October 2011 Archives
As dreams go, it is so simple, so utterly uneventful, that its resonance baffles me over the ensuing day. Which is a diminished day, it turns out, for the dream that awakens me at 2:30 in the morning proves final. It is the last dream of the night. The end of night, or more precisely, of sleep. I am terrified into consciousness. And no, that is not accurate either. I am terrified into sleeplessness. And why?
Only a few years ago I rode an adult tricycle around the neighborhood for exercise. My dream recalls that neuromuscular stage of things. In it, I am pedaling the tricycle around a low stucco house, modern and nondescript, rectangular, and the sidewalk inclines ever so slightly. But I am at the end of a long ride or the end of my wits, for my strength is ebbing. I can feel it in the dream, how it used to be in moments riding the tricycle when my leg, particularly the right paralyzed one...in this context, mostly paralyzed...began to fail. I would shift into low gear and hope for the best. But the best does not figure in the dream. In reality, my tired legs generally needed a couple of moments' rest before starting up again. In this dream, just the fact of tiring drains me of muscular strength and everything else. I am stuck on the mild slope of a sidewalk...and while the feeling is a very real one, nothing about the externals reinforces it.
After all, as in reality, this is a neighborhood of some sort, people cannot be far away...and the slope seems so mild that after a short rest, I should be on my way. But in this nightmare, there is no one where there should be someone, and the small physical challenge feels insurmountable. It is a sinking feeling, running out of steam and facing a routine physical challenge that has proven too much.
Which, if I think about it, echoes my earliest disabled experience. Freshly and massively paralyzed, the tiniest things were impossible. And now at this stage of life, a return to something like that experience seems likely. After all, the postman has bogged down in variations on a mass mailing theme, addressed to me: you are turning 65. Medicare. Soon I will be on it. And it is already on me. How did this happen? How did I get here, and what do I do about it now? And beyond such futile musings, the organism is absorbing the awareness, I am convinced, that a return to a much more diminished physical reality is certainly in the cards. If there are enough cards to be that 'lucky,' a concept that is not only ironic but push-pull in force. To live long enough to experience substantial physical decline. The latter being perhaps the fruit of pessimism, but entirely reasonable, going into old age with half a body. After all, my neuromuscular decline has been steep, if one reviews the course of the last 20 years. And the next 20, if there are so many? The body, one might say, is thinking it over.
The odd thing is the dreamscape's absence of people. Or the absence of hope. People are not visible, but their presence is almost tangible. One could imagine someone eventually coming along. My tricycle is circling an apparent home, after all. Small, bleakly new, modest and working class. The place could be all these things. It has more of the sense of a beginning than an ending. A starter home, perhaps. So why the panic at running out of physical steam? More than the absence of hope. The absence of purpose. Why am I riding my adult tricycle around this place? Why is there no landscaping? No people, no history. But a future? Oddly, all the ingredients are there for a future. Just open the front door to the modest, a.k.a., starter, home. Plant a few shrubs, of course. Flowers, even better. Brussels sprouts, perfect.
With all the stuff recently cleared out of the upstairs apartment, the downstairs closet, the carport storage spaces, my own contribution to the Palo Alto landfill not inconsiderable...it is quite interesting what escaped the wrecker's ball, as it were. One chair. Steel, all that remains of an outdoors set, impossibly heavy...weight an essential attribute of patio furniture circa 1950. I recall where it sat, on the south terrace of my parents' home. Redwood fencing around it. Did anyone actually sit out here? I have no memory of such a scene. For all the action was in the garden.
They must have been equally bewildered by the desert and its harshness and oddities, my parents. But that they were ever equal anything, that is enough. They were in this together, somehow, even if I can't recall the details. I do know that around age 5 I got a post-toddler's hernia. Was it my father's embellishment or the actual truth that this was the result of my helping him push boulders around their desert acreage? My parents did their own landscaping. Doubtless with help, but I do have this image of my dad moving big rocks around. And my mother digging out dish-shaped wells around each of her roses. And I can see her watering them, filling each depression to the brim. Such was life in the desert. A foreign land to both of them, but there was a time when they seemed to embrace its newness, take on the challenges of oven-like winds and a mineral ground that compacted itself against disturbance and held on tight.
Except for a frustrating time in the third grade when my mother was teaching me to spell, the only other shared project I recall undertaking together was carrots. At one end of the roses, there was a raised bed. The thing was lined with rocks, large desert stones fitted into a low wall. Containing a rectangle of planting ground. I believe she scattered the carrot seeds directly from the package. In any case, she was instructing. Watch this. A little water. Now watch this space. The whole thing took an immeasurable amount of time, me losing the plot long before there was anything to see. Even disconnecting from the sprouting carrots, as though the whole seed planting event had occurred in another lifetime. I was short enough to look up at the roses. They were taller than me. How old was I?
Did I sit on the steel chair I saved from being discarded? Possibly. More likely, I jumped on it. The legs swooped from ground to seat in a continuous C shape, creating a natural spring. You bounced on the chair and it bounced you. It still does precisely the same thing today. I had it repainted, restored, in fact. Why not? I have few such remembrances. It would have been so easy to discard this old, heavy and rather impractical piece. It comes from a time when my parents must have been trying to build something, rancorous conflict had not yet flared, and hope seemed a natural part of things. It is a natural part of things, if one gives life a chance. This seems to be my work these days. To find it or rediscover it or breathe it back into my lungs.
Only a few years ago I rode an adult tricycle around the neighborhood for exercise. My dream recalls that neuromuscular stage of things. In it, I am pedaling the tricycle around a low stucco house, modern and nondescript, rectangular, and the sidewalk inclines ever so slightly. But I am at the end of a long ride or the end of my wits, for my strength is ebbing. I can feel it in the dream, how it used to be in moments riding the tricycle when my leg, particularly the right paralyzed one...in this context, mostly paralyzed...began to fail. I would shift into low gear and hope for the best. But the best does not figure in the dream. In reality, my tired legs generally needed a couple of moments' rest before starting up again. In this dream, just the fact of tiring drains me of muscular strength and everything else. I am stuck on the mild slope of a sidewalk...and while the feeling is a very real one, nothing about the externals reinforces it.
After all, as in reality, this is a neighborhood of some sort, people cannot be far away...and the slope seems so mild that after a short rest, I should be on my way. But in this nightmare, there is no one where there should be someone, and the small physical challenge feels insurmountable. It is a sinking feeling, running out of steam and facing a routine physical challenge that has proven too much.
Which, if I think about it, echoes my earliest disabled experience. Freshly and massively paralyzed, the tiniest things were impossible. And now at this stage of life, a return to something like that experience seems likely. After all, the postman has bogged down in variations on a mass mailing theme, addressed to me: you are turning 65. Medicare. Soon I will be on it. And it is already on me. How did this happen? How did I get here, and what do I do about it now? And beyond such futile musings, the organism is absorbing the awareness, I am convinced, that a return to a much more diminished physical reality is certainly in the cards. If there are enough cards to be that 'lucky,' a concept that is not only ironic but push-pull in force. To live long enough to experience substantial physical decline. The latter being perhaps the fruit of pessimism, but entirely reasonable, going into old age with half a body. After all, my neuromuscular decline has been steep, if one reviews the course of the last 20 years. And the next 20, if there are so many? The body, one might say, is thinking it over.
The odd thing is the dreamscape's absence of people. Or the absence of hope. People are not visible, but their presence is almost tangible. One could imagine someone eventually coming along. My tricycle is circling an apparent home, after all. Small, bleakly new, modest and working class. The place could be all these things. It has more of the sense of a beginning than an ending. A starter home, perhaps. So why the panic at running out of physical steam? More than the absence of hope. The absence of purpose. Why am I riding my adult tricycle around this place? Why is there no landscaping? No people, no history. But a future? Oddly, all the ingredients are there for a future. Just open the front door to the modest, a.k.a., starter, home. Plant a few shrubs, of course. Flowers, even better. Brussels sprouts, perfect.
With all the stuff recently cleared out of the upstairs apartment, the downstairs closet, the carport storage spaces, my own contribution to the Palo Alto landfill not inconsiderable...it is quite interesting what escaped the wrecker's ball, as it were. One chair. Steel, all that remains of an outdoors set, impossibly heavy...weight an essential attribute of patio furniture circa 1950. I recall where it sat, on the south terrace of my parents' home. Redwood fencing around it. Did anyone actually sit out here? I have no memory of such a scene. For all the action was in the garden.
They must have been equally bewildered by the desert and its harshness and oddities, my parents. But that they were ever equal anything, that is enough. They were in this together, somehow, even if I can't recall the details. I do know that around age 5 I got a post-toddler's hernia. Was it my father's embellishment or the actual truth that this was the result of my helping him push boulders around their desert acreage? My parents did their own landscaping. Doubtless with help, but I do have this image of my dad moving big rocks around. And my mother digging out dish-shaped wells around each of her roses. And I can see her watering them, filling each depression to the brim. Such was life in the desert. A foreign land to both of them, but there was a time when they seemed to embrace its newness, take on the challenges of oven-like winds and a mineral ground that compacted itself against disturbance and held on tight.
Except for a frustrating time in the third grade when my mother was teaching me to spell, the only other shared project I recall undertaking together was carrots. At one end of the roses, there was a raised bed. The thing was lined with rocks, large desert stones fitted into a low wall. Containing a rectangle of planting ground. I believe she scattered the carrot seeds directly from the package. In any case, she was instructing. Watch this. A little water. Now watch this space. The whole thing took an immeasurable amount of time, me losing the plot long before there was anything to see. Even disconnecting from the sprouting carrots, as though the whole seed planting event had occurred in another lifetime. I was short enough to look up at the roses. They were taller than me. How old was I?
Did I sit on the steel chair I saved from being discarded? Possibly. More likely, I jumped on it. The legs swooped from ground to seat in a continuous C shape, creating a natural spring. You bounced on the chair and it bounced you. It still does precisely the same thing today. I had it repainted, restored, in fact. Why not? I have few such remembrances. It would have been so easy to discard this old, heavy and rather impractical piece. It comes from a time when my parents must have been trying to build something, rancorous conflict had not yet flared, and hope seemed a natural part of things. It is a natural part of things, if one gives life a chance. This seems to be my work these days. To find it or rediscover it or breathe it back into my lungs.
The rockets' red glare...well, they have a way of making me glare...and the bombs bursting in air...are clearly not the smart variety. And with America pounding so vociferously on its relics, making craven images of its founding documents, it is easy to be cynical. Not to mention blasé. Although both stances run into serious competition within the life of a disabled person. For as soon as one is exerting effort, which is most of the time, things become real.
Such as the schlep to the Campbell Heritage Theater, in that suburban home of the brave, you guessed it, Campbell, near San Jose, California. Where Jane and hundreds of others swore their fealty to these United States and were all pronounced citizens. All of which had a profound affect on virtually anyone observing. Largely because those on hand from the nation's Immigration Service made a point of celebrating the melting pot. As the proceedings began, all were invited to stand, those huddled masses, as each 'country of origin' rolled through the loudspeakers. Only a couple of people from the United Kingdom. Perhaps 100 from Mexico. Maybe 25 from the Philippines. Along with a smattering of new, diminutive or downright odd places like Slovakia. All represented, all celebrated. An unexpectedly urbane moment, and a moving one. God bless America.
Which is a much cozier song, to my thinking. From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans...I can really get behind this. My home sweet home. Whatever. Even if I find the militaristic dimension disquieting, there is more good than bad here in what is transpiring below me. For I am above, in the balcony of the Heritage Theater. For which I must thank the enforcers of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for without this legal fact of life, no one would have bothered to install an elevator. Those being naturalized...a strange term when one considers it...are seated in one section, we, the admiring citizens, seated elsewhere. And one of Jane's Episcopal congregation, and there are several here, has spotted her seated in the right orchestra. As the proceedings get under way, voting instructions are presented in Chinese, Spanish and Tagalog and I open The New Yorker.
I close it as a woman on stage sings the national anthem. She is good, and she is live, in contrast to the video that follows. Actually, it is pretty good as well, presenting as it does all the races and skin tones and appearances of these new United States. Emma Lazarus features prominently. Still, it is canned, and this event is nothing if not live. Fortunately, one of the new citizens leads us in a welcomely halting Pledge of Allegiance, read from a sheet of paper. Those in the audience follow the text on screen, a fine and appropriate use for electronic media.
The main event, the swearing in, includes a string of curious oaths. One is to renounce all allegiance to foreign potentates. The actual word, not mine. The importance of willingly, and it is implied enthusiastically, picking up arms to defend the nation dominates a good chunk of the oath. Which at a time when the nation is being defended by a combined force of mercenaries and working-class youth, does just rankle a bit. But so much of this rather brief ceremony is aimed at the higher level of melting-pot commonality and idealism, that one does not quibble. Acknowledging that being a democracy, it is our God-given right to quibble. To wave, or not wave, the flag. Deciding to wave at each other, as has happened this afternoon, often being the better choice. And not to let anyone drive us to cynicism. For it is still a grand experiment, America, Newt Gingrich notwithstanding. Yes, we have much to overcome. The Electoral College. Exxon. But there is time.
Now is the time to roll back to the elevator, down to the ground floor and meet Jane in the globally warmed afternoon. I feel somewhat irrelevant being here in the balcony. Not to mention ineffective. I actually tried to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, but in my portable wheelchair the task proved daunting. Also, the seat is slightly uncomfortable, my torso slumps into a worsened scoliosis. And the wheelchair is less maneuverable, that is the other thing, which I demonstrated on the way from the elevator to the balcony, crashing just slightly into the wall as I made my turn. All of which can, with remarkable ease, drain my sense of confidence and convince me of my own feebleness and, yes, irrelevance.
And after years of attending the Minnesota Men's Conference and hearing its resounding message - this is the human, and particularly male, experience - it comes down to this. Stand. Stand up. Take a stand. Be upstanding. Which can be done, by leaning forward in the wheelchair, shoving my hand back along the surprisingly wide and solid armrest, and levering myself forward, over my center of gravity, and into the vertical. Which seems so inadequate, the sort of small effort for which one applauds a child. The cripple doing his best. And the thing which should, or should not, be surprising is that Jane can see me here. She notices her man, which is not the way he usually refers to himself. Perhaps I notice myself too. Being. Not looking the way I expected, and with more effort than anticipated. But present and wholly accounted for, being as utterly part of things as I wish to be.
For it is a strange and foreign notion, that being can suffice. Outside in the October sun everyone is scurrying around, a family from Swaziland or somewhere close, a woman tall and thin and blushing with her citizenship certificate and so evidently moved that her ultra-short-black-leather-miniskirted-euro-hipster attire actually seems like what it is, a costume. Mexican-American families aglow. Chinese families close and shy and proud. And I would love to take a picture of Jane, for she looks so fetching and festive with a small American flag stuck in her hair. And it doesn't matter. Someone else will take the photo. And yes this wheelchair is heavy, and I cannot help her fold and stash it in the car, but she has signed up for this and will get her own help, stopping a teenage kid in the parking lot. For I will help when I can, and I will be when I can't. And it is all enough. And I have been here, and I am here. And we are citizens.
Such as the schlep to the Campbell Heritage Theater, in that suburban home of the brave, you guessed it, Campbell, near San Jose, California. Where Jane and hundreds of others swore their fealty to these United States and were all pronounced citizens. All of which had a profound affect on virtually anyone observing. Largely because those on hand from the nation's Immigration Service made a point of celebrating the melting pot. As the proceedings began, all were invited to stand, those huddled masses, as each 'country of origin' rolled through the loudspeakers. Only a couple of people from the United Kingdom. Perhaps 100 from Mexico. Maybe 25 from the Philippines. Along with a smattering of new, diminutive or downright odd places like Slovakia. All represented, all celebrated. An unexpectedly urbane moment, and a moving one. God bless America.
Which is a much cozier song, to my thinking. From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans...I can really get behind this. My home sweet home. Whatever. Even if I find the militaristic dimension disquieting, there is more good than bad here in what is transpiring below me. For I am above, in the balcony of the Heritage Theater. For which I must thank the enforcers of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for without this legal fact of life, no one would have bothered to install an elevator. Those being naturalized...a strange term when one considers it...are seated in one section, we, the admiring citizens, seated elsewhere. And one of Jane's Episcopal congregation, and there are several here, has spotted her seated in the right orchestra. As the proceedings get under way, voting instructions are presented in Chinese, Spanish and Tagalog and I open The New Yorker.
I close it as a woman on stage sings the national anthem. She is good, and she is live, in contrast to the video that follows. Actually, it is pretty good as well, presenting as it does all the races and skin tones and appearances of these new United States. Emma Lazarus features prominently. Still, it is canned, and this event is nothing if not live. Fortunately, one of the new citizens leads us in a welcomely halting Pledge of Allegiance, read from a sheet of paper. Those in the audience follow the text on screen, a fine and appropriate use for electronic media.
The main event, the swearing in, includes a string of curious oaths. One is to renounce all allegiance to foreign potentates. The actual word, not mine. The importance of willingly, and it is implied enthusiastically, picking up arms to defend the nation dominates a good chunk of the oath. Which at a time when the nation is being defended by a combined force of mercenaries and working-class youth, does just rankle a bit. But so much of this rather brief ceremony is aimed at the higher level of melting-pot commonality and idealism, that one does not quibble. Acknowledging that being a democracy, it is our God-given right to quibble. To wave, or not wave, the flag. Deciding to wave at each other, as has happened this afternoon, often being the better choice. And not to let anyone drive us to cynicism. For it is still a grand experiment, America, Newt Gingrich notwithstanding. Yes, we have much to overcome. The Electoral College. Exxon. But there is time.
