December 2011 Archives

It is a cold wind that does not blow at all, I always say, and so it is with this one. The Menlo Park air is downright stationary. Nothing is moving, including the thermometer, somewhere around 55° Fahrenheit, enough to make one's hands cold on the way back from Peet's. As for the coffee emporium itself, within moments of arrival the muggy air condenses on one's glasses. The effect is so startling, so out of keeping with anything typically Californian, that for a long moment I am disoriented. All but steering into tables as I navigate toward the baristas.

It is the day after Christmas. A day for survivors, if there ever was one, me included. Yesterday's celebration having been delayed, a festive Boxing Day awaits. While I wait for my café mocha. Then for a brown, dioxin-free paper napkin. And in the end, Godot. He is on his way, no doubt about it. While waiting for him, I read The Nation. In my mind I have a private moment of Occupy Peet's. We shall take over the means of production, the baristas and I, and then...what? If I knew, I would not be reading The Nation.

Things are on the upswing, the earth's year having gotten over its own hump, the 21st, days now lengthening. Honestly, this makes all the difference. A difference manifest in the four bulbs of garlic just inside my front door. They are destined for the garden. Odd thing about garlic, onions too, these bulbs know their calendar. When the days lengthen, they make a mad dash for it. Planting garlic after 21 June, does not work out as well. Fascinating, this stuff, and enough to make one sacrifice a virgin.

And so this has been Christmas, to misquote John Lennon, and what have I done? Well, actually, small O Henry stories have been sprouting all over the place. Realizing that plans had been postponed, I found myself adapting. I would do what I would do. My brother's family, all four of them, phoned me at the same time. There is no such thing as a group call, not really, someone makes a judgment call. Talking to each family member as best one could. Work, swim practice, all of the pressures on family life, all these topics dancing around the dinner table from where they appear to be making their Seattle hearthside phone call. Planning salmon for dinner. Enough to make me reheat, and eat, the entire stock of Su Hong Chinese takeout in the refrigerator, including all of the garlic chicken. Christmas, and what have you done? You have done yourself in with Chinese. The ultimate Jewish Christmas dinner, my brother observes from long-distance.

And then, reading in my front chair, there is the slight and unexpected miracle of landlord Tom's knock at the door. Remember, I have lived in this apartment for...the calculation always floors me...18 years, is that right? When I moved in, Tom and his mother talked to me in her apartment. I'm not sure I have been back in that apartment since. Hazel died at least 15 years ago.

So there was a knock at the door. Portentous in the way of Christmas stories. Tom, self-described hermit, was there. I ushered him in, tried to think of what to do next.... And hit on the big-screen TV. It's a 50-incher, purchased to provide home entertainment for someone dying...but equally pleasant for the non-terminal. Yet I don't really watch the thing, at least not alone. Miraculously I found something Tom would like in TiVo: an old recorded show with the Car Guys, a.k.a., Tappet Brothers, done for PBS about the car of the future. Tom seemed to like it enough. But after 10 minutes, he was edging toward the door. As though he had somehow overstayed himself. I was enjoying the whole experience, actually. Grateful for the company myself. But he was gone. He has a bit of the Boo Radley about him. One is grateful for the occasional sighting. Perhaps he'll return. One thing about TiVo, it will stay on pause indefinitely.

Winter is the season for stories of indomitability. And there is one more.

I am conscious of my disabled brethren. Our limitations do not necessarily link us in profound ways, but one never knows. Take this guy, roughly my age or a bit younger, who I used to see around Palo Alto. He is athetoid, if my vocabulary of amateur diagnoses is up to date. Mild cerebral palsy, another term. And I would see him walking with a cane, in an era when I was still walking with a cane. He had the neuromuscular wherewithal to ride an adult tricycle, as I used to. So in recollecting the story, the basis for a bond...well, it is there. And what happened? The details are murky, but I encountered him having some trouble with his tricycle, offered to help, thinking I would just drive him someplace. But this morphed into an epic, a drive around the area in search of some sort of inner tube, or some other bike part. In the end, I invested far too much time in this particular guy. But never mind. He got his tricycle back on the road.

Back to 2001, and Caltrain. Boarding at Menlo Park, the conductor had a quick heart-to-heart with me on the platform. There was a situation, he said. Perhaps I might want to position my wheelchair sideways. The two-person space had been filled by one, a wheelchair packed with so much gear that there might not be room for mine. I shrugged this off, rolled on board and briefly eyeballed the wheelchair. It was empty. But the guard's account was accurate enough. Bags and backpacks hung off the rear, a huge blue tarpaulin draped over the enormity of the whole. The wheelchair was empty. The occupant apparently sitting in a seat. I wedged my way into place, propped up my leg and read happily all the way to San Francisco. Until, I felt a bump. The wheelchair behind me, its occupant perhaps now in place, was being readied for motorized action. Rushing to an appointment, I didn't have time to observe what came next.

