right along the reservoir, when I simply did not feel in control of the car.  A very simple maneuver, right turns never particularly dangerous, but the centrifugal force, however mild, something, was making it hard to push the brake pedal.  Which for the short term tells me to slow down, the long-term take away being to get some advice in this matter...but not now.  Some reassuring interaction and I am heading over the ridge.  

In my mind, the downhill slope into the San Geronimo Valley is another steep, fear inducing trial.  Except that I am around the one curve and approaching the main highway before I know it.  Where the next long-anticipated moment arises, turning left on the busy street.  Except I do have eyes, I can see both ways, and what the hell, I am rolling toward Fairfax like everyone else.  Yes, I do slow people down a bit on the main hill leading to town, having slowed down myself.  It would be nice to pull over and let the backed up cars go by, but my elbow-operated turning signal can't quite manage the right flasher.  So I don't stop but carry on until traffic slows us all down.

The motorway, another experience, and slightly frightening at first, when one considers the speed, but no one does, that is the thing.  Everyone hurtles effortlessly.  This is California.  People have been legally enjoined to not use their mobile phones while barreling southward at 70 mph.  Doubtless half of the drivers ahead of me are changing music, looking at their fingernails, absently considering the view.  And then the final hill before the Golden Gate Bridge.  Which, I remember, always seems much more frightening going the other way.  Perhaps that's because southbound, much of the slope occurs in a tunnel.  That and the endlessly stunning sight of San Francisco Bay opening to my foggy left.  The Pacific's vapors wafting across the waters in their late-afternoon way, tendrils blowing toward Berkeley, others dissipating south, the same fog now rolling up the very Inverness canyon I have left.  Both a distraction and a reminder that I live in an area that is, more or less, paradise.

And 45 mph on the bridge, that is important, as is the six dollar toll, and from there, what is it but...routine?  The slow drive across San Francisco, 19th Ave. grinding its cars into obedient stoplight obeyers.  And then the other motorway, the one that actually leads to my home, which leads to my right shoulder feeling like it is going to fall off.  But at least my massage guy, my rolfer, has told me that not much can be done about this, given the way I sit behind the wheel.  But that I sit behind the wheel at all is a miracle.  I tell myself this for the last five miles or so, hanging on and hanging on until, parked against the homeplace oleanders, I turn the engine off.

Are the turkey vultures circling me or just, you know, circling? It is one of the pleasant oddities of living up the main canyon of Inverness, California, that one can actually look down on gliding buzzards. And glide they do, dipping and swooping over the green hillsides where bay laurels still give their convincing imitations of tufted broccoli spears. Sometimes the vultures slip by at tantalizingly close range, the red of their heads and flared effect of their wingtip feathers clear and prominent. True, I am not moving, at least not much, but at this stage my candidacy for buzzard food is probably weak. My wheelchair moves, not often, but enough.

And enough of this, whatever this is. Life and death always arise simultaneously in my mind. They are something to behold, these birds. And in late afternoon they alight in the redwoods by the deck. My friend Phila assures me that they do not nest there. Very well. I nest here. And that is the problem.

I knew something was odd on Tuesday. With guests expected that afternoon for lunch, we rose relatively early and hit the road. After all, this is Inverness, at the edge of one of the nation's great seashores. Dramatic cliffs, crashing surf, a small mountain range with stands of rare Bishop pines. And a strange peninsular geography, the landmass projecting into the cold Pacific like a sideways banana, various points curving into the sea. Who would miss such a thing? I could, it was clear once we were parked by the breakers at North Beach. Always stirring, the sounds of pounding waves. And there it was, the mass of fog moving like an army in formation toward its afternoon assault up Tomales Bay and every adjacent nook and cranny. Yep, this was the source of it, where the fog bank hung out during the day. And that mystery solved, I was happy to drive home. 'Home' being this rented redwood house, not our own, and shortly to revert to its real estate managers. Tomorrow.

Leaving me rather irritated and edgy today. What have I done this week? What has been accomplished here that could not have been accomplished somewhere else? And whatever happened here, what has made it so important that I am highly annoyed to see it end?

Evenings in this 90-year-old redwood house, sounds come alive. There are very few, and those that one hears acquire prominence. Jane asked me to turn off my humming laptop computer one evening for, it was true, the faint whine filled the woodpaneled living room. At night, even when we have had no guests, the upstairs sounds slightly haunted. Things wooden are on the move. The crack, they creak, they thud. I always awaken before dawn. The house is cold in late August. Every thirty minutes or so, as late-summer light creeps across the bedroom, a car drives down the hill. Morning rush hour in Inverness, California.

The fog. Then no fog. Then the book, the deck, the vultures, the broccoli treetops blowing in the coastal wind. Somewhere down the canyon normal life is occurring beneath a redwood forest canopy. Car doors slam. A dog barks. The outrageous whine of a chainsaw sends its blades into every living thing on two forested slopes. In the distance, the most tantalizing view of Tomales Bay. Infinitely blue, its green marshy islands vibrant, almost chartreuse. Everything lazy and effortless and sparkling. And I have been coming and going through these parts for something like 44 years. None of it can be improved, no one would dare try. And somehow such a green coastal idyll has become wildly expensive. And that is the thing. I want to move here. To live here? Would that not be madness? Would I not quickly tire of the remoteness, the time and automotive effort necessary to sit in a room where others are drinking cappuccino and reading newspapers? Not to mention the safety angle, for that has been at the background of everything this week. I have been alone here for stretches. And what if I had fallen or gotten stuck in some corner?

Of course, there is that other corner, the habitual. Which is why in the middle of the night, the last night, and the last hours of the last night...that it comes to me, wakes me and keeps me awake. How angry I am to be crippled. To have spent my life so restricted. While whoever did this to me has...walked away, quite literally. That being the reward of the lucky. Mine being the daily challenge of getting to my paralytic feet and walking, if that is the word, around the perimeter of this rented vacation house. And, although trying to hold my torso upright, the whole thing painful, not to mention exhausting, rounding the final corner of the perimeter terrace delighted to crash back onto the wheelchair, breathing rather heavily, returned to my rolling orthopedic home.

And so much lost, so many things never seen or done. And so much arduous work along the way, every day, every way. In 1968, the Berkeley police speculated that my shooter was the brother of a prominent Black Panther. I will never know. Nattily attired, my very phrase for his dress. He looked like a racetrack gent, done up in a rather tacky, unsophisticated way. Very out of place in North Berkeley. I was wearing a Pendleton shirt, de rigueur in those undergraduate days. I liked the shirt and asked about it after my shooting. A nurse explained that it had a hole in it. The hole in my life was not yet apparent, of course. The only thing prominent in those days after the shooting was terror, sleepless terror. The two accomplices, the ones who helped kick my apparently lifeless body under some Oleander bushes, wore bandannas on their heads. It was one of the styles of the day, certainly pre-Afro or, in the politics of that era, anti-Afro. As a friend then described it, 'those are the blacks who really hate themselves.'