Now is the time to roll back to the elevator, down to the ground floor and meet Jane in the globally warmed afternoon. I feel somewhat irrelevant being here in the balcony. Not to mention ineffective. I actually tried to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, but in my portable wheelchair the task proved daunting. Also, the seat is slightly uncomfortable, my torso slumps into a worsened scoliosis. And the wheelchair is less maneuverable, that is the other thing, which I demonstrated on the way from the elevator to the balcony, crashing just slightly into the wall as I made my turn. All of which can, with remarkable ease, drain my sense of confidence and convince me of my own feebleness and, yes, irrelevance.
And after years of attending the Minnesota Men's Conference and hearing its resounding message - this is the human, and particularly male, experience - it comes down to this. Stand. Stand up. Take a stand. Be upstanding. Which can be done, by leaning forward in the wheelchair, shoving my hand back along the surprisingly wide and solid armrest, and levering myself forward, over my center of gravity, and into the vertical. Which seems so inadequate, the sort of small effort for which one applauds a child. The cripple doing his best. And the thing which should, or should not, be surprising is that Jane can see me here. She notices her man, which is not the way he usually refers to himself. Perhaps I notice myself too. Being. Not looking the way I expected, and with more effort than anticipated. But present and wholly accounted for, being as utterly part of things as I wish to be.
For it is a strange and foreign notion, that being can suffice. Outside in the October sun everyone is scurrying around, a family from Swaziland or somewhere close, a woman tall and thin and blushing with her citizenship certificate and so evidently moved that her ultra-short-black-leather-miniskirted-euro-hipster attire actually seems like what it is, a costume. Mexican-American families aglow. Chinese families close and shy and proud. And I would love to take a picture of Jane, for she looks so fetching and festive with a small American flag stuck in her hair. And it doesn't matter. Someone else will take the photo. And yes this wheelchair is heavy, and I cannot help her fold and stash it in the car, but she has signed up for this and will get her own help, stopping a teenage kid in the parking lot. For I will help when I can, and I will be when I can't. And it is all enough. And I have been here, and I am here. And we are citizens.
At 4:30 AM my archenemy reasserts control of first my arch, then the spastic foot, then my sleep. The latter has been dense, action-packed somehow, as though the body knew it was heading for this juncture - the stinging and the jerking and the not sleeping. Still, I hang in there for another 2 1/2 hours, finally getting up to make tea and get on with the helpless day. The latter meaning that I do not have help this particular morning. Jane is working. Menchu is exhausted. And all I have to do is not fall in the bathroom. I don't. As for getting on my trousers single-handedly, this proves a staggering challenge. Yes, I have put on weight. But no, there are worse complications involving my black blue jeans. Somehow the button-buttonhole interface doesn't work. The aperture is too tight. Yes, the jeans are too tight also, but we are not going there. Not now. For now we are fighting with buttoning the jeans, cursing existence, denouncing myself, and long day's journey into.... Chorus.
Yes, this is the appalling Saturday truth. I must get myself properly attired, put on the more difficult pair of shoes for driving. And drive, itself an outrage, to the local veterans hospital for the purpose of singing songs about dashing through the snow in a one horse open sleigh, which is a noble endeavor, but distinctly less so on a day when it is effectively summer. The temperature is in the low 80s Fahrenheit. I give up on the black jeans, begin a struggle with green slacks, and on and on until I am almost, but not quite, dressed. The last insult being my shoelaces, twisty ones designed for the kids who cannot tie their shoes. I do make a nominal effort to twist them into something resembling normalcy, and this is what I'm doing now, desperately trying to yank the right shoe's laces into something like a pleasing configuration. This is wholly cosmetic, but it wholly obsesses me. I look dorky enough, that is the thought. I just can't have two little untied corkscrew shoelaces sticking out like pigs' tails. If I am honest, all this has taken...from bed to completion...three hours.
What slightly alarms me is the way I swoon in the course of maneuvering. Say, leaning over to try to grasp my right shoe lace. Woozy. Exhausted. I'm simply not getting enough sleep. Never mind, for the chorus awaits. I have many things to do this morning, and all must be jettisoned in favor of rolling out to the summerlike garden, tilting my wheelchair into the supine, and having a late morning snooze. Should I be doing this? Is this the wisest course? What happens when I try to sleep tonight? None of this, it develops, matters at all. Somehow I am too anxious, noticing my own short breaths, to do anything but try to calm myself.
And the tomatoes have that effect. I sleep beside them, as though under them, turning occasionally to note that more, perhaps 100, are still ripening. Also that mildew is growing on the leaves. Dewey autumn nights followed by hot days. It is an unnatural season. The last of the tomatoes, that is for sure. The last of me, I am also thinking. For surely this cannot go on, this foot-stinging exhaustion. It is time. I check the latest order of music, attempt to punch holes in a Danish Christmas song and, in the way of these things, can only punch two out of three. In fairness, it must be stated that I do not throw the three-hole punch against a wall. I have neither the strength nor the aim. But this would be a worthy physiotherapy goal, punch hurling. I seriously consider putting the punch on the ground, standing up and stepping on the thing with my foot. A plan that is either extremely practical or too foolish for a balance-compromised woozy cripple to attempt. I am angry enough to smash the thing with my fist, creating a sort of outline of one of the three holes. Close enough. I snap the binder shut and head for the veterans.
The Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital sprawls across an expanse of what must now be very expensive land. Who knows who these veterans are? Old, most of them, quite a few in wheelchairs, many with those helmets that go with too much falling. They are gathered, one by one, and conducted in walkers and wheelchairs and canes to the so-called recreation room. Many sit impassive. But I know this is a false impression. They are happy to see outsiders, these men and, yes, women. I have a vague sense of how they may feel, having once spent six months in a Los Angeles hospital. One of their number has died recently, a nurse explains to the assembled chorus, and one man wants to sing something. Sure enough, once the chorus is lined up and ready for vocal action, this elderly man launches into a highly discordant rendition of the most grating of national anthems. The Star-Spangled Banner run through Stockhausen. Oh say, can you see?
It is all over soon enough. Near the end, there is a rather alarming outburst from the back row. There have been outbursts throughout the concert, such as the neurological state of much of the audience. Not to worry, for I am not unused to these matters, having done this aforementioned hospital time myself. But what is happening in the last row, throttling imitations of cardiac arrest, does not even slightly faze the staff. If they are not worried, I am not worried. The concert is over. I want out. The place is a maze, and naturally I make a wrong turn. Now I am on C Wing, a sign explains, a wing and a prayer and patients apparently too infirm, or too wise, to head for the recreation room. A nurse asks if I am lost. Hard to say, I tell her. Now, having reached the dead end of one ward, I make it a point to reverse and head back toward the nurses' station. I get the same question, she gets a variation on the same answer, and all this is highly pleasing. You can take the patient out of the boy or the boy out of the patient...I don't know. Some long buried memory of dealing with literal minded nurses has come back to me, my response being an effort at confounding passive aggression. She may even be phoning Security as I roll outside into the blazing summer's autumnal sun.
Earlier, before I swooned my way through the marginal morning, almost canceling my concert appearance, and so on.... I lay in bed trying not to think too much about the stinging, spasming foot, and recalling a dinner with my father at age 25. I was visiting the States, and did so at least once a year while living in London. And on one particular occasion, almost a year after deliberately snubbing him, not even bothering to phone while back in California for a couple of weeks...well, we did in fact have dinner together, and even grew a bit closer. Sitting in a Southern California chain restaurant, he said it had been too long, that he missed me. Which surprised me somehow. But touched me. I can't recall what I said. It doesn't matter. He was trying, trying very hard. And so was I.
And now, 40 years later, this early-morning fantasy. An angry one. I am scheduled to have dinner with my father, after not seeing him for a year or so...at what must have been one of the Coco's restaurant chain...and I imagine myself arriving at his house, he coming outside to greet his fairly recently disabled son, and me refusing a hug, pointedly shaking his hand. Then going inside, sitting on his couch and steering the conversation toward general, objective matters. How was work? Whatever I was doing in Britain. And, throughout dinner and whatever was left of the evening, carrying on in this superficially friendly, distant way. Then announcing my departure for wherever I was staying. Presumably not with him.
It is one of those contrived, bitter, not to mention passive-aggressive, expressions of hurt and anger. And I can actually recall handling him this way at times. Not a recommended technique, of course, but one that must have gotten to him. Which is what I wanted. I was so hurt, so angry about my own childhood codependency with him, the sense of never being heard, and so I was determined to...what? Not hear him as payback? An era of inarticulate pain, my 20s. And why does all this come back to me now? The book. Consider the book. Which if it only sells 35 copies and is otherwise ignored, still marks a milestone. Something completed. And built of the stuff of my life. As though to say, this does add up to something, my survival, my story. And in ways I cannot quite grasp, this development now turns my attention toward my father.
Paul A. Bendix, M.D. The name on the sign outside his office. His persona. His name, my name, and whatever else we share. Including, people have told me for years, physical gestures. I am his son. And I still feel the hurt of his neglect, self absorption and...the key, perhaps...his disability. He never overcame his. He never found ways to keep moving. He got stuck, and although I have that same potential, mostly my life has not stalled. And if I doubt this fact, I can show skeptics a book. My book. I can even show my father the same book can imagine how he might respond. In the realm of the dead, washed clean of his own pathology, he would enjoy it, I think. He would be proud. I think that too.
'A Voyage Round My Father,' that is what John Mortimer named his famous autobiographical play. A gift to the stage and to literature and to Laurence Olivier, who never performed any part better. A reminiscence of a disabled man and the stumbling achievements of his flawed life. A voyage. The title is perhaps most magnificent. And since plays occur in the world of action, and the hidden is manifest, a play about a disabled father, Mortimer's blind barrister dad, seen through my eyes...those of a disabled son...well, it is all very confusing. The effect being either one of double vision or three dimensions. In any case, when I look at the Mayo Clinic's online description of narcissistic personality disorder, my voyage round my own father sees him drowning in a sea of shame. I am powerless, and always was, to do anything about it. Although as a child, his afflictions seemed to be my own. Certainly they were my responsibility to heal, save a marriage, save me. It was all very sad and tragic for all concerned. But it was a voyage. And whoever has been lost at sea will never know that I have picked up survivors along the way. Principally me. And call it a ghost ship, if you will. But my father is at last on board.
Yes, this is the appalling Saturday truth. I must get myself properly attired, put on the more difficult pair of shoes for driving. And drive, itself an outrage, to the local veterans hospital for the purpose of singing songs about dashing through the snow in a one horse open sleigh, which is a noble endeavor, but distinctly less so on a day when it is effectively summer. The temperature is in the low 80s Fahrenheit. I give up on the black jeans, begin a struggle with green slacks, and on and on until I am almost, but not quite, dressed. The last insult being my shoelaces, twisty ones designed for the kids who cannot tie their shoes. I do make a nominal effort to twist them into something resembling normalcy, and this is what I'm doing now, desperately trying to yank the right shoe's laces into something like a pleasing configuration. This is wholly cosmetic, but it wholly obsesses me. I look dorky enough, that is the thought. I just can't have two little untied corkscrew shoelaces sticking out like pigs' tails. If I am honest, all this has taken...from bed to completion...three hours.
What slightly alarms me is the way I swoon in the course of maneuvering. Say, leaning over to try to grasp my right shoe lace. Woozy. Exhausted. I'm simply not getting enough sleep. Never mind, for the chorus awaits. I have many things to do this morning, and all must be jettisoned in favor of rolling out to the summerlike garden, tilting my wheelchair into the supine, and having a late morning snooze. Should I be doing this? Is this the wisest course? What happens when I try to sleep tonight? None of this, it develops, matters at all. Somehow I am too anxious, noticing my own short breaths, to do anything but try to calm myself.
And the tomatoes have that effect. I sleep beside them, as though under them, turning occasionally to note that more, perhaps 100, are still ripening. Also that mildew is growing on the leaves. Dewey autumn nights followed by hot days. It is an unnatural season. The last of the tomatoes, that is for sure. The last of me, I am also thinking. For surely this cannot go on, this foot-stinging exhaustion. It is time. I check the latest order of music, attempt to punch holes in a Danish Christmas song and, in the way of these things, can only punch two out of three. In fairness, it must be stated that I do not throw the three-hole punch against a wall. I have neither the strength nor the aim. But this would be a worthy physiotherapy goal, punch hurling. I seriously consider putting the punch on the ground, standing up and stepping on the thing with my foot. A plan that is either extremely practical or too foolish for a balance-compromised woozy cripple to attempt. I am angry enough to smash the thing with my fist, creating a sort of outline of one of the three holes. Close enough. I snap the binder shut and head for the veterans.
The Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital sprawls across an expanse of what must now be very expensive land. Who knows who these veterans are? Old, most of them, quite a few in wheelchairs, many with those helmets that go with too much falling. They are gathered, one by one, and conducted in walkers and wheelchairs and canes to the so-called recreation room. Many sit impassive. But I know this is a false impression. They are happy to see outsiders, these men and, yes, women. I have a vague sense of how they may feel, having once spent six months in a Los Angeles hospital. One of their number has died recently, a nurse explains to the assembled chorus, and one man wants to sing something. Sure enough, once the chorus is lined up and ready for vocal action, this elderly man launches into a highly discordant rendition of the most grating of national anthems. The Star-Spangled Banner run through Stockhausen. Oh say, can you see?
It is all over soon enough. Near the end, there is a rather alarming outburst from the back row. There have been outbursts throughout the concert, such as the neurological state of much of the audience. Not to worry, for I am not unused to these matters, having done this aforementioned hospital time myself. But what is happening in the last row, throttling imitations of cardiac arrest, does not even slightly faze the staff. If they are not worried, I am not worried. The concert is over. I want out. The place is a maze, and naturally I make a wrong turn. Now I am on C Wing, a sign explains, a wing and a prayer and patients apparently too infirm, or too wise, to head for the recreation room. A nurse asks if I am lost. Hard to say, I tell her. Now, having reached the dead end of one ward, I make it a point to reverse and head back toward the nurses' station. I get the same question, she gets a variation on the same answer, and all this is highly pleasing. You can take the patient out of the boy or the boy out of the patient...I don't know. Some long buried memory of dealing with literal minded nurses has come back to me, my response being an effort at confounding passive aggression. She may even be phoning Security as I roll outside into the blazing summer's autumnal sun.
Earlier, before I swooned my way through the marginal morning, almost canceling my concert appearance, and so on.... I lay in bed trying not to think too much about the stinging, spasming foot, and recalling a dinner with my father at age 25. I was visiting the States, and did so at least once a year while living in London. And on one particular occasion, almost a year after deliberately snubbing him, not even bothering to phone while back in California for a couple of weeks...well, we did in fact have dinner together, and even grew a bit closer. Sitting in a Southern California chain restaurant, he said it had been too long, that he missed me. Which surprised me somehow. But touched me. I can't recall what I said. It doesn't matter. He was trying, trying very hard. And so was I.
And now, 40 years later, this early-morning fantasy. An angry one. I am scheduled to have dinner with my father, after not seeing him for a year or so...at what must have been one of the Coco's restaurant chain...and I imagine myself arriving at his house, he coming outside to greet his fairly recently disabled son, and me refusing a hug, pointedly shaking his hand. Then going inside, sitting on his couch and steering the conversation toward general, objective matters. How was work? Whatever I was doing in Britain. And, throughout dinner and whatever was left of the evening, carrying on in this superficially friendly, distant way. Then announcing my departure for wherever I was staying. Presumably not with him.
It is one of those contrived, bitter, not to mention passive-aggressive, expressions of hurt and anger. And I can actually recall handling him this way at times. Not a recommended technique, of course, but one that must have gotten to him. Which is what I wanted. I was so hurt, so angry about my own childhood codependency with him, the sense of never being heard, and so I was determined to...what? Not hear him as payback? An era of inarticulate pain, my 20s. And why does all this come back to me now? The book. Consider the book. Which if it only sells 35 copies and is otherwise ignored, still marks a milestone. Something completed. And built of the stuff of my life. As though to say, this does add up to something, my survival, my story. And in ways I cannot quite grasp, this development now turns my attention toward my father.
Paul A. Bendix, M.D. The name on the sign outside his office. His persona. His name, my name, and whatever else we share. Including, people have told me for years, physical gestures. I am his son. And I still feel the hurt of his neglect, self absorption and...the key, perhaps...his disability. He never overcame his. He never found ways to keep moving. He got stuck, and although I have that same potential, mostly my life has not stalled. And if I doubt this fact, I can show skeptics a book. My book. I can even show my father the same book can imagine how he might respond. In the realm of the dead, washed clean of his own pathology, he would enjoy it, I think. He would be proud. I think that too.
'A Voyage Round My Father,' that is what John Mortimer named his famous autobiographical play. A gift to the stage and to literature and to Laurence Olivier, who never performed any part better. A reminiscence of a disabled man and the stumbling achievements of his flawed life. A voyage. The title is perhaps most magnificent. And since plays occur in the world of action, and the hidden is manifest, a play about a disabled father, Mortimer's blind barrister dad, seen through my eyes...those of a disabled son...well, it is all very confusing. The effect being either one of double vision or three dimensions. In any case, when I look at the Mayo Clinic's online description of narcissistic personality disorder, my voyage round my own father sees him drowning in a sea of shame. I am powerless, and always was, to do anything about it. Although as a child, his afflictions seemed to be my own. Certainly they were my responsibility to heal, save a marriage, save me. It was all very sad and tragic for all concerned. But it was a voyage. And whoever has been lost at sea will never know that I have picked up survivors along the way. Principally me. And call it a ghost ship, if you will. But my father is at last on board.