Still, I looked back as the conductor prepared the wheelchair lift. There was the guy, the athetoid guy from 20 years ago, hair longer, perhaps a bit weathered, but still quite ambulatory and making his way back to his vehicle. Sobering and horrifying to see this person homeless and living this way. The nights have been cold. And yet, certainly part of the story, he had found a way. Turning a wheelchair into a sort of small electric coach. Apparently it was all there, enough to live, stay warm, and keep going. I had to hand it to him. Yet I admit I didn't want to hand him anything else. Such as money. My fear...that he would recognize me, perhaps aboard another Caltrain and whatever followed...would never end.

Deck the halls and hit the decks, lots of shopping, not much sex.

Just thought I would share that.

And what would Christmas be without Grace Paley? Her The Loudest Voice the current feature of one of the public radio short story shows. Which I had thought would make playing the thing for Jane quite easy. But no, it took a postgraduate degree in computer science to even find the story on the web. Once I had downloaded the file, it had to be found again, of course. But at last, there it was in iTunes and, thanks to my home entertainment technology...for which thanks really go to various computer engineer neighbors...there it was, Grace Paley's incomparable short story read by Linda Lavin. With a live audience. Which helped. Whose fiction is more about sharing, after all?

Because for an anxious person like me whose underlying fear involves emptiness, no one's writing is more full. Full and brief. She only wrote about three or four books. Less than 50 short stories, someone told me. Each one a portal. So here we are in a house full of Russian Jewish immigrants, the neighborhood pretty much the same, and it's Christmas. Which for Jane and for me doubtless means something quite different, our life experiences being what they are. And in terms of theological roots, mine are nil, which also leaves me open. And since Jane is pretty open herself, could there be a better story for the two of us than this particular one by Paley?

It is winter in Paley's neighborhood. We don't exactly see it. Certainly, we are not told it. We know it. For her world is spare, highly efficient in its use of language, usually offered rather than served up. The Jewish butcher who lowers the black shades of his shop to shield the chickens on display from the colorful Christmas tree lights outside...this is more than enough to tell us the season. As for the tree, Paley's girl heroine senses its status as an outcast, as far from home as a Jew in Egypt, in bondage to the City of New York. We are invited to consider all these ironies, tables turned, victims and oppressors so confused that we are briefly asked to reconsider the very definitions. Yes, we know what time of year it is. The dark time, when all the light has been squeezed out of the shortened days, coldness pouring forth. Just as the sun begins turning its face earthward for longer and longer glances. Just enough to be cause for hope. The message built into midwinter rituals.

What animates the story some might describe as language or dialect. To me it is attitude. What's happening here involves perspectives. Sardonic. Accepting. Glib. Suspicious. In just a brief exchange or two all the adult characters evince one of these points of view. But thanks to Paley's structure, the grown-ups portray a single facet. It is the kids who easily absorb and balance the contradictions. We are Jews and we are doing a Christian play. And we know that shepherds have to find their sheep, travelers their room, and we are not really questioning any of this story, except when one of us doesn't want to get himself hauled up in the air, his arms spread wide. Crucifixion not really being the point. It is a sad story, as any sensible little girl can see. And hope comes from being in a family and being in a play and in a life. So why not make a chapel with one's fingers, kneel at the edge of the bed and pray Christian-style in Yiddish? It all makes heartfelt sense in this story. It makes us laugh and cry and weep and makes us whole.

It's a small world. And size being relative, I recall how much smaller it got with one particular relative. My nephew, to be exact, Rick, who stuffed stuffed fingers in his five-year-old ears as we floated through 'It's a Small World' at Disneyland. The happiest cruise that ever sailed, the sign outside proclaims. Rick sensed early on that the ride's soundtrack is among the most cloying and repetitive anywhere. Though being a kid, he complained about the decibel level. Whatever. The size of his world and that of Disney's were already out of sync. And so it is.

The point being that the quadriplegic world is scaled in ways that anyone, including the quadriplegic, would mostly like to forget. Take this particular morning. Lorna, captain of Team Filipina, is bustling about, washing dishes, opening mail, and getting my day under way. While I attempt to do the same. Vis-à-vis exercise. Under normal circumstances, whatever those are, I might very well go for a stroll on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. Linking my arm with Lorna's we would schlep one length, then the other. One has to keep walking, after all. Which unfortunately is much more complicated. One has to keep walking and balancing. And the latter almost by definition is a sort of solo act. The difference between holding onto Lorna's arm and proceeding on my own, well, it is vast. I am losing my balance, it seems, although my physiotherapist says that proprioception would be a better word. A day of wheelchair sitting, however convenient, undermines walking muscles and walking awareness, let us say. So let us also say arriba! Up and at 'em.

Rising from the wheelchair, now in the vertical, forearm crutch positioned and ready to roll. But only ready. Actually, frozen in place, if one is mercifully honest. Or if one is true to scale. For this is the thing I find most difficult, near impossible actually, to convey. How frightening such a moment really is. For Lorna, my public relations plan involves what, in the olden days, people called 'lying.' Sure you don't want me to help, she asks? Absolutely not, I lie, urging her to wash the dishes while I motor about. Motor neurons being in short supply, this is always complicated. But now, having logged a few too many wheelchair hours, it is downright fraught. Yes, I am up and moving, but just barely. And here, this is the place where a certain level of New Agey, psychobabble consciousness doesn't do any harm. We get in touch with our inner quadriplegic, we do. Which is to say, we acknowledge our level of terror.