I am not sure I have seen the same style of bandannas tied over heads among African-Americans since. Even then, it seemed old-fashioned, something I'm not sure I had ever seen. Before that night. They were from Richmond, perhaps Sacramento, the police speculated. And did they hate themselves? If so, I will not give them the favor of continuing this tradition. By loathing what I have failed to achieve or failed to manifest in this, my crippled life. As for the shooter and accomplices, I haven't forgotten the trio. I have put them through many tortures in my mind. Reasonably certain, although not quite certain enough, that fate had appropriately bad things in store for them. Meanwhile, a week in Inverness has returned me to my angry self. And another? Well, that is the thing. I shall return.

The Psychologist I Happen to Bump into on Mondays put it this way.  For me, lying sleepless in bed has a particular quality of physical helplessness.  An individual oddity of my disabled state, the physical merging with the psychoemotional in a way that is all mine.  Raising interesting questions about why on a recent night, having awakened at 2:40 in the morning and some gnawing anxiety vibrating on and on...that I go on and on supine in the bed.  For there is a known antidote, discussed before, which is to sit up.  Either perch on the edge of the bed, or actually get up and sit in the wheelchair, not to mention even roll about the apartment.  Yes, the psychologist has a point, that change of physical posture can make a big difference under such circumstances.  I regain a sense of physical, and thereby emotional, control.  Empowered, one could say.  Subtle, but sometimes that's all it takes.  Especially, all it takes to get back to sleep.

Except that I don't do this.  Instead, I stare at the ceiling and its patterns of light and dark, shifting and not shifting, the green glow from the Apple wireless connection to my stereo blinks occasionally.  I blink constantly.  Time passes.  I do not pass out of consciousness.  I do not want to sit up, for it takes too much effort.  Including the effort to acknowledge my panicky, sleepless state.  Although, with an hour down the great drain of time, there seems no other option.  Besides, Jane can give me a shove in the lower back region, which makes all the difference in terms of middle-of-the-night abdominal effort.  Which happens now, she pushing, me keeping my balance, until there I am.  Seated at bed's edge.  My legs dangling over the great cliff of life, viewing the expanse in the distance, all three feet of it from mattress to wall, wheelchair charger still glowing.  The latter is the excuse I now use.  No sense in unplugging the charger and rolling about the apartment with the wheelchair batteries still low.  So, what is there to do but sit and stare and wait?

Well, of course, there is another thread...and it stretches across my shoulders more like a rope.  It needs to be flung off, but this proves difficult.  For it is the force of...well, I would call it Jane's presence beside me on the bed...but this isn't quite right.  Initially, I tell myself that there is no sense in disturbing her.  Except that she is rather dead to the world.  Then, in a more refined version of the same thought, I tell myself that I don't want to give her the impression that she isn't comforting, or the impression that I am abandoning her, don't need her...all of which we have articulated.  This is old, this discussion.  And Jane has made it clear, if I need to get up, then get up.  No prob.  Leading me where?  Well, with better luck, it would lead me up and into my wheelchair, unplugging the silly charger and rolling into the sitting room for a change of nocturnal scene.  There to think and reflect and perhaps remember that life is good, and sleep is good, and tomorrow and tomorrow, even they are good.

Unfortunately, this does not happen.  Instead, I convince myself that the wheelchair is best left charging, that a few minutes of perching here has restored my equilibrium or personal sense of control.  When actually, the path to control means getting up, muttering a warm and reassuring word or two to Jane, then motoring into the front room, staring at the street light coming through the Venetian blinds...and separating.  For I can see it now, and could almost see it then, and hard as it is to admit, there are some benefits to age and, dare one say it, maturity.  For there is some emotional truth, puzzling but graspable, about being on one's own at certain moments.  That Jane is enormously supportive, the essence of security...and yet there are times when I need to reassure myself that...this is my life, this is me, and here I am, and everything isn't dangerous.  Even on my own, everything isn't dangerous.  Not that I am precisely on my own, Jane being reassuringly only a few meters away.

Instead, I do eventually fall back into a couple of hours of fitful sleep.  Jane goes to her work, leaving me to mine, the hard sweaty labor, repetitive and futile, that is my exercycle.  I am listening to Radio 4 accounts of the London riots or disturbances or, as my cousin Caroline puts it, 'shopping with violence.'  I am listening to my heart rate, if such a thing is possible.  I am wondering why this activity has become so monstrously difficult, as though I am truly pedaling up the greatest hill on the Peninsula.  On and on it goes, and this can't be possible, except that fatigue can do this sort of thing to a human body.  

Not that Perry, my physiotherapy assistant, cannot do even worse things.  My hips are tight, he says, once I am supine on the massage table.  And this time I actually am helpless.  Hamstrings are tight, he tells me.  Quadriceps also need stretching.  On and on this goes.  Like the exercycle that precedes it, this is a familiar experience, now rendered unimaginably more difficult by...I don't know.  Tiredness, it seems.  Unfortunately, for I have many miles to go before I...use my computer again.  My laptop, that is, and it will be an essential companion on my week in Inverness, shortly to begin.  Better get the sucker repaired.

And because I am running on automatic, and the computer is barely running at all, I get my van running.  That is to say, Perry starts the thing for me, then I ascend in the lift.  Normally, this works the other way around, but this day is not normal.  More to the point, the van and its driving are not normal.  Long periods of time go by without turning the ignition.  For example, 10 days.  I don't know why.  Volunteer Paul and I drove the thing to the Salvation Army recently, dropping off years of junk that had been sitting in the back.  But that was...more than a week ago.  And I have a history of trying to start the van and encountering a dead battery.  So, better to get the engine running first.  And now I am off and heading for Redwood City, regional computer repair capital, not to mention county seat.  The day seems excessively bright.  I am excessively dull.  Best to keep one's eyes on the traffic.  Lest an unfortunate automotive interaction further compress what's left of my spinal cord.  I know Redwood City.  Know it like the back of my hand.  Not that I know my own hand very well these days, skin wrinkling, veins varicosing.  Where was I?

Parking in the only spot I can think of, the Redwood City Caltrain station.  For isn't the computer repair place just across the street?  No, apparently it is another street away, and I just rang the repair guy to say I would be there before noon.  And I have barely get myself here before noon.  And now I am rattling my way, belatedly, towards his shop.  And now I am missing the traffic light, though not quite missing, more fearing.  Fearing to barge out into traffic with the pedestrian walk signal only flashing.  Not that this is really a bad thing, a small note of caution never amiss when a quadriplegic is rolling about the landscape.  