I am deluged with flyers and mailers, not to mention wheelchairing past lawns staked out with more cardboard election signs than tombstones in a graveyard. Such is the bitterly fought election over the officers of the Menlo Park Fire Board. The only point being that I know all this. So when I roll in the door at 7:45 this evening only to be greeted from a call from Steve from the Menlo Park Firefighters...there is every reason to be gracious. Although in the moment graciousness eludes me. I assure Steve that my house is not ablaze and say goodbye.
Which is nothing to brag about, considering the general course of my day. Which began at 3 AM with me in a vociferous dinner party conversation. No, I tell my crystal clinking, plate clattering restaurant companions, I had no idea that the Embarcadero Freeway had been torn down. Everyone at the table is aghast at my coarse ignorance. I look around the assembled guests and ask 'why am I always the last to know?' And in this dream, I am as worked up as the guests. Everyone is disturbed, somehow. I am most aggressive in my sarcastic self-deprecation. Which soon translates into being awake and awake and awake until, well, now. I do not return to sleep.
What is going on? Enthusiasm or hysteria? Too much energy to channel into the conventional outlets? Or just plain fear? It really doesn't matter, for I have so constructed things as to have many miles before I sleep, all of them on public transit. Better get going. But not before I ask Menchu to whip up some croutons. Never know when you might need croutons. And with all that bread hanging about the kitchen, most of it putatively French, might as well let go with the olive oil and the garlic and the oven. She does all this admirably, I turn off the heat, let the croutons cool, stuff them in a bag, and let the good times roll.
Naturally I am rolling toward the northbound platform of Caltrain at maximum warp and with maximum load. Among the latter, Kipling, a rail lobbyist's newsletter, the New York Times, the Guardian, The Nation and one New Yorker. When I expect to read all this is not clear. It is magical thinking. It seems to me that after having lunch with Leo, my writing professor from the 1970s, I will have lots of time to kill in San Francisco before journeying south to the Caltrain meeting in the Peninsula suburbs. Lots of time.
From the moment the journey tries to begin, it stumbles. Human beings need sleep, this is the simple truth. True, I did have four hours the previous night, but the body is telling me that this is not sufficient. It is the fatigued body that told me to load my lap full of half a library's reference section. And now it is telling me to announce to the Caltrain conductor that I am heading to San Francisco. Which is factually true, though circumstantially false. I need to get off this train at Milbrae and launch myself citywards on BART, the region's subway system. Unfortunately, he is absent for much of the northbound trip, but fortunately does reappear at Burlingame. He lets me off at the next stop. The BART train departs within seconds, and what a good boy am I.
The morning's rigors are already getting to me, and I do slightly nod off somewhere near Daly City, awakening only seconds before we hit Balboa Park. I roll off the train onto the shiny brick platform. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. We're off to see the Wizard...of the glass booth. Wheelchairs are something of an afterthought in the BART system, and often one is obliged to exit with the help of the station agent...who swipes the magnetic ticket, then opens an emergency door. Except that the glass station booth is empty. No agent in sight. However I do collar a BART employee, a woman in a yellow safety vest, and more or less demand her help. After all, I am in a hurry, have a lunch appointment, and cannot screw around. There, she says. She is pointing at the most obvious thing, a wheelchair-sized exit gate. No, I tell her, I am not going in the system, but heading out. Yes, she says, that's the exit. I cannot understand this. The facts are so simple, yet I deny their truth. Until the reality coalesces through a fog of fatigue. This is the exit, a wheelchair exit. And, yes, at other stations, such as Berkeley, things are much more confusing. Wheelchairs rise one level via elevator, emerge outside the paid zone, and the station agent intervenes. But not here. And by the time I finally grasp this reality, having swiped my ticket, the turnstile closes. I have waited too long. The BART woman...perhaps a janitor, opens an emergency side gate. After which I'm still convinced that I must take the elevator up one more level. But here at least I give reality a try. The outside is, you guessed it, just outside.
Through the open door, which leads right to where I last found myself months ago. Down a long footpath, skirting the edge of a Muni yard full of empty trams. Although one real tram, a moving one, has rounded a distant corner and is coming straight down the track toward me. Which means that I must rush to the distant wheelchair platform before the tram arrives. Naturally, I drop my wallet, Kipling, miscellaneous newspapers and magazines, on the pavement. I stop, cursing myself for being a fool. For overloading my lap with crap. Which now must be picked up, item by item, with one working hand, grab and lift. Grab and lift. Until my possessions are again in my possession, though the same cannot be said for my faculties. I roll up the ramp just as the tram whooshes by. I am a dismal and utter idiot. I will wait here for another 20 minutes, 30 minutes, just because I dropped my stuff. The tram pauses. The driver walks to the rear. Is this where I get the tram, I beg him. My hope is that, improbably, he will back the thing up and take me with him. He asks me where I want to go. I tell him. Yes, he says. He parks the tram in the adjacent yard. False alarm. As is the next tram that stops there. It is an N. I want a J. And here it is, finally, and the damn thing better get going and get going fast.
The driver is a young woman, black with cornrows. She has her act together, I can tell. She apologizes for needing to use the station toilet and leaving me alone onboard. But this is the end of the line, after all, which makes it the beginning too. A profound metaphysical truth, which eludes me at the time. All I notice is the pigeon that flies through the open door while the driver is away. I am most affable about all this, hoping she will return and get things going fast. I have made this mistake before, getting off at Balboa Park, somehow thinking this bridging of three entirely separate transit systems would be faster. It isn't. We set off down Ocean Avenue, a part of San Francisco that could be anywhere hundreds of miles north or south, coastal air being prevalent, but the whole ambience neither urban nor suburban. Nowhere. Never mind, for ahead the tram will accelerate, its tracks rolling down the center of...bam. The tram slams to a stop, my wheelchair tilting, throwing everything off my lap, and almost sending me flying from the chair. There they are, the same things, the Kipling, magazines, newspaper, wallet. Are you okay, the driver asks? Yes, I assure her. A Hispanic woman helps me pick up the gear. She is seated with her husband, an impassive man who has seen too many gringos. Muy peligroso, I observe. She smiles. He looks away. The driver grabs something like a car jack to readjust the stuck switch we have just hit.
I am remarkably late by the time I roll off the tram at 24th St. Rolling up the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk a man stands oblivious, in my way. I wait for him to move. When he finally does so, he observes 'you're welcome.' I can't manage anything so lofty. I might have said thanks, but then again, maybe not. I don't care. All I care about is that I have once again dropped everything from my lap, desperately rolling up the street towards Leo and lunch. Some sort of container wouldn't hurt, would it? A bag, perhaps. Too late for that sort of thing. Too late for everything. Maybe even too late for lunch. I wonder if Leo is still there. Sure, of course, there he is. Or this wouldn't be Hamano Sushi, would it? I have been meeting him here for years. I manage lunch without dribbling too much soy sauce down my chin. Exiting the men's room, I do manage in turning the wheelchair to rip the pay phone off its cradle. I apologize to one of the waiters. I really don't mind, such is my state. When Leo almost knocks over the cream container when we have coffee afterwards down the street, it feels like it's my fault.
I board a tram, the final one for the day, taking me to Caltrain. Naturally, a quarter of a mile later, the tram brakes to a violent stop, everything flies off my lap again. But this time I am parked more or less safely, behind a low bulkhead just behind the entrance steps. True, if I really went flying, the protruding ticket scanner would break several ribs. Not to worry. For I have seated myself defensively. Wisely. For as anyone can see, this is not a good transit day. Which, however consistent the pattern of events, is not my fault. It is my fate, however. And whatever else can be said, it is taking me somewhere.
Which is nothing to brag about, considering the general course of my day. Which began at 3 AM with me in a vociferous dinner party conversation. No, I tell my crystal clinking, plate clattering restaurant companions, I had no idea that the Embarcadero Freeway had been torn down. Everyone at the table is aghast at my coarse ignorance. I look around the assembled guests and ask 'why am I always the last to know?' And in this dream, I am as worked up as the guests. Everyone is disturbed, somehow. I am most aggressive in my sarcastic self-deprecation. Which soon translates into being awake and awake and awake until, well, now. I do not return to sleep.
What is going on? Enthusiasm or hysteria? Too much energy to channel into the conventional outlets? Or just plain fear? It really doesn't matter, for I have so constructed things as to have many miles before I sleep, all of them on public transit. Better get going. But not before I ask Menchu to whip up some croutons. Never know when you might need croutons. And with all that bread hanging about the kitchen, most of it putatively French, might as well let go with the olive oil and the garlic and the oven. She does all this admirably, I turn off the heat, let the croutons cool, stuff them in a bag, and let the good times roll.
Naturally I am rolling toward the northbound platform of Caltrain at maximum warp and with maximum load. Among the latter, Kipling, a rail lobbyist's newsletter, the New York Times, the Guardian, The Nation and one New Yorker. When I expect to read all this is not clear. It is magical thinking. It seems to me that after having lunch with Leo, my writing professor from the 1970s, I will have lots of time to kill in San Francisco before journeying south to the Caltrain meeting in the Peninsula suburbs. Lots of time.
From the moment the journey tries to begin, it stumbles. Human beings need sleep, this is the simple truth. True, I did have four hours the previous night, but the body is telling me that this is not sufficient. It is the fatigued body that told me to load my lap full of half a library's reference section. And now it is telling me to announce to the Caltrain conductor that I am heading to San Francisco. Which is factually true, though circumstantially false. I need to get off this train at Milbrae and launch myself citywards on BART, the region's subway system. Unfortunately, he is absent for much of the northbound trip, but fortunately does reappear at Burlingame. He lets me off at the next stop. The BART train departs within seconds, and what a good boy am I.
The morning's rigors are already getting to me, and I do slightly nod off somewhere near Daly City, awakening only seconds before we hit Balboa Park. I roll off the train onto the shiny brick platform. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. We're off to see the Wizard...of the glass booth. Wheelchairs are something of an afterthought in the BART system, and often one is obliged to exit with the help of the station agent...who swipes the magnetic ticket, then opens an emergency door. Except that the glass station booth is empty. No agent in sight. However I do collar a BART employee, a woman in a yellow safety vest, and more or less demand her help. After all, I am in a hurry, have a lunch appointment, and cannot screw around. There, she says. She is pointing at the most obvious thing, a wheelchair-sized exit gate. No, I tell her, I am not going in the system, but heading out. Yes, she says, that's the exit. I cannot understand this. The facts are so simple, yet I deny their truth. Until the reality coalesces through a fog of fatigue. This is the exit, a wheelchair exit. And, yes, at other stations, such as Berkeley, things are much more confusing. Wheelchairs rise one level via elevator, emerge outside the paid zone, and the station agent intervenes. But not here. And by the time I finally grasp this reality, having swiped my ticket, the turnstile closes. I have waited too long. The BART woman...perhaps a janitor, opens an emergency side gate. After which I'm still convinced that I must take the elevator up one more level. But here at least I give reality a try. The outside is, you guessed it, just outside.
Through the open door, which leads right to where I last found myself months ago. Down a long footpath, skirting the edge of a Muni yard full of empty trams. Although one real tram, a moving one, has rounded a distant corner and is coming straight down the track toward me. Which means that I must rush to the distant wheelchair platform before the tram arrives. Naturally, I drop my wallet, Kipling, miscellaneous newspapers and magazines, on the pavement. I stop, cursing myself for being a fool. For overloading my lap with crap. Which now must be picked up, item by item, with one working hand, grab and lift. Grab and lift. Until my possessions are again in my possession, though the same cannot be said for my faculties. I roll up the ramp just as the tram whooshes by. I am a dismal and utter idiot. I will wait here for another 20 minutes, 30 minutes, just because I dropped my stuff. The tram pauses. The driver walks to the rear. Is this where I get the tram, I beg him. My hope is that, improbably, he will back the thing up and take me with him. He asks me where I want to go. I tell him. Yes, he says. He parks the tram in the adjacent yard. False alarm. As is the next tram that stops there. It is an N. I want a J. And here it is, finally, and the damn thing better get going and get going fast.
The driver is a young woman, black with cornrows. She has her act together, I can tell. She apologizes for needing to use the station toilet and leaving me alone onboard. But this is the end of the line, after all, which makes it the beginning too. A profound metaphysical truth, which eludes me at the time. All I notice is the pigeon that flies through the open door while the driver is away. I am most affable about all this, hoping she will return and get things going fast. I have made this mistake before, getting off at Balboa Park, somehow thinking this bridging of three entirely separate transit systems would be faster. It isn't. We set off down Ocean Avenue, a part of San Francisco that could be anywhere hundreds of miles north or south, coastal air being prevalent, but the whole ambience neither urban nor suburban. Nowhere. Never mind, for ahead the tram will accelerate, its tracks rolling down the center of...bam. The tram slams to a stop, my wheelchair tilting, throwing everything off my lap, and almost sending me flying from the chair. There they are, the same things, the Kipling, magazines, newspaper, wallet. Are you okay, the driver asks? Yes, I assure her. A Hispanic woman helps me pick up the gear. She is seated with her husband, an impassive man who has seen too many gringos. Muy peligroso, I observe. She smiles. He looks away. The driver grabs something like a car jack to readjust the stuck switch we have just hit.
I am remarkably late by the time I roll off the tram at 24th St. Rolling up the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk a man stands oblivious, in my way. I wait for him to move. When he finally does so, he observes 'you're welcome.' I can't manage anything so lofty. I might have said thanks, but then again, maybe not. I don't care. All I care about is that I have once again dropped everything from my lap, desperately rolling up the street towards Leo and lunch. Some sort of container wouldn't hurt, would it? A bag, perhaps. Too late for that sort of thing. Too late for everything. Maybe even too late for lunch. I wonder if Leo is still there. Sure, of course, there he is. Or this wouldn't be Hamano Sushi, would it? I have been meeting him here for years. I manage lunch without dribbling too much soy sauce down my chin. Exiting the men's room, I do manage in turning the wheelchair to rip the pay phone off its cradle. I apologize to one of the waiters. I really don't mind, such is my state. When Leo almost knocks over the cream container when we have coffee afterwards down the street, it feels like it's my fault.
I board a tram, the final one for the day, taking me to Caltrain. Naturally, a quarter of a mile later, the tram brakes to a violent stop, everything flies off my lap again. But this time I am parked more or less safely, behind a low bulkhead just behind the entrance steps. True, if I really went flying, the protruding ticket scanner would break several ribs. Not to worry. For I have seated myself defensively. Wisely. For as anyone can see, this is not a good transit day. Which, however consistent the pattern of events, is not my fault. It is my fate, however. And whatever else can be said, it is taking me somewhere.
The arch of your foot may not seem like a thing to obsess over, certainly nothing to keep you awake at night. Yet this is what is happening. Where does this story begin? Is it even a story? The boring details amounting to nothing more than the fact that I have a foot, that it swells and stings. This pain occurs in the foot's arch, triggering spastic muscle activity in the area. Which makes the foot twist or jerk, and this is a good thing. Paralyzed people need all the movement they can get. A jerking foot is a foot that needs blood. And the more blood flows, the less it collects in the body's oil pans, such as the feet. The alternative is blood clots. Thrombosis. And so on. Good to have your swollen foot jerk its way back to, well, something less swollen.
Problem is, this foot pinging has begun erupting at all hours. The middle of the night, for example. And this seems to be happening at the very point when the foot is least swollen. Bad circulation, I tell myself. Though what I really tell myself is more expansive. That I do not like the body's aging. That I exercise enough to avoid this sort of thing or think I do. And that it is frightening to have the body so thoroughly out of control. At times I worry about what this means, this apparent decline of my circulatory system, seemingly inevitable in one's mid-sixties. But mostly I fume. Then despair. For already this foot stinging has narrowed my options. Which were narrow enough already, thank you very much. The foot's needling has been waking me up in the wee hours. This afternoon, while the housekeeper bustled about, I looked for a way to keep the foot elevated while doing the same with the conversation, that is to say, this blog. This requires getting into my recliner chair, cranking up an old laptop and having a go at the voice recognition software. Which took forever. 'Your memory is low,' advised Messrs. Sony. At age 65 no one needs to be reminded of this fact. A good 20 minutes of computer memory adjustments before work could begin. Oy.
It is a hot Indian summer day in this region, and heat only makes foot swelling worse. The confines of the body. The remains of the day. The neuromuscular dregs of what is left of one's life. I try not to go there, but there I am. So goes my despair. Along with something else, a new and heightened sense of disgust. A revulsion at things old and ossified. Tired. The fact is, I have been disabled for a long time. Why not get fed up? I can feel it in my shoulders, this old tired thing. In fact, whatever the feeling is, chances are that it's been there for a long time. As have I. Tired.
Jane calls it the 'border patrol.' Her term for all the forces that resist change and try to keep a person within comfortable boundaries. The comfort zone. As opposed to, say, the publishing zone. I do have a book coming out. Perhaps I am coming out. God knows what else is coming out too...a voice, louder, sharper, bigger. Listen to me. All exceeding the boundaries, currently under patrol, if one follows Jane's metaphor. And why not follow it? It can't be bad, this idea of learning while resisting change, instinctively sticking with what one knows, what feels safe. As the wise men say, what the hell? Follow me.
Which in the 1960s was an actual sign on the back of a jeep at Palm Springs Airport. Did this go on everywhere? Were there similar Jeeps with 'follow me' signs in resort airports around the country? As a kid, it seemed quite natural that someone landing in a private plane would be guided to their parking spot in this particular way. Just as it seemed natural that my father, either bored by small town desert life or considering escape, would occasionally stop by the airport...where the odd celebrity descended the aluminum steps of a DC-6. It was most infectious, this experience. Palm Springs had not yet been hit by an urban bomb, the sprawl of pavements, golf courses, roofs and, of course, smog, still a couple of decades away. For now, people called it The Village, with a center that was all of three blocks long and an airport with nothing beyond it but desert, the edge of development, the edge of the world. The San Jacinto Mountains overwhelmed everything in sight, throwing a rocky protective arm around even the extreme southern end of neighboring Palm Desert. When a Western Airlines DC-6 rolled skyward, the blue smoke mysteriously vanished, the plane rose before our eyes and seemed to head right for the mountain before vanishing too.