And sure enough, the shop is locked.  I ring the number just in case, and the repair man answers, telling me that, yes, he can hear the bell ringing, and he is on another call, and would I mind terribly....  Fuck him, I tell myself.  He unlocks the door, and we transact business on the sidewalk.  Naturally, his shop is inaccessible.  And something about this situation leaves me feeling overpowered...and if I had the time and psychological wherewithal, I could probably connect the dots between this feeling and the one I had in the middle of the night.  Instead, I simply roll away.  Everything is difficult, slow and heavy.  Fear is everywhere.  I feel fragile.  I also feel achy, Perry having shredded several major muscle groups in his effort to restore my joints' range of motion.  My range of emotion having narrowed into the dark and helpless end of the spectrum.  

Lunch.  It is time for lunch, and there's this place near the station, which I recall warmly.  And warm recollections smack of comfort food.  Not that food is really ever a comfort.  Comfort is a comfort.  But right now, at this moment, I will take anything I can get.  And I take chicken flautas, but mostly I take the hostess.  She is warm, motherly, and I take her in, as well as her food.  I am the sole customer in Restaurant La Fiesta.  It is the lunch hour, in the center of Redwood City, across from a rather busy commuter railway station.  It's me and the proprietor and the flautas.  Fortunately the latter are quite good.  I remember now.  These things are handmade, clearly fashioned for the lone customer.  I do need to pee, however.  The toilet in this place is known to be wildly inaccessible.  Good thing there is a Peet's by the railway station, and by the way, a small cappuccino wouldn't go amiss.

Still, my soul is heavy, the anxiety pervasive.  And at Peet's as I am about to roll out the door, cappuccino behind me, the barista asks me if I would like the wheelchair-accessible table.  I thank her profusely.  Truly, it is the thought that counts.  We are not alone.  Although one wouldn't know it from my last-minute call to the computer guy.  I just have to ask him if the problem is apparent.  Actually, no, he tells me, and he's on another call....  And I am on my way.  Home.  And not only home, but into the local Shell station.  When did I last fuel this van?  Definitely since the Bush Administration.  The second one, that is.  The Egyptian guy who served me the last time...whenever the last time was...does a magnificent job of serving me again.  I wave at him through the plate glass of the station's office, he wanders out and, no, there's no need to move the van.  Just stay where I am.  He can reach me with the hose.  This is good.  Today, somehow, movement is proving very difficult.

Ordering at Peet's, I change my mind at the last minute, opting for an espresso con panna to go.  Oh, I do hang about long enough to get a quick sense of the nation's decline, wondering how Paul Krugman can stand to write about this stuff day after day.  Then I am off, or back, to be more precise.  Back home, back to work, back against the wall.  For truth to tell, I have been in some state of fear.  Better than in the state of Texas, I must admit, where the prayer-mongering governor is gathering in the campaign dollars for one nation under Christ...but never mind, for I am already tired of the news, even after two minutes of it.  Which is doubtless the intended effect. 

Never mind, for I am already rolling homework.  And against obvious and better judgment, rolling right over some dead shrubbery branch right in the middle of the footpath.  Which, based on abundant experience, gets caught up in my Swedish wheels.  I am now proceeding east on Live Oak Avenue, the woody rasp of branches crackling under my tires, happily scraping over the asphalt, each little twig zinging like a tuning fork.  At which point I stop, flare into a moment of self denunciation, then begin backing up.  This maneuver is guaranteed to dislodge almost anything that wedges itself between wheel and plastic fender.  Well, not quite guaranteed, but tending in the correct direction.  Which isn't true either, when one considers that traffic on this side of the street is heading in one direction, east, whereas I am backing west.  Worse, I am backing with no mirror to provide a rear view.  And while this is indicative of my exasperation, as well as expressive, it is also mildly suicidal.  Which does occur to me.  And in this I see progress.  For fear has me in its grip these days.  And in this moment of foolish street backing, driven by the most minor of matters...a twig against a tire...I can see how undermining anxiety can be.  I roll my wheelchair closer to the curb, knock the sticks lose, and carry on, wondering at the next focus of my worry.

This generalized fear has been with me for days.  Its source is unclear and elusive.  But one thing about a pervasive shakiness of the emotional foundations - everything is up for grabs.  True, nothing seems quite as it was.  As it should be?  Well, that is up for grabs too.  Take Henry IV, Part One, where everyone was converging on Shrewsbury as recently as Thursday evening, the Santa Cruz Coast in the distance...and me in this fearful and distracted state as I have been for some days.  Not that I couldn't manage to project myself into the action.  Yes, Hotspur is a sort of Tea Party warrior, egomaniacal and out of touch with the big picture.  But would I want to kill him?  And more to the point, would I want to do battle with the rebels?  Would I see the point, let alone have the courage?  No, I keep looking around the stage, wondering how I would hide.

And because there is a pervasive sense of...well, everything...I realize something obvious.  It's a general feeling, one I had earlier, during dinner on a steep slope at the University of California campus where Santa Cruz' summer Shakespeare fest takes place.  The folding chair was slipping and sliding in the uneven terrain, with Jane occasionally grabbing the thing.  I was less concerned, but then I seem to have bigger anxiety fish to fry.  But it is, and was, tenuous to be half-paralyzed and wandering about unknown hillsides in a wheelchair borrowed from repair people.  Pervasive is the word.

The thing about Henry IV, Part One is that it sets the stage for Medicare, Parts A, B, C and so on.  Why does one need to set the stage?  Don't ask.  You know.  This is what happens to people who cling to this earthly coil for a sufficient period of time.  And because all assessments are up for grabs, it is occurring to me, really it is, that this matter of survival is actually a sort of achievement.  And also that I really do think Hotspur is an asshole.  Not that Hal himself isn't insufferable.  But I digress.  Never mind.  The point is that if I found myself half-paralyzed and in and around the Battle of Shrewsbury, it would indeed be wise, perhaps even courageous, to hide in the nearest culvert.  Or whatever preceded culverts.  There simply would not be that many opportunities for stationary, one-handed quadriplegic derring-do on that battleground or any other.  Fantasies notwithstanding.

And that is the thing about life with a severe disability.  Everything has to get redefined, reevaluated and reinterpreted.  Courage in battle?  The quadriplegic's battles are everywhere and mundane and invisible to passersby.  The sum total of surviving, not losing nerve, just keeping at what physiotherapists term ADL, activities of daily living.  It's a very different battleground.  It has its own interwoven narrative, Medicare IV, Part Henry A & B.  And with the end of my own personal play getting nearer every day, it seems important to credit oneself with small heroics.  Leave the big ones for the stage.

And there is a certain perspective, a narrative one might say, that seems wholly born of disability or loss or both.  Actually, early injury mixed with a few years in Britain.  Our nation's sense of its own power needs to shift.  We need to let go of claiming to be first and best and biggest.  We aren't anymore, in so many ways, and it's okay, it really is.  We can be strong in ways that matter, share our strength, cooperate.  All of which seems obvious to me on a personal level.  In my saner, older moments, I understand that scoring a major success in the career world...which eluded me...well, fuck it.  Just being in the career world took an awful lot.  Too much, at times.  It wasn't a matter of scoring goals.  Being in the game at all, that was an achievement.  Humanity could be defined, in part, as acknowledging how far we have come.  A quality that like so many others, begins at home.

When I wander out there now, it is with the seasoned and settled eye of a grandparent detachably amused by his own offspring and pleased at their progeny.  The garden, of course.  I seem to be largely on top of matters there and oddly accepting of botanical disappointments.  Naturally, one is drawn to the latter.  The brussels sprouts are hanging on like the Russian army bivouaced for the winter.  Which is what a snow-loving organism does when the morning air has acquired a Tennessee Williams languor.  I know it's all wrong.  So what?  Why not hang on until the cooler autumn?  What's to lose?  I do lose track of the aphids, that much is true.  They are vile, truly bloodsucking and their place in the ecosystem seems assured.  Forever.  The mystery of the red cabbage, which isn't cabbage, only thickens.  I am winding up this mystery.  Shoving things toward their dénouement.  Paul, Tuesday helper, pulls non-cabbage up on a regular basis.  They have produced nothing, these drains on the agricultural community, and I will shortly have their benefits cut off.  Compost time, my lovelies.  And by the way, fuck you.

Bringing us to the good news, in terms of agronomy.  One can barely sight the tops of the tomato plants.  They have reached a higher level and are now communicating with beings beyond the outer solar system.  Which keep encouraging them to flower, bear fruit and extend their green joyous hands skyward.  On and on.  Hard to say what to do now, the eight-foot stakes supporting them now being at their limit.  Yes, one can go high-rise, but only so far.  Think of the earthquake risk.  Above all, think of the harvest.  There are globs and globs of big green tomatoes, one of them now shifting gear into the yellow spectrum, soon orange, and you know the rest.  And, as I say, I largely observe.  As with all grown children, my interventions are few.  True, the lettuce recently needed rescue.  Rather surprising, considering their two weeks in the ground, very much post-transplanting.  But there are lessons in all of this.  The laziness and indulgence of youth clearly visible in the lack of botanical effort, particularly in the root department.  Keeling over at the slightest breath of mid-70s warmth in a late afternoon breeze.  Necessity not quite having gotten there, the knot of roots grown entangled in the plastic sixpack clearly sufficient until the lettuce leaves reach a certain critical mass.  Until which they coast.  And, if one is honest, don't we all?

One grows, one learns, and after a few seasons the harvest comes in full and intact.  My neighbor's little girls seem to have no grasp of vegetables, at least how they grow.  Which means that when they are around, we have a go at a few onions and garlic.  As each bulb emerges, there are oohs and ahs, followed by a fight as to who gets the next one.  Never mind, for there are plenty to go around.  And I know how to do this.  I didn't as recently as last year.  When the tops of garlic die down, turgid green stalks losing their tumescence, withering into straw...well, watch out.  Let them wither too much and there is no trace left of the garlic.  Try to pull on them, and there is a good chance they will break, also cutting the farmer off from his crop.  Unless one does what I am doing now, levering the underground and unseen bulb up and free with a trowel, while a little girl pulls.  And there it is, satisfyingly big and coated in earth and dangling off its stem.  See, kids, this is where food comes from.  Folks like me, doing stuff like this in a planter like that.  Satisfying.  But no longer particularly demanding.

Actually, there was a time when I was farming on a large scale, at least from a quadriplegic perspective.  I was a homeowner, if one takes into account indebtedness to one's in-laws and a soon-to-be-corrupt mortgage company.  Never mind, for my contractor father-in-law built some rather impressive beds in our backyard.  It didn't occur to me to elevate them.  It also didn't occur to me that within a few years I would actually be in a wheelchair.  The wheel of fortune cranking up for some massive turns.  Never mind.  

The harvests astounded me.  Corn, in one particularly warm year.  Tomatoes quite reliably.  I would hobble out through the screen door, cross the terrace and make my way to the crop zone.  Everything needed water, of course.  I stood there with a hose for hours.  In between watering, assuming that all the planting was behind me, there was weeding.  With four beds, this was a Sisyphean task, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, begun, completed, then begun again.  When leg fatigue began to take over, I sat down on a three-wheeled garden scooter.  It had the maneuverability and the instability of a tricycle.  At least once, I fell off the thing, rolling a few inches onto the sandy path between beds.  My neighbor Bob was there in seconds, barely interrupting his own lawn watering to get me back on my agricultural feet.

Did the wife participate in this experience?  Yes, she must have.  Unfortunately, what remains in my memory is the later years when she was largely absent.  She had a horse several miles away.  I had a garden several feet away.  And even if the beds were too low for my deteriorating neurology, they were low enough for my spirits.  Depression, psychic reenactment of mother abandonment, what else is a first marriage for?

I did learn how to garden.  More to the point, I learned how to learn.  The whole thing is charged with mystery.  I know the world is full of politically-correct twaddle about how one should compost everything and eat nothing but organic rutabagas.  But in this particular year, almost 20 years since my first wife announced our divorce, damned if I'm not rich into the later lessons of organic home gardening.  The little plastic barrel on rollers that claims to be a compost tumbler and is no bigger than the smallest beer keg, well into its maw has gone virtually a year's garbage.  Virtually nothing goes down the sink disposal, these days.  Why bother, with everything happily decomposing in the silly tumbler?  And if I seem to digress, you will understand that the compost tumbler gets regularly emptied into a hole dug in the raised beds.  That is to say, several hundred teabags, coffee filters, endless peels and roots and wilted and forgotten refrigerator greenery, all reduced to this compact and odoriferous mass.  Compact, but far too heavy for me to carry.  Which is why God invented my helper Paul, who disposes of the unpleasant stuff a few times a year.  And this same stuff can be the only explanation for the profusion of tomatoes, the vines sailing ever upward.  What's a guy to do but watch and marvel?  What is going on underground?  Hard to say, but I have yet to see a teabag emerge when the soil gets pitchforked in the spring.