As for my father, most of the time I hoped he would vanish...while secretly fearing what would happen if he did. For better or for worse, he was my parent. I saw my mother in Santa Barbara a few times a year, mostly in the summer. It took years after their divorce for my father to cease railing against her. His obsession, how she had ruined his life, wasted his existence, undermined him in ways unstated lay at the center of his post-marital life. Get one, I was starting to tell him, mostly silently, as I moved into adolescence. By the time I was moving out of the house, as boys do psychologically in their late teens, it was no secret. Get a life, that was my message. My father and I experienced a succession of schisms. My anger achieved nothing, of course, except accelerating my departure from the nest. Sadly, he never did get much of a life. Today, just Google 'narcissistic personality disorder,' and you'll get a general sense of the guy.
And then, first thing I knew, a little time having passed, I was staring at the ceiling of a private room at Berkeley's campus hospital. My mother drove in fairly often from nearby Walnut Creek to visit her paralyzed son, and my father flew up from Southern California as often as he could. I had time on my hands. Both of which were paralyzed at that point, and so I had time on my body. Quadriplegia's path to enlightenment involved lots of staring at acoustical ceiling tile. And thinking, of course. And somehow, out of all this helplessness, post-terror and anticipatory grief...the full extent of my bodily loss not quite apparent...came The Night of the Father.
'That blows my mind,' a friend told me, hearing me tell the tale. Which was simple enough. Somehow, it had come to me. I had to tell my father that I loved him and I hated him. Naturally, I had to tell myself this first, but opportunities for self reflection were rather slim at Cowell Hospital. Despite the abundance of time, there was no psychotherapist handy. And there were the drugs. I was on so much cortisone, then a recently discovered technique for shrinking the swelling of a damaged spinal cord, that my days were quite speedy. Definitely an extroversion drug, whatever I was on. Balanced with that other drug, my own reclusiveness and defensive silence. Battling forces dwell with inside everyone, I suppose. But when they battle within a neurologically damaged body, the effects can be odd.
I was shouldering the burden. My scapula, to be exact. The right one, in particular. Lying awake in my hospital bed, anticipating my father's visit the next day, I went back and forth. I would tell him about this insight about my love-hate feelings for him. And then I would decide no, I wouldn't say anything. And whenever this thought arose, my right, neurologically damaged shoulder blade's muscles would spasm. 'Yes,' I'll tell him...and there was no scapular activity. 'No,' I won't do it...and the shoulder muscles would clench. Was this really happening? Yes, and fortunately I told a friend or two. After all, I had lain awake for hours with this, going back and forth. Life spurring me onward, in a general worthwhile direction toward confrontation and self-revelation. More than a message from the body...a major e-mail, with attachments, download time estimated at 45 years.
So what happened? I must have known the likely course. My father sat at my bedside, the window side, June light streaming in from the bay. I told him of my revelation, said it as clearly as I could. A mixed message, the ultimate mixed message. There was no right way to say it, all ways wrong in a sense. I love you and I hate you. My father frowned, rose and announced his early departure. As I had announced mine, for points unknown, timetable uncertain. The whole thing announced much earlier, and this is the point, by my shoulder blades. Which brings us back to the arch of my foot. The archvillain, as it were. Whereas actually its role is as yet uncertain. Oh, I will drag in the usual physical medicine experts. My doctor having already pronounced his 'not to worry' verdict. The upshot...of the gunshot...four and a half decades later, still unclear.
Problem is, this foot pinging has begun erupting at all hours. The middle of the night, for example. And this seems to be happening at the very point when the foot is least swollen. Bad circulation, I tell myself. Though what I really tell myself is more expansive. That I do not like the body's aging. That I exercise enough to avoid this sort of thing or think I do. And that it is frightening to have the body so thoroughly out of control. At times I worry about what this means, this apparent decline of my circulatory system, seemingly inevitable in one's mid-sixties. But mostly I fume. Then despair. For already this foot stinging has narrowed my options. Which were narrow enough already, thank you very much. The foot's needling has been waking me up in the wee hours. This afternoon, while the housekeeper bustled about, I looked for a way to keep the foot elevated while doing the same with the conversation, that is to say, this blog. This requires getting into my recliner chair, cranking up an old laptop and having a go at the voice recognition software. Which took forever. 'Your memory is low,' advised Messrs. Sony. At age 65 no one needs to be reminded of this fact. A good 20 minutes of computer memory adjustments before work could begin. Oy.
It is a hot Indian summer day in this region, and heat only makes foot swelling worse. The confines of the body. The remains of the day. The neuromuscular dregs of what is left of one's life. I try not to go there, but there I am. So goes my despair. Along with something else, a new and heightened sense of disgust. A revulsion at things old and ossified. Tired. The fact is, I have been disabled for a long time. Why not get fed up? I can feel it in my shoulders, this old tired thing. In fact, whatever the feeling is, chances are that it's been there for a long time. As have I. Tired.
Jane calls it the 'border patrol.' Her term for all the forces that resist change and try to keep a person within comfortable boundaries. The comfort zone. As opposed to, say, the publishing zone. I do have a book coming out. Perhaps I am coming out. God knows what else is coming out too...a voice, louder, sharper, bigger. Listen to me. All exceeding the boundaries, currently under patrol, if one follows Jane's metaphor. And why not follow it? It can't be bad, this idea of learning while resisting change, instinctively sticking with what one knows, what feels safe. As the wise men say, what the hell? Follow me.
Which in the 1960s was an actual sign on the back of a jeep at Palm Springs Airport. Did this go on everywhere? Were there similar Jeeps with 'follow me' signs in resort airports around the country? As a kid, it seemed quite natural that someone landing in a private plane would be guided to their parking spot in this particular way. Just as it seemed natural that my father, either bored by small town desert life or considering escape, would occasionally stop by the airport...where the odd celebrity descended the aluminum steps of a DC-6. It was most infectious, this experience. Palm Springs had not yet been hit by an urban bomb, the sprawl of pavements, golf courses, roofs and, of course, smog, still a couple of decades away. For now, people called it The Village, with a center that was all of three blocks long and an airport with nothing beyond it but desert, the edge of development, the edge of the world. The San Jacinto Mountains overwhelmed everything in sight, throwing a rocky protective arm around even the extreme southern end of neighboring Palm Desert. When a Western Airlines DC-6 rolled skyward, the blue smoke mysteriously vanished, the plane rose before our eyes and seemed to head right for the mountain before vanishing too.
As for my father, most of the time I hoped he would vanish...while secretly fearing what would happen if he did. For better or for worse, he was my parent. I saw my mother in Santa Barbara a few times a year, mostly in the summer. It took years after their divorce for my father to cease railing against her. His obsession, how she had ruined his life, wasted his existence, undermined him in ways unstated lay at the center of his post-marital life. Get one, I was starting to tell him, mostly silently, as I moved into adolescence. By the time I was moving out of the house, as boys do psychologically in their late teens, it was no secret. Get a life, that was my message. My father and I experienced a succession of schisms. My anger achieved nothing, of course, except accelerating my departure from the nest. Sadly, he never did get much of a life. Today, just Google 'narcissistic personality disorder,' and you'll get a general sense of the guy.
And then, first thing I knew, a little time having passed, I was staring at the ceiling of a private room at Berkeley's campus hospital. My mother drove in fairly often from nearby Walnut Creek to visit her paralyzed son, and my father flew up from Southern California as often as he could. I had time on my hands. Both of which were paralyzed at that point, and so I had time on my body. Quadriplegia's path to enlightenment involved lots of staring at acoustical ceiling tile. And thinking, of course. And somehow, out of all this helplessness, post-terror and anticipatory grief...the full extent of my bodily loss not quite apparent...came The Night of the Father.
'That blows my mind,' a friend told me, hearing me tell the tale. Which was simple enough. Somehow, it had come to me. I had to tell my father that I loved him and I hated him. Naturally, I had to tell myself this first, but opportunities for self reflection were rather slim at Cowell Hospital. Despite the abundance of time, there was no psychotherapist handy. And there were the drugs. I was on so much cortisone, then a recently discovered technique for shrinking the swelling of a damaged spinal cord, that my days were quite speedy. Definitely an extroversion drug, whatever I was on. Balanced with that other drug, my own reclusiveness and defensive silence. Battling forces dwell with inside everyone, I suppose. But when they battle within a neurologically damaged body, the effects can be odd.
I was shouldering the burden. My scapula, to be exact. The right one, in particular. Lying awake in my hospital bed, anticipating my father's visit the next day, I went back and forth. I would tell him about this insight about my love-hate feelings for him. And then I would decide no, I wouldn't say anything. And whenever this thought arose, my right, neurologically damaged shoulder blade's muscles would spasm. 'Yes,' I'll tell him...and there was no scapular activity. 'No,' I won't do it...and the shoulder muscles would clench. Was this really happening? Yes, and fortunately I told a friend or two. After all, I had lain awake for hours with this, going back and forth. Life spurring me onward, in a general worthwhile direction toward confrontation and self-revelation. More than a message from the body...a major e-mail, with attachments, download time estimated at 45 years.
So what happened? I must have known the likely course. My father sat at my bedside, the window side, June light streaming in from the bay. I told him of my revelation, said it as clearly as I could. A mixed message, the ultimate mixed message. There was no right way to say it, all ways wrong in a sense. I love you and I hate you. My father frowned, rose and announced his early departure. As I had announced mine, for points unknown, timetable uncertain. The whole thing announced much earlier, and this is the point, by my shoulder blades. Which brings us back to the arch of my foot. The archvillain, as it were. Whereas actually its role is as yet uncertain. Oh, I will drag in the usual physical medicine experts. My doctor having already pronounced his 'not to worry' verdict. The upshot...of the gunshot...four and a half decades later, still unclear.
I have received a pitch from Peninsula Open Space, an eminently worthwhile NGO that has systematically done what the government should have done. Buying up lands in the hills and along the coastline of the increasingly crowded countryside south of San Francisco. What the British would call a green belt. Here, the situation being more of a green scarf, such is the geography. I like everything about the pitch from this organization. What is there to say except this land is your land, this land is my land, no man is an island...so give us some money to buy more of it. Land, that is. Until we build it up and up, this mercantile-free zone in which nature predominates, and Walmart does not. And they are not fucking around, these people. Their minimum donation, at least the options available on their mailer, is $100. Which gives me pause, but not much. No, the only problem with Peninsula Open Space has to do with space itself. I'm having a hard time defining one from the other. Where I draw the line. Meaning, faced with the obvious problem of general disaster all around, a yawning need for worthy contributions in every imaginable area.... And I feel I am responsible. Responsible for just about everything. If I don't help, who will? What will become of the world, without my assistance and intervention? As I say, I am having trouble defining space. Mine, versus virtually everyone else's.
Save the Bay. Save the Whales. Save the date...any number of dates, actually, for any number of worthy organizations. Take the World Affairs Council. Somehow, I actually joined this organization, and now? Well, they host public speakers, run seminars, generally conduct forums on the global state of things. Eminently worthy, of course. But their goings-on have a way of going on in the center of San Francisco, not to mention on nights when the Menlo Park Chorus has other things in mind for me. And can I let down the bass section? I mean, have I no sense of responsibility? That I have no voice in the matter, acknowledging the presence of a thin baritone, untrained and unreliable, seems obvious. I mean, you sign up for a chorus, and you had better turn up for a chorus, right? Space. Chorus space. MySpace. In your face.
Which brings us to Facebook. Another source of guilt. People keep trying to friend me, of course. Which unnerves me on so many levels as to render this person catatonic. Friend, verb transitive, is acquiring as diverse a set of meanings as 'fuck.' Except that the latter ranges from affectionate intimacy to hostile aggression, and the Facebook verb spans possibilities as rich as membership in the Safeway Club. So, the whole area sets my teeth on edge. And yet I keep getting these notices that someone has done something to my wall. Graffiti. Pissing on it. Testing it for earthquake safety. I don't know. And I really wouldn't care, except that, well, these communiqués emanate from people such as my cousins in upstate New York. I really would like to at least say hello, but do I really have to be up against the wall? Whatever 'the wall' is? And, believe me, I really have tried. But 'the wall' doesn't make sense. I don't write things on my walls at home. Why should I do this on screen? Yes, I know, it is a metaphor. But I don't like it, this metaphor. It doesn't work. Except that some walls are weight-bearing, and this one isn't. Which still leaves me where I started, with guilt, or a throbbing sense of responsibility. For people are trying to contact me, be friendly. And what am I being, except for churlish, curmudgeonly, not to mention extremely out of it. Because in truth I do want to share space with these people. Just not cyberspace. When someone says 'up against the wall, mother fucker,' surely they can't be thinking pixels.
This problem with boundaries emanates from my childhood, of course. As soon as my parents started fighting, they started confiding in, you guessed it, the oldest and most verbally precocious candidate available. Neither parent seemed to have much grasp of the fact that I was a kid and could be expected to have anything like a life. Mine was a 24-hour a day job, mother cheerer, father listener, marriage saver. Family protector. There wasn't much space. No wonder I'm a little confused about what to do about Open Space. Except space out. And, I have decided, share space with the people I have already given money to at the World Affairs Council. The Bay? Let someone else save it. The Peninsula? It will have to save itself. The world? Simple. I have decided to friend it.
In the wake of my wife's death, one curious phenomenon involved newspapers and the news. Whatever cells or receptor sites within them are attuned to current events had gone numb. Actually, they had shrunk, like the human stomach after a fast. I could take in only so much, which was very little. In retrospect, and signaling that this phenomenon has passed, I do wonder what was going on. Perhaps I was more tuned into the eternal, the issues that inhabit that blank spot between the dead and the living. Perhaps I was just exhausted. No, I could only have been selectively exhausted, for it was the polemical that turned me off so thoroughly. I would stare at a newspaper, the New York Review of Books, anything involving contemporary, or even critical, thought...and retreat. When pressed, I would blank out. The whole organism was resisting. The source was something deep, totally beyond my control and seemingly permanent.
Wrong. I am pleased to report the return of interest in such matters. And just in time for Armageddon. A term which, by the way, is neither accurate, nor helpful. Nothing more than history repeating itself, as Marx put it, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. And the problem with farce is that to enjoy it, you have to be in the audience. It's a different matter on stage. On the receiving end of a loud, cruel blow, your face smarts. As a spectator, a slap is the stuff of slapstick. All of which poses a significant problem for any red blooded American. Which is why we should look to Britain. Where Labour's David Miliband, recently cartooned in the satirical magazine Private Eye as the new 'Prince of Darkness'...actually bought the cartoonist's original artwork. Which he has hung on the wall of his home. A man who regularly makes serious pronouncements on everything from UK poverty to Gaza...wants to see himself lampooned badly enough to shell out lots of money...and has made no secret of it. He has also made no big thing of it. In fact, this little story only emerged in a casual interview with the current editor of Private Eye. End of story. Not that there was ever a beginning.
In any case, damned if I'm not back in the world of news. Following the events of the day. Getting worked up. Working out, one might say, my frustrations. Of which there are plenty. Especially as the night grows, the darkness looming darker as the hours advance. Who knows what old anxiety lies at the heart of this? My challenge, for the time being, is to accept. When sleep ceases, long about 4:30 AM, I get up, muse upon my emotional state, have a bite of chocolate, stare out the living room window, steady my breathing. And hope for the best. And the best is often disappointing. A return to bed, a succession of obsessive thoughts, an occasional glimpse of the bedroom ceiling, until it is all over, the night, and it becomes official, the day.
But for now, I rejoice in this thing about the newspapers and magazines and online articles. Somehow, I am with it. Sucked downward by grief, I have bobbed back to the surface. True, there is a worrying tendency to be everyone's friend at Kepler's, local bookstore and in my mind, potential site of my own launch into literature. I imagine having a reading here, and also imagine that it can't hurt to be known to the staff. Possibly can't help either. Who can say? The guy who sells me today's Kipling even tells me his name. Good to be so extroverted and buoyant and all, I tell myself rolling out the door.
Okay, I admit that it took until this morning to hear, almost inadvertently, of the derailment of the northbound Coast Starlight, Amtrak's train to Seattle. Still, I did hear. Which led me right to the San Francisco Chronicle website, which...go figure...had CBS news footage of the (minor) collision of two trains at the Oakland station. Did not look like much, but the thing, startlingly prominent, was the close-up of a rather dazed passenger standing on the platform and regarding the slightly damaged locomotives. Phyllis. Partner of recently deceased Clint. I knew she was heading to Seattle on this very train, but of course had forgotten until this cosmic message.
Followed only hours later by an actual telephonic message, Phyllis herself calling as the greatly delayed Starlight zipped across Lake Shasta at 3:30 in the afternoon. Making it only 10 or 11 hours late, which at one phase in the train's existence was more or less par for the course. Do not underestimate the chutzpah of a greedy railway, such as the Union Pacific, owner of the Seattle-bound tracks. Another story. In any case, I quite understood Phyllis' delight. It is a glorious natural place, California, and the normal schedule of the train rolls passengers through the upper Sacramento River canyonlands at something like 5 AM. So there is much to be said for a delay in terms of scenery. The tracks roll through the river canyon, climb up and out to skirt the lava flows at the base of Mount Shasta. And it is all glorious.