In short, failed marriage and gardening have given me a healthy respect for decomposition.  Things need to fester and rot.  Underground processes defy both scrutiny and explanation, and somehow they sustain life.  And speaking of life, strange how late in the experience, one gets the hang of things.  While simultaneously learning not to hang on.  I did everything in my suburban, marital garden.  Somehow I even pitchforked the cover crop under in the spring.  A major act of leverage, the application of body weight, and endless patience.  Surely I tied up the tomatoes myself.  It all had to be done, I did it, and consciousness be damned....

It took seven years to get over the first marriage, if I think about it.  And I am.  Seven years being the traditional view of life's phases and cycles.  At the time, I wasn't thinking about phases.  I had reached the end of some road.  Rejected and dejected.  Bankrupt spiritually and soon financially.  In short, I was headed down, down to where things rot and wet dripping teabags disappear forever.  If anything comes of all this, well, it is a sort of miracle.  It's enough to make one stare at 10 feet of tomato plants in disbelief.

John Chiang and I have been exchanging letters.  He sending me one, me sending one to him, then back, then forth, and what does it all mean?  It means that deep beneath the fiscal dysfunctions of a waning empire in its self-devouring stage, there are miniscule events, blockages in the capillaries of the body politic.  Which is why John feels obliged in his guise as Controller of the State of California to send me a tax bill for $14.81.  Which I duly pay online.  After which John is kind enough to send me a refund for...you guessed it...$14.81.  No one can say money isn't circulating in the economy.  John and I are certainly doing our bit.  And it's good to know that there is someone with the job title of controller.  Important to be in control.  

Sylvain Chomet appears utterly in control of 'The Illusionist,' which follows his incomparable 'The Triplets of Belleville.'  Hand-drawn animation, remarkable encapsulations of styles and eras, European sensibilities...in this case, several...all rendered in a story that seems uncharacteristically rich and poignant for a cartoon.  Uncomfortably poignant, if you are me.  And perhaps it's better if you aren't, at least that's how it seems today.  For days later, at 3:45 this very morning, it came back to haunt me, 'The Illusionist.'  Not that it didn't haunt me at the time.  And that's the thing about haunting, you can run, but you can't hide.  And in fact, you can't even run very long or far.

Relying on a bare minimum of dialogue, 'The Illusionist' could not tell a simpler story.  There isn't much to it.  A French stage magician used to performing in what was left of variety shows in the late 1950s finds work harder and harder to come by.  He tries Britain, hoping for an occasional job in the twilight of the music hall.  A drunken Scot imports him to a West Highlands herring port to amuse the pub locals.  Then the illusionist departs to seek work in Edinburgh...with a char girl trailing after him, convinced that he can really make rabbits, flowers and God knows what else appear in a hat.  It ends sadly.  It begins sadly.  It progresses sadly.  Which may explain why throughout its 80+ minutes, I kept looking at my watch.  Unbearably sad, would be a better description.

And not, let me make it clear, unbearably boring.  Far from it.  For there are so many qualities to this vaudeville-type magic guy.  His formality.  His European mix of the self-contained and the socially aware.  An ineffable courage, particularly as he finds himself in one railway carriage after the next, en route to nowhere in particular.  Just life and it's inexplicable fortune and misfortune shunting him backward and forward.  Quite the antithesis of the American progress paradigm, which variously suckers and repels us, but nonetheless underlies our narratives.  No, most of the film is occupied with Edinburgh.  A place where chances and opportunities were sewn up long ago, though new times do bring an occasional new job, the firth and the Highlands compressing everything in the most tight and picturesque of ways.  Until the magic-struck girl finds a boyfriend and the middle-aged performer finds himself broke and on another train.

Even in the earliest scenes, the old performer presenting his stage tricks to ever emptier houses, the sadness seemed overwhelming.  He is too far gone in life.  His wares no longer needed.   No competition for showgirls with tits and tutus.  Teddy boy bands and howling teenage girls.  He can't keep up with this, and he doesn't even try, just keeps looking for some place he can perform.  And so what?  Why does this have such searing effects on me?

Something about loss.  Life's essential twilight experience.  Or maybe my own perennial theme.  Rejection.  The performer's nightly request for attention...spurned.  Unwanted.  And still trying.  Leading to new places, new fresh starts.  And more losses.  This aspect of 'The Illusionist,' and it is only an aspect, so skewed my impressions of the film, that I may have lost, or only partly absorbed, the rest.  Making the main line of plot development seem subordinate.  Though it's well worth considering now, the stage magician and the young girl following him to Edinburgh.  What makes him buy her things at great expense and pretend that he has conjured them?  The girl is young and credulous.  And he?  Perhaps he has finally found an audience.  And if this is so, another level of poignancy comes oozing out of the screen.  For she cannot appreciate his illusions, believing them to be the real thing.  Which he may want to believe himself.  But no, he just seems to want a bit of...applause.  Good thing we have the tragicomic sensibility of Jacques Tati's script or else we might dismiss these two as codependent.

Near the end our illusionist is stripped of every possible illusion, not that he had many to begin with.  He sets his white rabbit free.  Now that she is mated, he sets the girl free to be with her boyfriend.  And what is his final note for?  Who is it addressing, him or the girl?  There is no magic, he writes.  And in this tale in which survival dominates, and human generosity, even when reciprocal, brings no lasting buoyancy to the spirit...there certainly is no magic.  Even though the film itself is utterly magical.  In its design, in its conceit, in its ur-fabular storytelling.

All of which leaves me watching the clock, wondering when this excruciating story, for all its beauty, will end.  Which slightly surprises me.  I thought I had more of a stomach for sad.  More acceptance of loss.  Except that I have watched with more than interest as a friend has gone about working with a nonprofit that anticipates, and tries to avert, suicides.  He has been tracking a man, a guy on the edge of homelessness, who says he wants to end it all.  And who also says he wants to be left alone.  Should one honor this request?  Or err, possibly, on the side of relentlessly pursuing the man, leaving messages, even bugging him with the simple fact that someone does care.  That no matter how much he shoves people away, people remain.  No one gives up on him, even if he gives up on them.  But my focus is on the volunteer, my friend.  He has invested a lot in trying to save this man.  He may fail.  Just as human connections can, and do fail, despite our best hopes and efforts.  Divorce.  Death.  Loss.  Ties get severed, and something in me has never accepted this.  One of the worst, most brutal, and certainly most recent severings having occurred in my own bedroom, the deathbed of my wife.  They say it takes years to get over such a thing.   Patience I must tell myself.  Give it a few years, then try 'The Illusionist' again.

It rolls around every year about this time, the annual men's conference I attend in the upper Midwest, and the only real difference is this sort of preview, lunch with one of the likely attendees currently in town with his wife.  I should have known that on this August day the San Francisco skies would be dark, fog swirling...in a normal city giving every indication of rain.  But of course, not here.  The only danger comes from the parking brigade sweeping the streets around South Park, uncomfortably close to the Giants game about to get underway.  Move your car, I urge my friend, the parking vultures are swarming.  Oddly, one of the realities I escape by my penchant for wheelchairs and mass transit.  Fortunately, the packed café in South Park is emptying as the nearby Giants Stadium fills.  I go for a gallette, dark brown and suggesting a high buckwheat content.  It tastes fine.  I am not really here for the food, but for the company.  

My friend has doubts about this year's conference, though.  His concerns seem misplaced.  But concern itself is never misplaced, it occurs to me, as I bite into a shrimp.  Thing is, concern kind of wanders around like a horse in a paddock.  There seem to be moments when you can harness the thing and let concern drag you in a useful direction.  Other times when it just needs to wander around, munching hay.  All you can do is stay alert and grab the thing when it moves.  Acknowledging that concern, or what one cares about, can be good or bad, but is mostly indifferent.

My friend has a point.  It's hard to say what will happen at this conference.  Some years are good.  Some less good.  I listen to his concerns about this year's and decide to err on the side of optimism.  Much of what dominates the news tips me toward despair and helplessness...so it is salutary to hold onto the hope that something good can be gained from a conference devoted to...this year's theme...veterans.  After all, historically, I can be said to be part of the problem.  The latter being vast and bipartisan and way beyond politics, in any case.  And yet not.  I hated them, the proudly patriotic young men of my generation going off to fight the Commies in Vietnam.  They seemed morally superior, duped, instruments of the empire.  And they hated me, and I hated them, and now all that's left is some ruined lives, mostly theirs, and it must be admitted, partly mine.  My disability providing an accidental link to another experience of, well, disability.  My real challenge of a conference being to say something like this.  To stand up in front of a group...and I generally do stand at such moments...and expose myself, say what I have to say, vulnerable and flawed.  The latter seems to be an enduring challenge.  This is something worth anticipating.  The challenge of speaking up, speaking out.  That's my concern as I polish off the last of the spinach salad.  And why not?  One of those moments when concern is well and wisely put to use.

As for the rest of the time...do I dare to eat a peach?  What about the peaches Jane just bought, what if I forget to eat one of them...and it goes rotten?  How rotten will I be?  How much self-recrimination will accompany this event?  What about my fear of walking around the apartment?  Is it really that dangerous?  Which, I am happy to report, even as we speak...or as we write...translates into standing up and crutching to and from the bedroom.  Not a vast distance, but enough to make an orthopedic difference.  Without even calling Jane.  Certainly an option, but on this occasion, no.  Up and at 'em, as it were.

For this is the thing, the walls can close in, things becoming impossible when they are only difficult.  With a disability, it is as though one becomes elderly in an instant.  The loss of movement, freedom, self-image all feel so catastrophic that the inevitable extra layer of senescence seems an utter outrage.  Worse, it seems a mistake.  After all, exercise and general willpower have pushed the mobility envelope in the past...and surely this trick can be repeated forever.  Surely.

The fear of falling.  Of falling and not being able to get up.  Or reach a telephone.  Yes, this has been plaguing me for years, and not without some reason.  But only some.  One has to take a chance.  One even has to fall.  Off the rowing machine, for example, only a couple of weeks ago.  It's not the falling but the fear of falling, of course, that can put a distinctive crimp in one's style.

There are other fears of falling.  Such as falling into a rage.  Okay, maybe a quiet version, but on your average introvert, the effects are less visible, but just as dire.  Take dinner.  And rather a healthy one, if I do say so myself.  Involving as it did, hummus and tomatoes.  And damned if opening the silly cellophane package from Trader Joe's, one plump and beautifully spherical hydroponic tomato didn't bound to the linoleum.  Where it rolled.  Straight across the kitchen floor, and only a matter of inches, to a spot under the deeply recessed wooden island next to the stove.  Lodging in the most inaccessible spot one could imagine.  And one could imagine forgetting the whole thing, but tomatoes have a way of remembering.  Remembering that they are part of the general mortal coil, and move inexorably from ripe to more ripe and on to rotten.  A progression that was bound to happen should the tomato go untended.  Which was simply not viable.  Yes, someone else might have reached under the overhanging baseboard to retrieve the little fucker, but this would only occur if I remembered.  Which in view of my advancing age, is not very likely.  So, it was now or never.  And now was most fraught.

Mentally I went through various options.  Nothing had a handle long enough except a broom.  And I didn't see how I could control such an implement in such a tight space.  So what was there but the giant tongs?  Hard to say what they are actually for, but they sit next to the cooker, nestling with other kitchen gear.  I slid them once under the cabinet, failed.  Backed away to get a better perspective on the tomato, its dark outline barely visible.  Then I had another go.  This time, sliding the open tongs with my foot, trying to knock the metal jaws into place...until the little Dutch fucker rolled into a more visible spot.  From there, it was back and forth, back and forth, until I finally got it within grabbing range.

Quadriplegia is full of this sort of thing.  Which presents a constant challenge.  If I am in a state of robust mental health, my anger gets directed at something external and safe.  Pounding on the cushioned sofa, might be more or less optimal.  If I am anywhere south of well balanced, my exasperation heads inward.  Why do I do these things?  A familiar lament.  Closely related to...why do these things happen to me?  Which, after all the nasty neuropeptides settle down, if I am very lucky, culminates in...how resourceful one can be?  Particularly when there is no choice.  Tongs.  Forceps.  I could probably deliver a baby one-handed, if push came to shove.  It hasn't.  But almost everything else in my life has, so stay tuned.

'The first windstorm, and they blow right over.  It's like the roots are in nothing.  Just made up, artificial landscape.'  This from Bruce, fellow first-year university student, speaking of the effects of desert breezes on recently planted saplings at the University of California, Riverside.  He had a point, and I knew what he meant, but something in his rancor struck me personally.  It may have been artificial, Southern California, but it was home.  We were either walking somewhere, or Bruce had been walking somewhere.  But I must have seen the same thing, more or less, young trees fresh from the nursery, blown over.  Bruce, a graduate of Berkeley High, found Riverside unpleasantly new, insubstantial and deserving of the earliest possible exit.  Still, there was a war on.  There was a draft.  One had to be careful about exit strategies.  One had to be careful period.

Within a year and a half I would come around to Bruce's point of view, at least regarding an exit from Riverside to Berkeley.  But not now.  For the time being I was making friends.  Making women was constantly on my mind, but how to achieve this eluded me.  I wanted to be liked, included, a friend.  I wanted to keep up with courses enough not to be drafted.  It did not matter all that much what I studied.  This was people time.