And I learned something during the phase of my life in which I took this train to Seattle quite a few times. That being off schedule was often the best. One missed so much by being on time. And since I am so filled with regret for all that I have lost in life, particularly the time...when I could have, should have, been doing so many other things...having taken 11 years to progress from rehabilitation hospital to my first full-time job at age 32. In short, I identify with the Coast Starlight. Late, but with compensations. A situation that applies, seemingly, whether one is on or off the train. And of course, America's railways were once great, that is to say, headed for tragedy, as well as Chicago. And now they are a farce, but being in the midst of the farce is both scenic and pleasant and something I heartily recommend. Do book a sleeping compartment. If you can't sleep at home, not sleeping on the rails really won't matter.
Wrong. I am pleased to report the return of interest in such matters. And just in time for Armageddon. A term which, by the way, is neither accurate, nor helpful. Nothing more than history repeating itself, as Marx put it, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. And the problem with farce is that to enjoy it, you have to be in the audience. It's a different matter on stage. On the receiving end of a loud, cruel blow, your face smarts. As a spectator, a slap is the stuff of slapstick. All of which poses a significant problem for any red blooded American. Which is why we should look to Britain. Where Labour's David Miliband, recently cartooned in the satirical magazine Private Eye as the new 'Prince of Darkness'...actually bought the cartoonist's original artwork. Which he has hung on the wall of his home. A man who regularly makes serious pronouncements on everything from UK poverty to Gaza...wants to see himself lampooned badly enough to shell out lots of money...and has made no secret of it. He has also made no big thing of it. In fact, this little story only emerged in a casual interview with the current editor of Private Eye. End of story. Not that there was ever a beginning.
In any case, damned if I'm not back in the world of news. Following the events of the day. Getting worked up. Working out, one might say, my frustrations. Of which there are plenty. Especially as the night grows, the darkness looming darker as the hours advance. Who knows what old anxiety lies at the heart of this? My challenge, for the time being, is to accept. When sleep ceases, long about 4:30 AM, I get up, muse upon my emotional state, have a bite of chocolate, stare out the living room window, steady my breathing. And hope for the best. And the best is often disappointing. A return to bed, a succession of obsessive thoughts, an occasional glimpse of the bedroom ceiling, until it is all over, the night, and it becomes official, the day.
But for now, I rejoice in this thing about the newspapers and magazines and online articles. Somehow, I am with it. Sucked downward by grief, I have bobbed back to the surface. True, there is a worrying tendency to be everyone's friend at Kepler's, local bookstore and in my mind, potential site of my own launch into literature. I imagine having a reading here, and also imagine that it can't hurt to be known to the staff. Possibly can't help either. Who can say? The guy who sells me today's Kipling even tells me his name. Good to be so extroverted and buoyant and all, I tell myself rolling out the door.
Okay, I admit that it took until this morning to hear, almost inadvertently, of the derailment of the northbound Coast Starlight, Amtrak's train to Seattle. Still, I did hear. Which led me right to the San Francisco Chronicle website, which...go figure...had CBS news footage of the (minor) collision of two trains at the Oakland station. Did not look like much, but the thing, startlingly prominent, was the close-up of a rather dazed passenger standing on the platform and regarding the slightly damaged locomotives. Phyllis. Partner of recently deceased Clint. I knew she was heading to Seattle on this very train, but of course had forgotten until this cosmic message.
Followed only hours later by an actual telephonic message, Phyllis herself calling as the greatly delayed Starlight zipped across Lake Shasta at 3:30 in the afternoon. Making it only 10 or 11 hours late, which at one phase in the train's existence was more or less par for the course. Do not underestimate the chutzpah of a greedy railway, such as the Union Pacific, owner of the Seattle-bound tracks. Another story. In any case, I quite understood Phyllis' delight. It is a glorious natural place, California, and the normal schedule of the train rolls passengers through the upper Sacramento River canyonlands at something like 5 AM. So there is much to be said for a delay in terms of scenery. The tracks roll through the river canyon, climb up and out to skirt the lava flows at the base of Mount Shasta. And it is all glorious.
And I learned something during the phase of my life in which I took this train to Seattle quite a few times. That being off schedule was often the best. One missed so much by being on time. And since I am so filled with regret for all that I have lost in life, particularly the time...when I could have, should have, been doing so many other things...having taken 11 years to progress from rehabilitation hospital to my first full-time job at age 32. In short, I identify with the Coast Starlight. Late, but with compensations. A situation that applies, seemingly, whether one is on or off the train. And of course, America's railways were once great, that is to say, headed for tragedy, as well as Chicago. And now they are a farce, but being in the midst of the farce is both scenic and pleasant and something I heartily recommend. Do book a sleeping compartment. If you can't sleep at home, not sleeping on the rails really won't matter.
'Expression is the need of my soul,' said Archy, Don Marquis' famous cockroach. Such a simple, essential sentiment, and why can't I remember this myself? I wonder if women have an easier, more instinctive response to this need. In any case, I am experiencing the post-non-expression fallout of one particular day, yesterday. Which had superficially nothing very particular about it. Except for a private sense of letting things go, easing up on myself, advice from the Psychologist I Happen to Bump into on Mondays. Tempered with the observation that terrifying early experiences will continue to ripple through my life, nothing wrong with this, so don't worry. Always plenty to worry about, that is. Life. And damned if by the end of the day, yesterday, it wasn't all feeling better. Less anxious, certainly. Which being something of a novelty, constitutes news. Private, personal, inner news. The sort of thing I could have easily told Jane over dinner. But I kept this inside me. Because I'm used to keeping things inside me. And with all this new, undigested good feeling...well, it needed an outlet. Enough to keep me awake until midnight, then prematurely bolting alert at 5 AM. Whatever. Such is my new attitude. Some nights one sleeps, some one doesn't, and the beat goes on. Principally the heartbeat, for which one should be grateful.
Oh, what a beautiful morning. Yes, doubtless globally warmed, polluted and harboring the seeds of its own destruction. And what is one to do but scoot Peet's-ward? Our changing world being very much in evidence all the way. Beginning with the transformation of a $1.2 million Menlo Park bungalow and garage into four $1.2 million townhouses. Jane has been giving the emerging homes the fisheye. True, they are most unattractive in color, their spatial relationship to each other unclear and uninviting. But they are a work in progress, so I waive judgment. More important, I wave greetings at the forklift operator, the flag waver in the hardhat, all the Hispanic workforce building housing for these most deserving of the high-tech affluent. The latter doubtless queuing up to buy these four houselets. This is somehow the engine of capitalism, this sort of thing, and it's not bad if the engine is pulling a train. This is the other thing, what's coupled to the current boomlet in this small area of San Francisco and points south, at least a temporary island of prosperity in the drowning sea of the American New Depression.
These days George does not even nod at me as I make my way into Peet's. For the longest time he actually opened the door, such was his self-appointed task. Something about this has always irked me. Particularly the notion that I must tip, a.k.a., reimburse George for his unwanted services. I didn't hire him, and that is that. Except that it isn't. George has conflated several layers of issues and complicated the market for his services in a most unnecessary way. First, there is the matter of helping the disabled person. A tricky one for all concerned. So this amounts to a quibble, and George could benefit from my upcoming weekend seminars on this topic. For the moment, it would be better if he did not leap to his feet quite so automatically to yank open the door to Peet's at my every approach. Better - ask me if I want help. This at least creates the illusion of my personal independence. A very valuable fantasy, and one for which I would tip George handsomely. As it is, the whole thing has a wheelchair = door opening formula to it that rings unpleasant bells signaling dependency. A quibble, but when delivering a self-created service of marginal utility, nuance is everything.
I like George's sign. This morning it leads with the observation that he is not homeless - but needs money. I more than like this. It is utterly frank, not to mention disarmingly honest, and he doesn't even pretend to be seeking work. He opens the door, rain or shine, particularly shine, and that is enough, it seems. Works for me, it really does. After all, George's plight is a national one. His solution utterly entrepreneurial. His future...no doubt closely aligned with the nation's. Actually, at some point, I must give George $10, maybe $20. Begrudgingly, I must acknowledge his door opening. This man has opened doors for me, I would say at his testimonial dinner. A fact is a fact. Better, there is that time when I left my Panama hat sitting on a table at Peet's. George, seated outside by the button for the corner traffic light, the one he pushes even though I have been known to push buttons myself quite handily, by the way...anyway, he spotted what I had left behind. Who knows if I would have ever remembered that hat or gotten it back from Peet's lost property department? Talk about alertness, not to mention seeing through several layers. The problem with giving George a few bucks is that I am afraid he will open the door even more frequently for me. He will see me, leap to his aging feet and utterly embarrass me, again and again. All of which could be placed most effectively under control with a quick meeting. Wherein we define boundaries and set goals and enumerate job duties. Such as, don't open the door unless I give you the high sign. Something like that. I will consider this, I really will.
For the time being, I am in the door and note that Armando, renowned barista, is not behind the counter but at one of the tables. I speed by him, quickly saying hello. In truth, I am slightly embarrassed to see him there. This is because I am slightly embarrassed to see him working here at all. He is clearly a professional, a middle-aged guy who has done other things and somehow stuck in Peet's. Yes, like much of America. More to the point, like a surprising amount of my own life.
Having taken more than 10 years from my shooting in 1968 until my start of full time employment in 1979. But I have poor boundaries around these matters. Who knows? This may be a perfectly good place to work, Armando happy enough at it. And here he is, apparently even on his day off, coffeeing up at Peet's. Ours is not to worry. I place my order, come back and we chat about soccer. In his working guise, he is almost too helpful, our Armando, too solicitous. And I acknowledge this as a running thread, not to mention a fraying one. For it is ludicrous, my insistence that people must get it exactly right, helping me just enough, when I want it, desisting when I don't. Yes, there is more ground to cover here. But for now, we have a pleasant enough chat about soccer. My whole purpose being to deliver the message that I respect him, now that the sport of his native Venezuela is global, and America is not the world, and I'll catch him soon behind the counter. Caffeinated, I speed home.
And, yes, the $1.2 million townhouses or townhomes or mansionettes or whatever they are called, despite the price, have some important things going for them. Energy efficiency, of which these are exemplars by California standards. Green is good. Four houses in the space previously occupied by one is good. Being within a walk of the Caltrain station is good. And my upstairs tenant is looking very good. Not only has he redone the floors, painted the walls various decorator hues, I just heard him invite my reclusive, 80-year-old landlord Tom for dinner. That's right. A self described hermit, looking ever so slightly like Howard Hughes in his more eccentric phase, Tom said thank you and turned him down. I was glad that I did not turn him down, however occupancywise. We were transacting more than rent, I sensed. And I'm glad I have some sense. Sleep may be elusive, but I have this...whatever this is. I expect to find out soon.
Oh, what a beautiful morning. Yes, doubtless globally warmed, polluted and harboring the seeds of its own destruction. And what is one to do but scoot Peet's-ward? Our changing world being very much in evidence all the way. Beginning with the transformation of a $1.2 million Menlo Park bungalow and garage into four $1.2 million townhouses. Jane has been giving the emerging homes the fisheye. True, they are most unattractive in color, their spatial relationship to each other unclear and uninviting. But they are a work in progress, so I waive judgment. More important, I wave greetings at the forklift operator, the flag waver in the hardhat, all the Hispanic workforce building housing for these most deserving of the high-tech affluent. The latter doubtless queuing up to buy these four houselets. This is somehow the engine of capitalism, this sort of thing, and it's not bad if the engine is pulling a train. This is the other thing, what's coupled to the current boomlet in this small area of San Francisco and points south, at least a temporary island of prosperity in the drowning sea of the American New Depression.
These days George does not even nod at me as I make my way into Peet's. For the longest time he actually opened the door, such was his self-appointed task. Something about this has always irked me. Particularly the notion that I must tip, a.k.a., reimburse George for his unwanted services. I didn't hire him, and that is that. Except that it isn't. George has conflated several layers of issues and complicated the market for his services in a most unnecessary way. First, there is the matter of helping the disabled person. A tricky one for all concerned. So this amounts to a quibble, and George could benefit from my upcoming weekend seminars on this topic. For the moment, it would be better if he did not leap to his feet quite so automatically to yank open the door to Peet's at my every approach. Better - ask me if I want help. This at least creates the illusion of my personal independence. A very valuable fantasy, and one for which I would tip George handsomely. As it is, the whole thing has a wheelchair = door opening formula to it that rings unpleasant bells signaling dependency. A quibble, but when delivering a self-created service of marginal utility, nuance is everything.
I like George's sign. This morning it leads with the observation that he is not homeless - but needs money. I more than like this. It is utterly frank, not to mention disarmingly honest, and he doesn't even pretend to be seeking work. He opens the door, rain or shine, particularly shine, and that is enough, it seems. Works for me, it really does. After all, George's plight is a national one. His solution utterly entrepreneurial. His future...no doubt closely aligned with the nation's. Actually, at some point, I must give George $10, maybe $20. Begrudgingly, I must acknowledge his door opening. This man has opened doors for me, I would say at his testimonial dinner. A fact is a fact. Better, there is that time when I left my Panama hat sitting on a table at Peet's. George, seated outside by the button for the corner traffic light, the one he pushes even though I have been known to push buttons myself quite handily, by the way...anyway, he spotted what I had left behind. Who knows if I would have ever remembered that hat or gotten it back from Peet's lost property department? Talk about alertness, not to mention seeing through several layers. The problem with giving George a few bucks is that I am afraid he will open the door even more frequently for me. He will see me, leap to his aging feet and utterly embarrass me, again and again. All of which could be placed most effectively under control with a quick meeting. Wherein we define boundaries and set goals and enumerate job duties. Such as, don't open the door unless I give you the high sign. Something like that. I will consider this, I really will.
For the time being, I am in the door and note that Armando, renowned barista, is not behind the counter but at one of the tables. I speed by him, quickly saying hello. In truth, I am slightly embarrassed to see him there. This is because I am slightly embarrassed to see him working here at all. He is clearly a professional, a middle-aged guy who has done other things and somehow stuck in Peet's. Yes, like much of America. More to the point, like a surprising amount of my own life.
Having taken more than 10 years from my shooting in 1968 until my start of full time employment in 1979. But I have poor boundaries around these matters. Who knows? This may be a perfectly good place to work, Armando happy enough at it. And here he is, apparently even on his day off, coffeeing up at Peet's. Ours is not to worry. I place my order, come back and we chat about soccer. In his working guise, he is almost too helpful, our Armando, too solicitous. And I acknowledge this as a running thread, not to mention a fraying one. For it is ludicrous, my insistence that people must get it exactly right, helping me just enough, when I want it, desisting when I don't. Yes, there is more ground to cover here. But for now, we have a pleasant enough chat about soccer. My whole purpose being to deliver the message that I respect him, now that the sport of his native Venezuela is global, and America is not the world, and I'll catch him soon behind the counter. Caffeinated, I speed home.
And, yes, the $1.2 million townhouses or townhomes or mansionettes or whatever they are called, despite the price, have some important things going for them. Energy efficiency, of which these are exemplars by California standards. Green is good. Four houses in the space previously occupied by one is good. Being within a walk of the Caltrain station is good. And my upstairs tenant is looking very good. Not only has he redone the floors, painted the walls various decorator hues, I just heard him invite my reclusive, 80-year-old landlord Tom for dinner. That's right. A self described hermit, looking ever so slightly like Howard Hughes in his more eccentric phase, Tom said thank you and turned him down. I was glad that I did not turn him down, however occupancywise. We were transacting more than rent, I sensed. And I'm glad I have some sense. Sleep may be elusive, but I have this...whatever this is. I expect to find out soon.
Before there were video games, but only just, in that transition period between the corporeal and the pixel, there was pinball. At least, this is my impression. Surely I must have played pinball. In fact, I can see the steel ball bearing shot from a spring-loaded lever, hurtling and caroming, ricocheting and bouncing, but generally dropping, through a series of artificial obstacles. A controlled environment, not exactly an open shot on an open range. And one of the mysterious options being 'tilt.' Did people actually lean the pinball maze this way and that? Did 'tilt' become illuminated as an instruction on the game's electric headboard? Why do I think about this now when I tilt? My wheelchair leaning pleasantly backwards, my head slipping onto the rest provided for it...rest being essential just now. And yes it is one of my achievements this tilt mechanism, actually the social or interpersonal variety. Somehow in my weekly discussions with Paul, the volunteer who turns up from a local Catholic charity every Tuesday, I have broached the topic of the morning nap. Actually, I now refer to it as my HSP moment. This refers to the book The Highly Sensitive Person, which lends credence, provides cover and offers justification for the introvert's foible of overdosing on human interaction. God only knows if there is even the slightest truth to this HSP business. Which could be a trendy notion that will be gone in a few years. I may be gone in a few years myself, that is the point, and meanwhile I get awfully burned out at certain moments. Like this one. Where was I?
Café Borrone, to be exact. Paul and I were there for reasons that now seem unclear. But at the time had something to do with breakfast. We both opted for lunch instead. On such occasions I try to draw Paul out, encourage him to express himself, then offer advice and counsel. After all, I am more than twice his age. Least I can do in exchange for all his help about the place. Yet what tends to happen is that Paul draws me out. I tell him what is happening on the post-terror front, dealing with the aftermath of my shooting 43 years on. Which, symptomatically, can be described as not sleeping. Well, not sleeping enough.
I tell Paul that I am getting used to this notion that we don't get over such experiences. There is no 'over' to get. Nor do we get past or beyond or even by. We get up, if we are lucky. Dragging behind various bits of baggage. And when we get up at 4 AM, having woken into some nameless terror, we are particularly wise. For it has been my habit to just lie in bed at such insomniac moments, overwhelmed by the sense of wrongness, sleep being far from a luxury, but something physiologically mandated, healthy, essential. Yet elusive at such moments. But with help and sound advice, I am normalizing my early-morning wakefulness.