Bruce shouldn't have wasted his breath on the campus landscapers' foolish choice of trees.  Just check out the residence halls.  Was mine called Aberdeen Hall?  That seems right.  I know that the women were housed in Lothian Hall, or some of them.  Why the Scottish names?  Actually, the question barely occurred to me.  The campus motif, invented by someone or other, was 'the Highlands.'  The sports teams, perhaps just the football team, was 'the Highlanders.'  I had neither traveled enough, nor cared enough, to put two and two together and consider that the Upper Sonoran transition zone occupied by the campus was a hell of a long way from the Firth of Forth.  The annual rainfall was probably not much more than 10 or 12 inches.

Not only was the natural landscape brown and baked, but its features bore authentic desert names.  Box Springs Mountain comprised the actual 'highlands' that loomed above the campus and tilted its acreage gently upward.  I have no idea how the name arose.  The mountain in no way resembled a box spring.  More likely, someone dumped a box spring on one of its slopes.  Could there have been a natural spring, water oozing out of something box shaped?  Actually, there was.  Teamsters found some watering hole up there, put a wooden box around the thing, and so named the mountain.  But this is today's information from the web.  Then, the mountain and its name both seemed irrelevant.  Which in retrospect is too bad.  Anything that is more than 3000 feet high deserves respect.  I probably dismissed it for the 'Big C' on the campus side of the mountain below the summit, ugly University-of-California braggadocio.  Ah, the intolerance of callow youth.

It was actually quite pleasant to be out of my father's house and living with students.  But the university was an institution, and so deserved a certain dose of contempt.  Not to mention rebellion.  This took infinite forms.  Bob, one of my dorm buddies, had a dramatic way of sneezing and feigning surprise as he opened his hand to reveal a mass of the nightly green Jell-O.  I found a way of tormenting the Resident Assistant assigned to my floor, mostly through attitude.  It didn't take much to annoy him.  Laughing at the wrong things.  Being too cynical, a penchant often communicated by the way I rolled my eyes during the occasional floor meeting.  Late adolescent impatience with rules and orderliness, this wasn't much of a rebellion, but for now, it was all I could muster.

My residence halls, whatever they were called, funneled occupants through a lobby, then sent them up opposite hallways.  Here, on opposite sides of the split, is where the residents lived.  The latter were middle-aged, gray-haired women.  Each had an apartment.  In the evenings, the resident for my dormitory block often had her door open.  She sat watching television, never looking terribly involved, tacitly suggesting that one might enter and join her.  The residents could occasionally be glimpsed in the cafeteria, maneuvering trays, sitting together at the same table.  Were there two of them or four?  I think four.  Their function was unclear.  But in retrospect it was more than that.  It was half intriguing, half disturbing.

I gave it a wide berth, the open door where the little old lady sat before her television as students wandered to and from their rooms.  Even saying hello smacked of...well, it was hard to say.  Kissing up to old women?  Hanging out with grandmothers?  I was 18 years old, after all, and striving for cool.  I mean by the end of my first year I was actually smoking dope.  And how cool was that?  Old ladies, my God.  They had been planted there much like the trees from another ecosystem.  Nothing to do but breeze by and mentally puzzle over the phenomenon of old women supposedly overseeing hundreds of undergraduate guys.  If that was what they did.  What did they do?  I mean, you could see them, sometimes laden with a vast keyring, wandering to and from the front desk.  In fact, they were sometimes behind the lobby's front desk, not really servicing the counter, but doing some sort of work in the background.  Whatever.

The Riverside campus was miles from the town.  And the town was miles from anything very interesting.  Aside from a couple of cinemas, the town of Riverside offered very little to students.  So life focused on the campus and events around it.  And sometimes that focus got blurred.  Which is to say, there wasn't always much to do.  I recall wandering home one night from hanging out at The Barn, an older woodsy building which has cousins at other western campuses.  This particular barn serving as a hamburger source during the day, an attempted coffee house in the evenings.  The quasi-bohemian guitar strummings were the object of much eye rolling among my crowd.  Still, The Barn wasn't to be denounced too strenuously in view of the alternatives.  Of which there were none.  And on one particular night I even found the place closed.  My friends were...where?  Was there a party I didn't know about?  Something in one of the off-campus neighborhoods?  I set out across the campus, heading back to the only logical destination.  My dorm room.  The circular drive in front of the residence halls beckoned like a hotel, bright lights, cars coming and going.  It all seemed sad.

So did the graduate student manning the front desk.  He was reading and receptioning at the same time.  The sign with movable plastic letters now and then announcing a change in mealtimes or a plumbing repair...was blank.  There was no news.  There was no reason to linger.  I headed up the hallway and saw the usual tableau, the old woman-resident with her door open watching television.  'Hello,' she said, 'would you like to come in?'

What had I done?  Stared her way a little too long.  And now I was stuck, wandering in across her threshold to an empty chair, beside her in a small living room.  Revealing that the patio area I had noticed between the residence blocks was hers.  The layout of everything being clearer, but my presence even more uncomfortable.  I sat down.  She was watching Lawrence Welk.  Wonderful, wonderful.  She smiled at me.  The idea, apparently well practiced, was that she was watching TV, yet she wasn't.  Would I like a sweet?  She handed me a bowl.  I took a chocolate.  I thanked her.  What on earth was I doing here?  Why wasn't I out shtupping women?  Maybe I was really meant to be here, making nicey nice with someone old and non-shtupable.  Dry as crêpe paper.  She smiled at me again.  Normally not at a loss for conversation, something about this situation silenced me completely.  What if someone walking down the corridor saw me in here hanging out with this old lady?  I had to get out.  Good night, I said, not waiting for her reply.  Had I hurt her feelings?  I wondered about this, leaping up the stairs to the third floor.  Should I wonder about it?  Was I supposed to take care of her?  Or she of me?  When would I have a life?  And if it was a life, how would I know?

'But she can't just stop.  You have to taper off.  No.  I understand.  But it's not up to Julie.'

The woman in front of me traipsing down Crane Street has a mobile phone clamped to her ear, the width of her sidewalk-blocking hips swaying from curb to apartment lawn.

'But that's what I'm saying.  It's wrong to just stop.  She wants to reduce the dosage.  Yeah.  Yeah.  But what does her doctor say?'

It has been a long day.  If this woman only walked at the same speed she talks, I would be home by now.

'I know he didn't tell her to just stop taking it.'

'But he did,' I say, coming up behind her.  'He told her to just stop it.'

The woman turns to me, shock frozen over a not very intelligent face, and I speed past her, bouncing toward the corner.  'I'll tell you in a second,' I hear her say, as I clunk onto the street pavement.