My life trails wisps of terror. It is likely to keep trailing them. At 4 AM I am trying on this notion, facing the large windows of my apartment, peering into the night, paralyzed foot elevated on the sofa. Long day's journey. Deep breathing, the passage of time, consideration of the possibility that I am actually safe, that no one is particularly after me except the Republicans, and they are after everyone else, so why worry? I go to bed. I dream not unpleasantly.
Getting up, making tea, and another day. Marked by several such HSP reclinings. Which have the quality of giving way, letting myself be overwhelmed. Which when one thinks about it, is the essence of being gunned down in the streets. How to respond to an overwhelming force? Give way and give in, I say, and at least get a rest. With Paul's arrival, I have help getting on my socks, not to mention my shoes, which takes an enormous burden off the morning. I am attired and rolling in no time at all, even stuffing Schwab statements in the appropriate folder. All sorts of things lie buried on my desk. Articles from friends. DVDs. Announcements of cultural events. A recipe for sweet potato fries. The model names and serial numbers of my television and DVD player. Projects half-started, half forgotten, and many ready to be discarded. I am getting on with the day, that is the thing.
Outside, Paul helps with the garden. Not that there is much to do at this point in the season. I stare dumbfounded at the brussels sprouts. They do the same. They wonder why they are still living, and so do I. The mystery of 'how' does occur to me, though I quickly discard the matter. At some point, some point soon, I will simply cut these stupid things down and eat what is left. Still, I can't help it. I ask Paul to peer among the leaves and see what is eating them. The holes are rather large and not caused by aphids, the summerlong blight on these plants. Cabbage loopers, the common lepidopteran wiggly vermin? No. Paul retrieves five small snails from among the few leaves at the very tip of the brussels sprouts, a good four feet from the roots. How these vile things climbed all this way...or knew to climb all this way, sliming their pseudopods over one brussels sprout after the next, until paydirt, the very top leaves where photosynthesis and essential growth activity occurs...gosh, it beggars the imagination. But such is the life force.
Even snails have a life. It is just that in the natural order of things, the wild order, that life should be occurring in France. These escaped escargot, an invasive species, need to do their thing elsewhere. Paul has thrown them on the ground. When he isn't looking, I roll over them with my wheelchair tires. The least I can do for the California environment. Paul has this St. Francis of Assisi thing going, which I do respect as much as possible. After all, I am simply rolling my wheelchair about quite innocently, which I do all the time. Bye-bye snails.
So, as the day advances, life pounds me into the occasional nap. I pound back. Pound for pound. Getting a rest, but also getting some exercise. A good half hour on the rowing machine. Moving and resting, I progress.
Café Borrone, to be exact. Paul and I were there for reasons that now seem unclear. But at the time had something to do with breakfast. We both opted for lunch instead. On such occasions I try to draw Paul out, encourage him to express himself, then offer advice and counsel. After all, I am more than twice his age. Least I can do in exchange for all his help about the place. Yet what tends to happen is that Paul draws me out. I tell him what is happening on the post-terror front, dealing with the aftermath of my shooting 43 years on. Which, symptomatically, can be described as not sleeping. Well, not sleeping enough.
I tell Paul that I am getting used to this notion that we don't get over such experiences. There is no 'over' to get. Nor do we get past or beyond or even by. We get up, if we are lucky. Dragging behind various bits of baggage. And when we get up at 4 AM, having woken into some nameless terror, we are particularly wise. For it has been my habit to just lie in bed at such insomniac moments, overwhelmed by the sense of wrongness, sleep being far from a luxury, but something physiologically mandated, healthy, essential. Yet elusive at such moments. But with help and sound advice, I am normalizing my early-morning wakefulness.
My life trails wisps of terror. It is likely to keep trailing them. At 4 AM I am trying on this notion, facing the large windows of my apartment, peering into the night, paralyzed foot elevated on the sofa. Long day's journey. Deep breathing, the passage of time, consideration of the possibility that I am actually safe, that no one is particularly after me except the Republicans, and they are after everyone else, so why worry? I go to bed. I dream not unpleasantly.
Getting up, making tea, and another day. Marked by several such HSP reclinings. Which have the quality of giving way, letting myself be overwhelmed. Which when one thinks about it, is the essence of being gunned down in the streets. How to respond to an overwhelming force? Give way and give in, I say, and at least get a rest. With Paul's arrival, I have help getting on my socks, not to mention my shoes, which takes an enormous burden off the morning. I am attired and rolling in no time at all, even stuffing Schwab statements in the appropriate folder. All sorts of things lie buried on my desk. Articles from friends. DVDs. Announcements of cultural events. A recipe for sweet potato fries. The model names and serial numbers of my television and DVD player. Projects half-started, half forgotten, and many ready to be discarded. I am getting on with the day, that is the thing.
Outside, Paul helps with the garden. Not that there is much to do at this point in the season. I stare dumbfounded at the brussels sprouts. They do the same. They wonder why they are still living, and so do I. The mystery of 'how' does occur to me, though I quickly discard the matter. At some point, some point soon, I will simply cut these stupid things down and eat what is left. Still, I can't help it. I ask Paul to peer among the leaves and see what is eating them. The holes are rather large and not caused by aphids, the summerlong blight on these plants. Cabbage loopers, the common lepidopteran wiggly vermin? No. Paul retrieves five small snails from among the few leaves at the very tip of the brussels sprouts, a good four feet from the roots. How these vile things climbed all this way...or knew to climb all this way, sliming their pseudopods over one brussels sprout after the next, until paydirt, the very top leaves where photosynthesis and essential growth activity occurs...gosh, it beggars the imagination. But such is the life force.
Even snails have a life. It is just that in the natural order of things, the wild order, that life should be occurring in France. These escaped escargot, an invasive species, need to do their thing elsewhere. Paul has thrown them on the ground. When he isn't looking, I roll over them with my wheelchair tires. The least I can do for the California environment. Paul has this St. Francis of Assisi thing going, which I do respect as much as possible. After all, I am simply rolling my wheelchair about quite innocently, which I do all the time. Bye-bye snails.
So, as the day advances, life pounds me into the occasional nap. I pound back. Pound for pound. Getting a rest, but also getting some exercise. A good half hour on the rowing machine. Moving and resting, I progress.
The day begins, as most do currently, far too early, with a 3:30 AM wake-up call from the psyche. With a reminder. The book. No, not the book of life, the one sealed a couple of days ago at sundown on Yom Kippur. The other book. The one coming out in January and authored by me. So what, you ask? Exactly. So what. Except that in my early morning musings I am in front of a group of well-wishers at the local bookstore. And they are asking questions. And as is often the case in dreams, or the post-dream waking state, there are no details. Who knows what questions they are asking? I am trying to answer and can feel myself sinking into a sort of quicksand, for there is no safe treading on these unstable grounds. A sinking feeling, that is what I have before my imagined bookstore friends. For strangely it is hitting me now, the very sort of thing that did not hit me in the writing process, that I have put a bunch of stuff down on paper...or to be more contemporary, on screen...that is really no one's business but mine. Except that I have made it everyone's business, there is no one to blame but myself, and now it is too late. Why did I ever write a stupid book? Thus, the general tenor of these early morning musings. Why?
By midmorning, the question is 'why not?' After all, I have just fought my exercycle through an uphill 40 minutes, largely in pursuit of Sandi Toksvig, or pursued by her, thus the power of BBC radio's best acerbity. And when her show is over, fumbling with my iPod gets me only Puccini with Pasta, some old CD that now booms through my earphones. This is a day when I don't have much patience for my own manual dysfunction. The iPod is a marvelously simple device, and changing podcasts and albums is an utter no-brainer. But it is not a no-handser. More precisely, I have to keep pedaling to maintain the digital readout and know how far I have come or gone in virtual exercise space, and doing this while one-handedly trying to work the iPod controls pushes me right over the edge. Worse, the silly bit of electronics cannot discern music from speech. Of course, there is probably some better way of organizing the content, but this would take years of study and a postgraduate degree. I don't have years. I want things sorted out now, and I am very pissed off by the fact of my imprecise thumb movements aiming at Puccini and hitting Prokofiev. Nothing wrong with Sergei, by the way, but he just doesn't have the stirring neuromuscular punch I need to complete my exercise regime. For there is no way around it, now being 35 minutes into pedaling, everything is beginning to flag, muscles, breathing, you name it. Meanwhile, I keep jabbing my numbed middle finger in the general direction of Turandot, finally get the right aria, and that gets me most of the way. I drag myself to my feet, somehow get both limbs unentwined from the machine, and into that other machine, which does at least have batteries.
Keep moving, that is the thing. For the psyche is moving faster than anything around it, and there is no sense in even trying to keep up. In fact, why not pour on the speed? No, not the wheelchair joystick, for it is already bent forward to the max. The coffee speed. I breeze in the door at Peet's, thanks to the kindness of a stranger, an attractive woman who wanders over with her younger and even more attractive companion, chatting about how she thought I needed help. Thanks ever so much, I say, rolling toward the counter. A double mocha will do, thank you very much, followed by a quick trip to the men's room. Note that only in my mind is any trip to any men's room ever quick. I have to get inside, turn the light on, position my wheelchair in a certain relation to the safety bars, then deal with the general process of elimination, which to spare the details, involves dealing with a spastic bladder. Which, unlike wine, does not improve with age. Never mind. I am out and returning to my table only to find...what I cannot find. I had placed an article by Robert Reich right on the plastic surface, deposited my glasses on top of that, which is my common practice. After all, what is more personal than glasses? A computer printout from Salon may easily get chucked out by the cleaning staff, but one's specs?
Something like panic. I look around the place, wondering if there is a lens thief trying to abscond. After all, beneath the surface, the entire economic system is cracking apart. Poverty, deprivation and hopelessness are already beginning to ooze upward through the widening fissures. I wave at one of the staff. A new girl, large, flushed and clueless, wanders out from behind the counter. She has my glasses, Robert Reich, and I have her number. Watch out, and don't trust. Perhaps even revise the glasses-on-the-table ploy. I roll around to the far side of the table, my table, slap Reich on the surface and prepare to read.
'Won't you stop spinning around?' This from the very woman who opened the door moments earlier. I take in her remark like one of those computers with the much touted dual processors. I know she is joking, trying to be friendly, and actually probably take the sting out of my disability...her reaction to it, mine, some combination thereof, who can say? At the same time, another processor feels I am being ridiculed, she doesn't know the story of the almost stolen glasses and is being too familiar. Without making eye contact, I assure her that 'I am here now.' She resumes her conversation, and in the wake of this exchange, somehow I am all ears. She is organizing a conference, a quite progressive one from what I can hear. Left-wing economists, technology types, business leaders. The sort of thing that goes on in this area, think-tankish endeavors of all kinds. Okay, I am cooling out now, realize the error of my ways, the churlishness of my behavior and...do not know what to do.
Except not to do this again. After all, I go to Peet's, at least in part, because it is a social environment. And here someone was trying to talk to me, get somewhat familiar...that is to say, neighborly...and I cut them off. Refused to play. And why? Because beneath the surface, I still carry a burden of shame. Ashamed of being disabled. Of looking disabled. Of taking up so much space with my wheelchair that my 'spinning around' is obvious. Even ashamed of having my glasses spirited away, as though I should know better. As though I am someone who can expect ridicule from a complete stranger...much as I ridicule myself. It is better if I don't do this, much better, but so things have gone. And soon I will be gone, at least from Peet's. And it's barely midmorning, and the day is already so emotionally exhausting, I feel like taking a nap.
By midmorning, the question is 'why not?' After all, I have just fought my exercycle through an uphill 40 minutes, largely in pursuit of Sandi Toksvig, or pursued by her, thus the power of BBC radio's best acerbity. And when her show is over, fumbling with my iPod gets me only Puccini with Pasta, some old CD that now booms through my earphones. This is a day when I don't have much patience for my own manual dysfunction. The iPod is a marvelously simple device, and changing podcasts and albums is an utter no-brainer. But it is not a no-handser. More precisely, I have to keep pedaling to maintain the digital readout and know how far I have come or gone in virtual exercise space, and doing this while one-handedly trying to work the iPod controls pushes me right over the edge. Worse, the silly bit of electronics cannot discern music from speech. Of course, there is probably some better way of organizing the content, but this would take years of study and a postgraduate degree. I don't have years. I want things sorted out now, and I am very pissed off by the fact of my imprecise thumb movements aiming at Puccini and hitting Prokofiev. Nothing wrong with Sergei, by the way, but he just doesn't have the stirring neuromuscular punch I need to complete my exercise regime. For there is no way around it, now being 35 minutes into pedaling, everything is beginning to flag, muscles, breathing, you name it. Meanwhile, I keep jabbing my numbed middle finger in the general direction of Turandot, finally get the right aria, and that gets me most of the way. I drag myself to my feet, somehow get both limbs unentwined from the machine, and into that other machine, which does at least have batteries.
Keep moving, that is the thing. For the psyche is moving faster than anything around it, and there is no sense in even trying to keep up. In fact, why not pour on the speed? No, not the wheelchair joystick, for it is already bent forward to the max. The coffee speed. I breeze in the door at Peet's, thanks to the kindness of a stranger, an attractive woman who wanders over with her younger and even more attractive companion, chatting about how she thought I needed help. Thanks ever so much, I say, rolling toward the counter. A double mocha will do, thank you very much, followed by a quick trip to the men's room. Note that only in my mind is any trip to any men's room ever quick. I have to get inside, turn the light on, position my wheelchair in a certain relation to the safety bars, then deal with the general process of elimination, which to spare the details, involves dealing with a spastic bladder. Which, unlike wine, does not improve with age. Never mind. I am out and returning to my table only to find...what I cannot find. I had placed an article by Robert Reich right on the plastic surface, deposited my glasses on top of that, which is my common practice. After all, what is more personal than glasses? A computer printout from Salon may easily get chucked out by the cleaning staff, but one's specs?
Something like panic. I look around the place, wondering if there is a lens thief trying to abscond. After all, beneath the surface, the entire economic system is cracking apart. Poverty, deprivation and hopelessness are already beginning to ooze upward through the widening fissures. I wave at one of the staff. A new girl, large, flushed and clueless, wanders out from behind the counter. She has my glasses, Robert Reich, and I have her number. Watch out, and don't trust. Perhaps even revise the glasses-on-the-table ploy. I roll around to the far side of the table, my table, slap Reich on the surface and prepare to read.
'Won't you stop spinning around?' This from the very woman who opened the door moments earlier. I take in her remark like one of those computers with the much touted dual processors. I know she is joking, trying to be friendly, and actually probably take the sting out of my disability...her reaction to it, mine, some combination thereof, who can say? At the same time, another processor feels I am being ridiculed, she doesn't know the story of the almost stolen glasses and is being too familiar. Without making eye contact, I assure her that 'I am here now.' She resumes her conversation, and in the wake of this exchange, somehow I am all ears. She is organizing a conference, a quite progressive one from what I can hear. Left-wing economists, technology types, business leaders. The sort of thing that goes on in this area, think-tankish endeavors of all kinds. Okay, I am cooling out now, realize the error of my ways, the churlishness of my behavior and...do not know what to do.
Except not to do this again. After all, I go to Peet's, at least in part, because it is a social environment. And here someone was trying to talk to me, get somewhat familiar...that is to say, neighborly...and I cut them off. Refused to play. And why? Because beneath the surface, I still carry a burden of shame. Ashamed of being disabled. Of looking disabled. Of taking up so much space with my wheelchair that my 'spinning around' is obvious. Even ashamed of having my glasses spirited away, as though I should know better. As though I am someone who can expect ridicule from a complete stranger...much as I ridicule myself. It is better if I don't do this, much better, but so things have gone. And soon I will be gone, at least from Peet's. And it's barely midmorning, and the day is already so emotionally exhausting, I feel like taking a nap.
The key to understanding me and Yom Kippur is that I have no real understanding of Yom Kippur. More of a flavor. My role, as Woody Allen defines it, falls into the "90% of life is showing up" rule. Which, at such times, is all that I know to do. So, let us waltz through the Jewish ceremonial space for those who, like me, have no Jewish background. And see what we find. Or what finds us. This is the thing with matters spiritual. Pretty much a hide and seek game.
The sun sets every night, or to be more precise, the earth rotates out of range of the sun's rays, creating the illusion of sundown - and the start of the Yom Kippur fast. Note that in the past I have quite...well, religiously...followed the basic rule. Which is that fasting involves not eating. Indeed, this is the trick. You want to fast, don't eat. You want to eat, forget Yom Kippur...that is the implication. This year found me in some strange stage with the holiday's approach. Which, accidentally, may be where one is supposed to be. The Days of Awe, all 10 of them between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur's. A process of introspecting, assessing and reconfiguring - such is my take on the thing. And damned if this year did not find me deeply enmeshed in reexperiencing of my 1968 shooting, violent thoughts of revenge, loose and unformed wishes for justice, even peace. Which translates on an experiential level to not sleeping, coming down with a psychogenic cold, and now...fasting? Something told me that the last 10 days had been sufficiently fraught without a further physiological load. I awoke on Yom Kippur morning and had a bowl of bran cereal, thank you very much.
In short, there was a Frank Sinatra do-it-my-way thing going on, versus an inferiority-in-the-face-of-group-pressure thing. And I had already had my breakfast, fast be damned, and now there was the matter of attire. Lorna, the assistant of the day, is better versed in matters of Filipina Catholicism than what to wear to Yom Kippur services. Nevertheless, one makes use of available resources, and there she was helping me find something dark and sober that did not involve a tie. The cognoscenti in my Palo Alto congregation wear white on...wasn't it Rosh Hashanah? Or was it Yom Kippur? Or both?