A long, long day.  Which began as so many do on the northbound Caltrain platform.  A mysterious pronouncement is drifting across the digital screen.  Train 237 will make Train 235 stop.  The arrant nonsense of this transit tweet somehow seems worse than whatever news it attempts to describe.  The face-value meaning clear enough, that train 237 is in a bullying mood, deciding to hold up its little metal hand and force its lower numbered cousin to stop.  Or maybe lie crossways on the tracks.  Still, reluctantly, I do acknowledge the idea.  Train 237 is no more.  It is picking up 235's passengers, in addition to its own.  Making it a local train.  Local and late.  Somehow, the day is already lengthening.  I dial Pam in Berkeley to cancel our morning coffee.  As for my acupuncture appointment with her husband near the center of Berkeley, well, that should be okay.  There is plenty of time, after all.

I spend much of the northbound Caltrain experience pressing on my bladder, such is my concern about the next bold move.  Which involves alighting at Milbrae.  As predicted, the train bearing the contents of two rushhour northbounds, is unpleasantly packed.  Amplified announcements from the staff beg passengers not to block the exit doors, find standing room on the upper level, and so on.  In my normally secure and solitary wheelchair space, hands keep reaching around me to grab schedules from the plastic rack on the wall.  I want out of here.  

And in no time at all, this is what happens, me and several hundred others now hurtling north on BART, the regional subway line.  The sense of hurtling mostly an illusion, pounding and screeching being better descriptors of the stop-at-every-station trip across San Francisco.  Never mind, for now I am in Berkeley, and making my unfamiliar way through a very familiar station.  After all, as recently as 30 years ago, I regularly schlepped through here with my crutch.  Working as a science writer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, I boarded BART trains at San Francisco's 24th St. Station, got off here, and walked to the stop for the lab shuttle on the street above.  Which means that I should know where the elevator is, but damned if it remains in my mind.  Still, working on a guess, it isn't long before the elevator doors open on rehearsals for some canto of Dante's Inferno, otherwise known as Shattuck Avenue.  

Oh, it's not that bad, considering the likely state of the impoverished in many American cities.  I say 'likely' because my life is pleasantly insulated.  And in a sense, summer California weather and fairly benign liberal attitudes provide some insulation for street life here.  Still, there seem to be so many people living rough these days.  As I bounce pass in my wheelchair, several ask for money.  I continue on.  I have promises to keep, miles to go before I sleep beneath Joe's needles.

And it does have that effect, acupuncture.  This has been Joe's specialty for as long as I can remember, and I can remember at least 40 years.  In fact, he was still at the residency stage of post-medical-school life when we met.  And my skepticism being what it is, without knowing Joe I might never have given this branch of alternative medicine a try.  But it has proven most effective and most instructive, this oddity of needles in the skin.  Depending on my affliction du jour, acupuncture has helped me deal with bouts of insomnia, orthopedic aches and pains, spasticity and even balance.  Don't ask me how it works.  Ours is not to know.  But Joe has a rare opening on this particular day, and damned if I'm going to miss it.

I seem to have missed his street.  Webster Street, isn't that it?  How long has it been since I visited Joe's Berkeley office?  Probably before or shortly after Marlou's death.  My God.  Well, not to worry, for his office is within a block or two of Herrick Hospital, isn't it?  Which must be up ahead, just a few blocks further down Milvia Street.  Except that it isn't.  And finally, having passed a housing project and a playing field, I roll into a shady spot that allows me to see the digital screen of my mobile phone.  Fortunately, Joe's office number is tattooed on my brain.  I tell the receptionist where I am.  Even she isn't entirely clear, but I get the general idea.  I have sailed past Joe's turning by about eight streets.

I am stupid, stupid and now I'm going to be late.  Late and stupid, and there is no excuse for this.  Fuck me.  Idiot.  Idiot and fool.  Fool and idiot and asshole.  Late.  For what?  For no reason, except that I am incompetent.  How can I not know where I am?  Isn't this the fucking town where I was educated, then crippled, then employed, the whole saga spanning on-and-off periods of 12 years?  Fool.

And so on.  As I denounce myself, some small psychoanalytical voice is trying to deconstruct the phenomenon.  Is Joe a latent father figure?  Do I imagine being judged by him, ridiculed for my lateness?  Did I not know him at stages of my life when I felt much more one down?  Joe as judge and stand-in parent.  Once inside Joe's office, conscious of my lateness...which amounts to not much more than five minutes...I have to pee.  A process that takes much too long, and perhaps under the pressure of the moment involves lots of bad aiming and missing.  Never mind, for the toilet is also equipped with paper towels.  And it is not long before I am up on the acupuncture table, recalling the power and oddity of the experience.  For within moments of needle insertion, I feel sleep washing over me.  Then retreating.  And what sounds the retreat, although hard to say, may have something to do with the thing Joe says.  He marvels at my general vigor.  Clearly, I am not 18, but the life force is bounding along, he says.  Which I needed to hear, somehow.  Have reconfirmed.  A second opinion, as it were, mine not being enough.  A father figure?  How about a doctor figure, spanning 40 years?

I have a lunch date after all this in San Francisco.  Joe helps me get dressed.  He knows I am in a hurry, being frequently in one himself, so when I announce my intention to pee, he has a solution.  An old-style metal urinal, which I have no compunction's about asking him to hold.  And he has no compunctions about holding.  We have been through stranger things together, I point out, as my bladder releases itself.  No aiming into the toilet, missing the mark, and driving myself further nuts.  Helping myself.  Getting help from friends.  I seem to have interrupted one of those downward, self-hating spirals.  

I thank Joe and in a way that bolsters me.  I look him in the eye, confidently, warmly and let him know I appreciate him.  This matter of looking for Webster Street, across town at a location where Joe closed an office in 1986, well, by now it is a matter of true mirth, shared enjoyment, and no burden.  And with predictable jokes about finding my way back to the BART station, I am off.  

Uncertain if it has really been a transit day from hell or a transition day from...who knows where?  Just as no one knows the last dream I had before waking.  Clint, although dead, is sitting behind the wheel of his Volkswagen van.  I need a phone number, need to get in touch with someone.  Clint tells me that I do not have the right number, and he does so with a familiar look.  Paternal, one might say.  Or simply managerial, the sort of role he adopted in decades of overseeing engineering projects.  I have part of the number, 854, a Menlo Park prefix.  And yes, this is worth looking up in my files.  But for the time being, the being is Clint.  He is alive in death and telling me something.  That I don't know everything, that there is good fatherly energy out there to support and help me, and although having the right number is important, not having it is just a stage.  As I say, it has been a long day.