Like a high school kid wanting to fit in on the first day, I really would like to be attired properly. But this just isn't possible. I really don't recall who wore white when...why being another dimension, although it seems to have something to do with death shrouds and a symbol of funereal rebirth. Is that right? Or do I have this wrong? In any case, I do not have a white outfit. I don't play cricket. Or golf. The attire of the sprightly quadriplegic, sportif wear for the paralyzed, being something of a stretch. But only a stretch, not beyond reaching for. That is the point these days. And why it is the point I don't know...except that I do. Leisure wear for the quadriplegic is fine...unfamiliar to me so far, but fine. And something tells me that Yom Kippur being, well, serious, I should look serious. I put on gray trousers and a navy blue pullover, gray sports jacket. And after my morning constitutional, liming up and down the footpath arm-in-arm with Lorna, I am off.
Services are packed. That is the thing about Yom Kippur. Anyone in the orbital pull of things Jewish feels a strong tug. This is the one day you turn up. And so many Jews have turned up at my congregation that I don't recognize the place. Good thing I signed up early to read a Torah passage, in English, of course. Problem is, I can't figure out how to get up on the stage of the Jewish Community Center. And things are moving along rather smartly. After all, we have just read to ourselves, then read aloud, that long list of bad things I, or we, have done in the last year. It's quite a list. Comprehensive, not to mention exhaustive, but never mind, for I am very worried about how to get up on the stage. Thing is, one of the ushers says the route leads through the door marked exit. I see a very suspicious looking wheelchair lift stage left. As soon as the Torah procession starts, I get frantic, approach another usher, demand to see the route up to the bema. The usher leads me through the kitchen, we hang a right, and sure enough, there it is, a ramp to the stage. Now the problem is that I am here too early. Which raises essential questions about how out of it I really am. Why do I even pretend to be a Jew when I can't even turn up for my modest contribution to the service at the appropriate time? I try to quiet these fears. Soon it will be over.
The passage from Deuteronomy made absolutely no sense when I read it at home, but now with the collective experience, the words go into the microphone, out to the congregation and back into my brain, heightened and clarified. This is all about being left alone, left behind, and God...some positive, protective, renewing part of the life experience...wants us home. Right on. I want to be home myself. Reading concluded, I roll my wheelchair past the rabbi and fellow readers, a couple who just did the aliyah, the blessing. But they are occupied, talking to each other, so I scoot out. Normally, there is a pleasant handshake, a congratulatory moment, all warmth and recognition and belonging. But this is too awkward, the insiders talking to each other. I head back down the ramp, through the kitchen and out to the house.
But Joyce, one of my fellow readers, follows me. She didn't get a chance to shake my hand, she says. Joyce shakes it now. Why was I in such a hurry? Included. I am included. Even wanted. And it is beginning to settle in, this knowledge. Even later that evening when sated by all the food at a break-the-fast celebration, I return home and find that I cannot get my trousers unbuttoned. It is so embarrassing, how portly I am becoming in middle age. No, Jane tells me, eyes steady, there is no need to be embarrassed. She loves me. It's that simple, she says. And I try hard to listen to these words, to absorb them. For this part isn't simple. In fact, it is exhausting. But I do have the feeling that tonight I will get a good sleep.
The sun sets every night, or to be more precise, the earth rotates out of range of the sun's rays, creating the illusion of sundown - and the start of the Yom Kippur fast. Note that in the past I have quite...well, religiously...followed the basic rule. Which is that fasting involves not eating. Indeed, this is the trick. You want to fast, don't eat. You want to eat, forget Yom Kippur...that is the implication. This year found me in some strange stage with the holiday's approach. Which, accidentally, may be where one is supposed to be. The Days of Awe, all 10 of them between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur's. A process of introspecting, assessing and reconfiguring - such is my take on the thing. And damned if this year did not find me deeply enmeshed in reexperiencing of my 1968 shooting, violent thoughts of revenge, loose and unformed wishes for justice, even peace. Which translates on an experiential level to not sleeping, coming down with a psychogenic cold, and now...fasting? Something told me that the last 10 days had been sufficiently fraught without a further physiological load. I awoke on Yom Kippur morning and had a bowl of bran cereal, thank you very much.
In short, there was a Frank Sinatra do-it-my-way thing going on, versus an inferiority-in-the-face-of-group-pressure thing. And I had already had my breakfast, fast be damned, and now there was the matter of attire. Lorna, the assistant of the day, is better versed in matters of Filipina Catholicism than what to wear to Yom Kippur services. Nevertheless, one makes use of available resources, and there she was helping me find something dark and sober that did not involve a tie. The cognoscenti in my Palo Alto congregation wear white on...wasn't it Rosh Hashanah? Or was it Yom Kippur? Or both?
Like a high school kid wanting to fit in on the first day, I really would like to be attired properly. But this just isn't possible. I really don't recall who wore white when...why being another dimension, although it seems to have something to do with death shrouds and a symbol of funereal rebirth. Is that right? Or do I have this wrong? In any case, I do not have a white outfit. I don't play cricket. Or golf. The attire of the sprightly quadriplegic, sportif wear for the paralyzed, being something of a stretch. But only a stretch, not beyond reaching for. That is the point these days. And why it is the point I don't know...except that I do. Leisure wear for the quadriplegic is fine...unfamiliar to me so far, but fine. And something tells me that Yom Kippur being, well, serious, I should look serious. I put on gray trousers and a navy blue pullover, gray sports jacket. And after my morning constitutional, liming up and down the footpath arm-in-arm with Lorna, I am off.
Services are packed. That is the thing about Yom Kippur. Anyone in the orbital pull of things Jewish feels a strong tug. This is the one day you turn up. And so many Jews have turned up at my congregation that I don't recognize the place. Good thing I signed up early to read a Torah passage, in English, of course. Problem is, I can't figure out how to get up on the stage of the Jewish Community Center. And things are moving along rather smartly. After all, we have just read to ourselves, then read aloud, that long list of bad things I, or we, have done in the last year. It's quite a list. Comprehensive, not to mention exhaustive, but never mind, for I am very worried about how to get up on the stage. Thing is, one of the ushers says the route leads through the door marked exit. I see a very suspicious looking wheelchair lift stage left. As soon as the Torah procession starts, I get frantic, approach another usher, demand to see the route up to the bema. The usher leads me through the kitchen, we hang a right, and sure enough, there it is, a ramp to the stage. Now the problem is that I am here too early. Which raises essential questions about how out of it I really am. Why do I even pretend to be a Jew when I can't even turn up for my modest contribution to the service at the appropriate time? I try to quiet these fears. Soon it will be over.
The passage from Deuteronomy made absolutely no sense when I read it at home, but now with the collective experience, the words go into the microphone, out to the congregation and back into my brain, heightened and clarified. This is all about being left alone, left behind, and God...some positive, protective, renewing part of the life experience...wants us home. Right on. I want to be home myself. Reading concluded, I roll my wheelchair past the rabbi and fellow readers, a couple who just did the aliyah, the blessing. But they are occupied, talking to each other, so I scoot out. Normally, there is a pleasant handshake, a congratulatory moment, all warmth and recognition and belonging. But this is too awkward, the insiders talking to each other. I head back down the ramp, through the kitchen and out to the house.
But Joyce, one of my fellow readers, follows me. She didn't get a chance to shake my hand, she says. Joyce shakes it now. Why was I in such a hurry? Included. I am included. Even wanted. And it is beginning to settle in, this knowledge. Even later that evening when sated by all the food at a break-the-fast celebration, I return home and find that I cannot get my trousers unbuttoned. It is so embarrassing, how portly I am becoming in middle age. No, Jane tells me, eyes steady, there is no need to be embarrassed. She loves me. It's that simple, she says. And I try hard to listen to these words, to absorb them. For this part isn't simple. In fact, it is exhausting. But I do have the feeling that tonight I will get a good sleep.
Buffie and I have emerged from Trader Joe's, now sharing our neighborly secret, that both of us never miss the samples counter, where the free taste of the day is eternally on offer. We are now heading home, our apartments sharing a common footpath, all roads leading south. Or is it east? Actually, the latter is a much more useful frame of reference, the San Francisco Peninsula making some odd turns and twists as it skirts the Bay.
Buffie is full of traffic warnings. Do I really cross right in front of Trader Joe's, nary a stop sign, and just a zebra striped safety zone for pedestrians? Yes, I tell her. Dangerous, she says. Which I at first register as overly solicitous, then decide is something worth attending to. That I make certain drivers have seen me and show signs of slowing before I venture across the pavement, this reassures her. Global capitalism is cracking at its foundations, and the general impact on Menlo Park drivers cannot be ignored. Traffic being one of the likely early warnings that social collapse is imminent.
Buffie and I continue past the zebra crossing and down Crane Street. More passersby are noticing her today than usual, she says, and it is certainly due to me. This must be what it is to be an extrovert, to notice such things, to keep an approximate score of eyes darting your way. With a more detailed report detailing the number of male eyes, female eyes, and so on, perhaps even gauging the intensity or apparent motive. Fascinating. But also puzzling, for there is an essential, unanswered question. Or several.
Do people stare at me solely because of my wheelchair? Why? Should I care? Either way, am I truly oblivious to these stares? And if so, am I really not noticing, or am I blocking? Or more to the point, that is to say, perhaps closer to the truth, am I actually registering and 'steering' these wheelchair-inspired glances? By the latter, I mean smiling at people and encouraging them to do the same. Or, at other times, avoiding their gaze and finding the pleasant surprise of their smiles. Or staring back, almost challenging them to look right at me and...what? Acknowledge that they are looking right at me because I am rolling, and not ambulating. Go on, cripple starer, make my day. Gosh, what a rich and varied life is the introvert's.
Not that true oblivion is a particular virtue. In fact, ignorance is next to ungodliness, in my book...and because my book is about to achieve actual publication, let's get straight about this. People stare at me. Does it bother me? Would I like them not to stare? Depends.
I did have early exposure to Ed Roberts, avatar of the 1970s disabled movement, founder of a famous advocacy organization. Polio having taken its neuromuscular toll, Ed spent his days tooling about Berkeley in a wheelchair. He spent his nights in an iron lung. Which may explain why his 'tooling' anywhere was such a wonder to behold, Ed steering his electric wheelchair with two extremely weak fingers and the faintest hint of a wrist. His postural support was rather massive, some sort of formfitting design that tilted him backwards, perhaps to aid with his efforts at swallowing air, his daytime alternative to breathing. And it should be noted that, batteries being what they are, Ed achieved some impressive speeds on the local sidewalks. Hard to say precisely how he crossed streets. Ed wasn't all that good at turning his head, except in one direction. Still, he knew what he was doing, getting around places quite successfully for three motorized decades. But I digress. The point is that Ed cut quite a figure, and being a public figure and somewhere in the Nobel Prize league of extroverts, he worked conspicuousness into his act.
I recall someone's account of Ed's entrance at an important meeting. A foundation? A state agency? He headed one of the latter, ultimately. In any case, the meeting was already under way when Ed rolled in late...again, not a low-profile sight, being a tall man tilted back in a large wheelchair, doubtless followed by one or more attendants. All eyes turned...well, that goes without saying. But eyes do have a way of turning back, but not this time. With the meeting in progress, Ed asked his attendants to open a bag of potato chips. The room filled with the sound of crisps cracking in Ed's mouth.
And why? I can only say that any number of currents run through this moment. Attention grabbing, perhaps with a strategic end in mind. At the same time, something like counter-phobic behavior...having overdosed on a life of being stared at, make them stare some more. Or a certain amount of manipulative relishing of one's minority status...go ahead, just dare to judge, criticize, let alone tell me to stop chewing...I am the big macher now. All of this seems possible, and I would have to be Ed to know the real answer. And since he is dead, this is both problematical and largely undesirable. So there we are, the disabled person acutely aware of being looked at, openly harnessing this phenomenon. And apparently way beyond caring.
Have I not acquired some of Ed's state myself? At this point, I want to know that I can handle the world. In the 1970s, otherwise known as the Decade of Looking for Work, I applied for a job as junior news writer at a San Francisco television station. I turned up for the interview and the news director hustled me into a cramped, frenetic open office. The latter occurring only in retrospect, and entirely in my mind, for I, of course, hustle nowhere. In reality, I limped and lurched through a tight slalom of desks and noise, until the director found an open spot, motioned for me to sit. He stared at me as though wondering why I was there. The job, I explained. No job, he said, eyes hard and fixed. Sorry, I said, not quite getting it. I had phoned him, chatted briefly about his writer position. And here I was. Which was the problem. I was who I was, doubtless sitting rather cockeyed, trying to hold my paralyzed spastic hand still on my lap...and somehow it wouldn't do.
Around the same time, my old friend Monica was in town and invited me to meet her husband. We had a good evening, or so I thought. Later she told me that I had made Barry most uncomfortable. I wanted to ask what I had done wrong, but this was unnecessary. She was explaining reality. Barry was all about success, she said, and life's faltering imperfections disturbed him. A job and a friend, both with news of rejection. A message I had a hard time absorbing in that era. And yet, that was the era, the only era, when I got the truth. Somehow, at age 64, I have become a big boy. Now I want to know the truth, because I'm curious, because I can take it...and perhaps because I have something to do.
Buffie is full of traffic warnings. Do I really cross right in front of Trader Joe's, nary a stop sign, and just a zebra striped safety zone for pedestrians? Yes, I tell her. Dangerous, she says. Which I at first register as overly solicitous, then decide is something worth attending to. That I make certain drivers have seen me and show signs of slowing before I venture across the pavement, this reassures her. Global capitalism is cracking at its foundations, and the general impact on Menlo Park drivers cannot be ignored. Traffic being one of the likely early warnings that social collapse is imminent.
Buffie and I continue past the zebra crossing and down Crane Street. More passersby are noticing her today than usual, she says, and it is certainly due to me. This must be what it is to be an extrovert, to notice such things, to keep an approximate score of eyes darting your way. With a more detailed report detailing the number of male eyes, female eyes, and so on, perhaps even gauging the intensity or apparent motive. Fascinating. But also puzzling, for there is an essential, unanswered question. Or several.
Do people stare at me solely because of my wheelchair? Why? Should I care? Either way, am I truly oblivious to these stares? And if so, am I really not noticing, or am I blocking? Or more to the point, that is to say, perhaps closer to the truth, am I actually registering and 'steering' these wheelchair-inspired glances? By the latter, I mean smiling at people and encouraging them to do the same. Or, at other times, avoiding their gaze and finding the pleasant surprise of their smiles. Or staring back, almost challenging them to look right at me and...what? Acknowledge that they are looking right at me because I am rolling, and not ambulating. Go on, cripple starer, make my day. Gosh, what a rich and varied life is the introvert's.
Not that true oblivion is a particular virtue. In fact, ignorance is next to ungodliness, in my book...and because my book is about to achieve actual publication, let's get straight about this. People stare at me. Does it bother me? Would I like them not to stare? Depends.
I did have early exposure to Ed Roberts, avatar of the 1970s disabled movement, founder of a famous advocacy organization. Polio having taken its neuromuscular toll, Ed spent his days tooling about Berkeley in a wheelchair. He spent his nights in an iron lung. Which may explain why his 'tooling' anywhere was such a wonder to behold, Ed steering his electric wheelchair with two extremely weak fingers and the faintest hint of a wrist. His postural support was rather massive, some sort of formfitting design that tilted him backwards, perhaps to aid with his efforts at swallowing air, his daytime alternative to breathing. And it should be noted that, batteries being what they are, Ed achieved some impressive speeds on the local sidewalks. Hard to say precisely how he crossed streets. Ed wasn't all that good at turning his head, except in one direction. Still, he knew what he was doing, getting around places quite successfully for three motorized decades. But I digress. The point is that Ed cut quite a figure, and being a public figure and somewhere in the Nobel Prize league of extroverts, he worked conspicuousness into his act.
I recall someone's account of Ed's entrance at an important meeting. A foundation? A state agency? He headed one of the latter, ultimately. In any case, the meeting was already under way when Ed rolled in late...again, not a low-profile sight, being a tall man tilted back in a large wheelchair, doubtless followed by one or more attendants. All eyes turned...well, that goes without saying. But eyes do have a way of turning back, but not this time. With the meeting in progress, Ed asked his attendants to open a bag of potato chips. The room filled with the sound of crisps cracking in Ed's mouth.
And why? I can only say that any number of currents run through this moment. Attention grabbing, perhaps with a strategic end in mind. At the same time, something like counter-phobic behavior...having overdosed on a life of being stared at, make them stare some more. Or a certain amount of manipulative relishing of one's minority status...go ahead, just dare to judge, criticize, let alone tell me to stop chewing...I am the big macher now. All of this seems possible, and I would have to be Ed to know the real answer. And since he is dead, this is both problematical and largely undesirable. So there we are, the disabled person acutely aware of being looked at, openly harnessing this phenomenon. And apparently way beyond caring.
Have I not acquired some of Ed's state myself? At this point, I want to know that I can handle the world. In the 1970s, otherwise known as the Decade of Looking for Work, I applied for a job as junior news writer at a San Francisco television station. I turned up for the interview and the news director hustled me into a cramped, frenetic open office. The latter occurring only in retrospect, and entirely in my mind, for I, of course, hustle nowhere. In reality, I limped and lurched through a tight slalom of desks and noise, until the director found an open spot, motioned for me to sit. He stared at me as though wondering why I was there. The job, I explained. No job, he said, eyes hard and fixed. Sorry, I said, not quite getting it. I had phoned him, chatted briefly about his writer position. And here I was. Which was the problem. I was who I was, doubtless sitting rather cockeyed, trying to hold my paralyzed spastic hand still on my lap...and somehow it wouldn't do.
Around the same time, my old friend Monica was in town and invited me to meet her husband. We had a good evening, or so I thought. Later she told me that I had made Barry most uncomfortable. I wanted to ask what I had done wrong, but this was unnecessary. She was explaining reality. Barry was all about success, she said, and life's faltering imperfections disturbed him. A job and a friend, both with news of rejection. A message I had a hard time absorbing in that era. And yet, that was the era, the only era, when I got the truth. Somehow, at age 64, I have become a big boy. Now I want to know the truth, because I'm curious, because I can take it...and perhaps because I have something to do.
The morning finds me adrift on a sea of Walgreen's sleep remedy - and how can I find myself? I seem to have gone somewhere rather frightening. And is the fact that I have gone there frightening, or the place itself frightening? Both, I suspect. The trick being to rebut the former and soothe the latter. It's okay. Being afraid is okay.
And what are we talking about? The 3 AM wake-up call, basically. The body's announcement that it's time for terror. Disembodied and coming from no particular source. Just roaring along at an hour when nothing should be happening at all.
Which was equally true of the night I was shot. And is this what I cannot accept, that life can appear to proceed quite placidly, even boringly, until something intrudes with the force of Alien? Note that I have never seen the 30-year-old film, only a trailer, perhaps. One gets the idea. Well it is true. When you least expect it.... As a consequence, my disabled life is a matter of constant vigilance. There is no doubt that I can fall, get my arm stuck in something, encounter any manner of disaster, all in the quiet and comfort of my home. In other words, I do not trust quiet and comfort. I see menace lurking there. I see menace lurking everywhere. However life's plot unfolds, look for Harold Pinter in the final credits.
As for the night in question, terror was not actually among the ingredients. Horrified incredulity, yes. Plenty of that. Despair, hopelessness. Maybe a revitalizing sense of fear inside the ambulance, overlit and surprisingly soundproof when one considered the siren roaring outside. I do recall asking the paramedic if I was going to die. My talking, he said, was a good sign. Some impertinent questions from the Berkeley police while lying on a gurney. The incredible scene of a photographer, perhaps two photographers, leaning into the frame with vintage accordion cameras, complete with massive silver flash bowls exploding their white light in my face. For any introvert, the ultimate indignity. I even recall deciding right there and then that I might as well go to sleep, for I would either die or I wouldn't, but at least there would be no more flash photography.
No, the real terror began the next night. It was time for sleep, after all. The family members, the doctors, the police, all had come and gone with their bad news. None of which could remotely top my body's news, inert, deadened staring at the ceiling. Doubtless the nurse stepped into the hallway to give me some privacy or quiet. And this was almost certainly a big mistake. The last thing I wanted was to be alone. But suddenly the room was empty. And there was nothing, and I was in solitary, screaming or feeling like I wanted to scream, and totally abandoned.
In retrospect, this must have felt like a replay of my infancy, helpless in some cradle or other, the mother either absent or nonresponsive. A terror recalling a terror. Something in me clung to hospital consciousness, as though it was life. There was no letting go. Dreams were gathering in the hallway, lined up along the bed, incubi and succubi perched at the base of the wall, clamoring for that moment when I would slip unawares into their realm, and they could pounce. I did not sleep that night. I am almost certain.
'Almost' because as the nights wore on, sleep never seemed to come. People have assured me, long after the fact, that this was impossible. Yet it is my recollection. Not sleeping for four, maybe five, nights. The occasional psychologist would come by. The one I was seeing already, Don, plus another, perhaps a psychiatrist. I did tell one of them that I had been having dreams of being pursued by someone with a gun. Perfectly normal, he told me. Somehow, this did not reassure. Night and waking life, dreams and no life, all these states and possibilities had gotten muddled. Terror, being both deep and amorphous, is hard to talk away, normalize, or otherwise assuage. In retrospect, perhaps I needed to go toward it, rather than away.
Meaning, enough reexperiencing to face the savage fear, then decide I was safe, however hard to believe. What I do believe, in hindsight, is that being out at night anywhere in America felt menacing for about 20 years. It was always there, the fear, somewhere in the background. And I was never more than half conscious of this. And what's important now is the way fear, or terror, really seem to work. They come later, seemingly as part of a reevaluation, or a taking stock. In the moment we do what we have to do. The experience of helplessness, being overpowered, there being nothing there, screaming into emptiness...all this primal stuff is part of another stage. The only question being: does the stage go on forever? I don't know. Let us say, I'm working on it.
And what are we talking about? The 3 AM wake-up call, basically. The body's announcement that it's time for terror. Disembodied and coming from no particular source. Just roaring along at an hour when nothing should be happening at all.
Which was equally true of the night I was shot. And is this what I cannot accept, that life can appear to proceed quite placidly, even boringly, until something intrudes with the force of Alien? Note that I have never seen the 30-year-old film, only a trailer, perhaps. One gets the idea. Well it is true. When you least expect it.... As a consequence, my disabled life is a matter of constant vigilance. There is no doubt that I can fall, get my arm stuck in something, encounter any manner of disaster, all in the quiet and comfort of my home. In other words, I do not trust quiet and comfort. I see menace lurking there. I see menace lurking everywhere. However life's plot unfolds, look for Harold Pinter in the final credits.
As for the night in question, terror was not actually among the ingredients. Horrified incredulity, yes. Plenty of that. Despair, hopelessness. Maybe a revitalizing sense of fear inside the ambulance, overlit and surprisingly soundproof when one considered the siren roaring outside. I do recall asking the paramedic if I was going to die. My talking, he said, was a good sign. Some impertinent questions from the Berkeley police while lying on a gurney. The incredible scene of a photographer, perhaps two photographers, leaning into the frame with vintage accordion cameras, complete with massive silver flash bowls exploding their white light in my face. For any introvert, the ultimate indignity. I even recall deciding right there and then that I might as well go to sleep, for I would either die or I wouldn't, but at least there would be no more flash photography.
No, the real terror began the next night. It was time for sleep, after all. The family members, the doctors, the police, all had come and gone with their bad news. None of which could remotely top my body's news, inert, deadened staring at the ceiling. Doubtless the nurse stepped into the hallway to give me some privacy or quiet. And this was almost certainly a big mistake. The last thing I wanted was to be alone. But suddenly the room was empty. And there was nothing, and I was in solitary, screaming or feeling like I wanted to scream, and totally abandoned.
In retrospect, this must have felt like a replay of my infancy, helpless in some cradle or other, the mother either absent or nonresponsive. A terror recalling a terror. Something in me clung to hospital consciousness, as though it was life. There was no letting go. Dreams were gathering in the hallway, lined up along the bed, incubi and succubi perched at the base of the wall, clamoring for that moment when I would slip unawares into their realm, and they could pounce. I did not sleep that night. I am almost certain.
'Almost' because as the nights wore on, sleep never seemed to come. People have assured me, long after the fact, that this was impossible. Yet it is my recollection. Not sleeping for four, maybe five, nights. The occasional psychologist would come by. The one I was seeing already, Don, plus another, perhaps a psychiatrist. I did tell one of them that I had been having dreams of being pursued by someone with a gun. Perfectly normal, he told me. Somehow, this did not reassure. Night and waking life, dreams and no life, all these states and possibilities had gotten muddled. Terror, being both deep and amorphous, is hard to talk away, normalize, or otherwise assuage. In retrospect, perhaps I needed to go toward it, rather than away.
Meaning, enough reexperiencing to face the savage fear, then decide I was safe, however hard to believe. What I do believe, in hindsight, is that being out at night anywhere in America felt menacing for about 20 years. It was always there, the fear, somewhere in the background. And I was never more than half conscious of this. And what's important now is the way fear, or terror, really seem to work. They come later, seemingly as part of a reevaluation, or a taking stock. In the moment we do what we have to do. The experience of helplessness, being overpowered, there being nothing there, screaming into emptiness...all this primal stuff is part of another stage. The only question being: does the stage go on forever? I don't know. Let us say, I'm working on it.
It is all, all of it, in the old things. Even the small ones. Such as the moment, this very morning, when I perched one leg high on the back of the living room sofa, allowed myself to drift into a slight stupor, and got in touch with - as we say in California - my inner cruciform vegetables. That is to say, the broccoli and the cauliflower, both purchased eight days ago at the Menlo Park farmer's market, and residing, not to mention hidden, in the bottom of my fridge. They are good for you, these veggies, renowned for their knack of preventing their very state in the human being. Eat your broccoli and experience no vegging out, that is the bargain. And they had been lost, lost to memory, lost to life, and now they are returned. A small step, but one is grateful.
Much like Marlou's address book. Where did I think it was going? Doubtless to one of the people listed within its pages. For it seems almost alive, this thing, a small canvas covered book, a good modern pattern, well-worn and thumbed. And one can almost see the lines of connection, the web of vitality of which it is a node. Marlou's book of persons and places has been sitting on the table by the front door where I stage items for action. Mail going out. Checks to deposit. The registration to stash in my van. And this very personal little book of names...sitting there for practical reasons I truly can't recall and allowed to remain there for at least a year and a half due to sentiments never more than half conscious.
This is the summary of Marlou's human connections. Her guide to her people. As personal an item as a human being can have. And now I have it, unwanted. And surely some force will pull it from me toward where it belongs. Although the truth is clear as daylight. The address book has been entrusted to me, or me to it. Interestingly, I can pick it up, thumb through a couple of pages, and feel more wonder than sadness. These were her people, and she theirs. The only question is what to 'do' with it, and the answer seems surprisingly clear. Keep it, store it, and don't forget it in the middle-aged way of things. It may provide information someday. Who knows who Marlou knew? Who are these people? Someday, of necessity, I may find out.
Even if everyone has forgotten the ritual, and we go through our days in a great blankness, I know a ritual object when I see one. So the address book? Stashed, let the record state, right next to my passport case. My mother gave me the latter when I first headed to Britain. It must have taken a chunk of her nurse's salary, and it is a thoughtful, personal leather item that time has somehow made impractical. With compartments for landing cards, smallpox vaccination certificates, visas and other items that have disappeared or become electronic...well, it is a relic that points in the general direction of the Orient Express. And now it serves as the repository for my passport, when not traveling, and shall be closely bound with Marlou's address book...when it isn't traveling. For one must not rule this out. In moments, the address book may depart to visit its friends, who are hardly any secret, in places that range from Pasadena, California to Laboe, Germany. And who am I to stop it?
Marlou's handbag is another matter. It is sitting under my desk. And like everything else, it needs attention. Which it will get when the handbag comes to mind. Actually when it comes to mind and someone utterly impartial happens to be around. And what shall be done shall be done. Only yesterday I disposed of a bin of personal letters dating back to the 1970s, not to mention writing efforts from my student days in the same era. A trove of early literature, some might say. I tried on the notion of letting go of these things...and found it to be right and to be easy. They are decomposing now, or so I believe, in the Palo Alto landfill. Or they have been combusted to provide some source of alternative energy. Another fantasy, but I am sticking to it. As for the steel deck chair that has somehow followed me from my desert childhood all the way to the Menlo Park present, well this hangs in the balance. I can't quite let go of it. Perhaps I shouldn't. I seem to be rather good at letting go of things at this moment, so there may be a message here. For the moment, it stays.
And when I stay in the car these days, waiting for Jane, as I did for two wives before, it no longer seems that this is my duty as the disabled man. I don't like it, that is the simple fact. Being stuck without my source of battery-powered mobility, obliged to be stationary while others bustle. Yes, it is a sort of contribution, a way of not making oneself an obstacle. But I do not have to submit, do not have to like it, and I need to grouse and bridle. It has taken several decades to get here.
Right here, parked outside Jane's condominium in the hour before midnight, a quick stop on the way home from a rather trying opera. Jane has picked up some jeans and two dogs. In fact, they are headed my way right now, bouncing at the end of her leashes. And it is their sprightly energy at this hour that says the most about Jane and about my life. The two now being quite conjoined. This very evening Jane got me through a trying audience rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, oddly part of the opera experience. The anthem concluded, she turned to me and observed 'that was jolly, wasn't it?' An observation uniquely and enliveningly British, wry, arch and lost to most American ears...a reminder that mine are open. As open as the car door, through which one high-strung mixed boxer is now scrambling, albeit somewhat arthritically, soon to be followed by...no. Bixby, the mixed border collie, should be next but isn't. Instead, Jane is dropping her keys, while scrambling to do God knows what.
In moments, all is revealed. Bixby, all four legs as straight and stiff as those on a stuffed animal, is transported to the front seat. Jane deposits him there, and he arrives looking only mildly surprised. He is a traumatized little doggie, after all, having been domiciled with 25 other dogs in the house of some nut case. Not to worry, for though he is now something of a nut case himself, he is also Jane's. With love, patience and a seemingly natural belief in the healing power of both, she has helped this dog transition from what looks like canine autism to...well, never mind the current stiff-legged Bixby now being shoved into the back seat. Jane explains that he has occasional moments of panic, something seeming out of place which drives him to freeze. Literally. Standing stock still just outside the car. Until Jane intervened. And here we are, me no longer waiting alone in a car, feeling old and frustrated and paralyzed. But part of a cross-species family. And one that, so unlike my own, is continuously healing. All of us. Against all odds. Seemingly at the last moment. Which, like the last laugh, is never gratifying, being unknown and unknowable.
Much like Marlou's address book. Where did I think it was going? Doubtless to one of the people listed within its pages. For it seems almost alive, this thing, a small canvas covered book, a good modern pattern, well-worn and thumbed. And one can almost see the lines of connection, the web of vitality of which it is a node. Marlou's book of persons and places has been sitting on the table by the front door where I stage items for action. Mail going out. Checks to deposit. The registration to stash in my van. And this very personal little book of names...sitting there for practical reasons I truly can't recall and allowed to remain there for at least a year and a half due to sentiments never more than half conscious.
This is the summary of Marlou's human connections. Her guide to her people. As personal an item as a human being can have. And now I have it, unwanted. And surely some force will pull it from me toward where it belongs. Although the truth is clear as daylight. The address book has been entrusted to me, or me to it. Interestingly, I can pick it up, thumb through a couple of pages, and feel more wonder than sadness. These were her people, and she theirs. The only question is what to 'do' with it, and the answer seems surprisingly clear. Keep it, store it, and don't forget it in the middle-aged way of things. It may provide information someday. Who knows who Marlou knew? Who are these people? Someday, of necessity, I may find out.
Even if everyone has forgotten the ritual, and we go through our days in a great blankness, I know a ritual object when I see one. So the address book? Stashed, let the record state, right next to my passport case. My mother gave me the latter when I first headed to Britain. It must have taken a chunk of her nurse's salary, and it is a thoughtful, personal leather item that time has somehow made impractical. With compartments for landing cards, smallpox vaccination certificates, visas and other items that have disappeared or become electronic...well, it is a relic that points in the general direction of the Orient Express. And now it serves as the repository for my passport, when not traveling, and shall be closely bound with Marlou's address book...when it isn't traveling. For one must not rule this out. In moments, the address book may depart to visit its friends, who are hardly any secret, in places that range from Pasadena, California to Laboe, Germany. And who am I to stop it?
Marlou's handbag is another matter. It is sitting under my desk. And like everything else, it needs attention. Which it will get when the handbag comes to mind. Actually when it comes to mind and someone utterly impartial happens to be around. And what shall be done shall be done. Only yesterday I disposed of a bin of personal letters dating back to the 1970s, not to mention writing efforts from my student days in the same era. A trove of early literature, some might say. I tried on the notion of letting go of these things...and found it to be right and to be easy. They are decomposing now, or so I believe, in the Palo Alto landfill. Or they have been combusted to provide some source of alternative energy. Another fantasy, but I am sticking to it. As for the steel deck chair that has somehow followed me from my desert childhood all the way to the Menlo Park present, well this hangs in the balance. I can't quite let go of it. Perhaps I shouldn't. I seem to be rather good at letting go of things at this moment, so there may be a message here. For the moment, it stays.
And when I stay in the car these days, waiting for Jane, as I did for two wives before, it no longer seems that this is my duty as the disabled man. I don't like it, that is the simple fact. Being stuck without my source of battery-powered mobility, obliged to be stationary while others bustle. Yes, it is a sort of contribution, a way of not making oneself an obstacle. But I do not have to submit, do not have to like it, and I need to grouse and bridle. It has taken several decades to get here.
Right here, parked outside Jane's condominium in the hour before midnight, a quick stop on the way home from a rather trying opera. Jane has picked up some jeans and two dogs. In fact, they are headed my way right now, bouncing at the end of her leashes. And it is their sprightly energy at this hour that says the most about Jane and about my life. The two now being quite conjoined. This very evening Jane got me through a trying audience rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, oddly part of the opera experience. The anthem concluded, she turned to me and observed 'that was jolly, wasn't it?' An observation uniquely and enliveningly British, wry, arch and lost to most American ears...a reminder that mine are open. As open as the car door, through which one high-strung mixed boxer is now scrambling, albeit somewhat arthritically, soon to be followed by...no. Bixby, the mixed border collie, should be next but isn't. Instead, Jane is dropping her keys, while scrambling to do God knows what.
In moments, all is revealed. Bixby, all four legs as straight and stiff as those on a stuffed animal, is transported to the front seat. Jane deposits him there, and he arrives looking only mildly surprised. He is a traumatized little doggie, after all, having been domiciled with 25 other dogs in the house of some nut case. Not to worry, for though he is now something of a nut case himself, he is also Jane's. With love, patience and a seemingly natural belief in the healing power of both, she has helped this dog transition from what looks like canine autism to...well, never mind the current stiff-legged Bixby now being shoved into the back seat. Jane explains that he has occasional moments of panic, something seeming out of place which drives him to freeze. Literally. Standing stock still just outside the car. Until Jane intervened. And here we are, me no longer waiting alone in a car, feeling old and frustrated and paralyzed. But part of a cross-species family. And one that, so unlike my own, is continuously healing. All of us. Against all odds. Seemingly at the last moment. Which, like the last laugh, is never gratifying, being unknown and unknowable.