Which is high. The body itself now being high, elevated substantially above wheelchair level. The possibility of falling down very tangible. The ground being very far. The aging quadriplegic neck being especially vulnerable to fracture, one imagines. All this before the very first step. A small world, now shrinking. And yes, a baby step forward. Then another. All this and the bed, and its mattress, conveniently to my right, the direction most dangerous in terms of falling. And the key here being the fear of fear itself. For I loathe this. Hate this reality. That I have, it seemed, fallen so far, to mix metaphors, having reached as low a level of mobility as at any point in my life.

The thing about taking these baby steps, more of a shuffle, is that I feel safer. I do this with the twin consciousness, my own and that of my physiotherapist, letting mine win out. Dan assures me that I am not really safer. And having not given me a neuromuscular bum steer in 25 years, he has a certain credibility. Reaching the wall, I begin the physical-medicine-approved ambulation. Spasm, step, spasm, step. A little dance routine Dan developed just for me, oh, about 15 years ago. Thing is, the spasm part is a little destabilizing. Terrifying would be a better word. Never mind, for now I am into the office and at a sort of ambulatory crossroads. Do I crutch along the open closet, a misstep casting me in among the hanging clothes, or along the filing cabinet? What the hell. I go with the cabinet, reverse and head back into the living room.

An odd term, if one considers, as though living was confined to a single room. What happens in the others? The dying room? The falling room? What about the recovery room? I don't have enough room for all of these rooms, that is the simple answer. Turning around at the end of the entrance way, I am headed diagonally cross country, in general pursuit of the dining room table, not that there is a dining room, just a dining zone, this being an apartment, after all. And at the end of the sofa, a vista of carpet stretching for at least two meters, my nerve begins to fail. I baby-step it to the armchair. And this thought of arms makes me ask for Lorna's. After all, her shift is over. And no, I must reassure myself, I have not failed. I did as much as my proprioception-challenged self could manage. Tomorrow is another day, I'll never eat another root again, and so on.

Outside, Tom my landlord is eyeing the wheeled recycle bin with a heavy air. Having had a mother who sighed frequently and dramatically, suggesting some pervasive woe, I am tuned into Tom's signals. Something is wrong. We talk. Only a few days into the week, and the recycle bin is full. The culprit resides upstairs. He is my tenant. Therefore, he is also my responsibility, as is this overabundance of recycling. Well, I attempt to reassure Tom, he is starting a business, our Dave, thus the paper and cardboard cartons from recently purchased computer gear. But there is a solution, and by now I am beaming, and it is the acquisition of an additional recycling bin. I will order another recycling bin, I declare. Tom leans into me with a rare blend of conviction and authority. But we don't need another one, he says. And because Tom's domain, his realm of command, has shrunk even more than my own, I do not argue. Sure, I say, or don't say, my silence saying it all.

To brighten things, I follow Tom down the path to the garden. Where it immediately occurs to me. Paul, Tuesday volunteer, dropped the garden hose just a few days ago, cracking the nozzle, the latter dating approximately from the Aeneid. Once again, Tom's stable world is crumbling, and I am to blame. Fortunately, I remember, rush inside and return with, voilà, a new nozzle. Purchased only one day before at the Romanian hardware store. It looks nothing like the old one, which was yellow and displayed a network of cracks that had slowly opened over its decades of plastic life. The new Ace Hardware version has a black squeeze handle, sort of rubber inner tube material, and looks more or less industrial. Tom likes it instantly. Yes, he tells me, this is a big improvement. I take this in. His words have a mild shock value, and they require a moment of processing. I nod, as though expecting this all along, my contribution to the equipment about the grounds. An opportunity seems to have opened, and I seize it.

The garden hose. It also hails from another epoque. Small fissures have opened along its length, Tom has patched them, then replaced the brass connection, probably more than once. One would attribute this general state to time and the toll it takes on rubber. But not in this instance. The problem is me. My wheelchair tires keep running over the hose. Let's get a new one, I have suggested several times. The answer is, you guessed it, we don't need one. But the Romanians had an interesting answer hanging on a back shelf. One of those coiled garden hoses. In other words, I plead quadriplegia. I tell Tom that it is oh so hard to not roll over his garden hose, wheelchairs and disabled life being what they are. There is a solution. An aid, one might say. The special-needs flavor of this not lost, I hope. A curlicue hose, spirals like a pig's tail.... There is no need to explain, once I have bought the thing. There it is in its hardware store shrinkwrap, a boy toy for anyone with even minimal testosterone. Tom attaches it. Ushering in a new Garden Plumbing Era.

It happens almost daily, often several times.  Little jabs at the back of things.  Reminders.  There is Minnie, the supermarket's Colombian purveyor of delicatessen, her rapidfire Spanish too swift for my minimally competent ears.  Sandra, in charge of cheese two aisles over, and politely indulgent when one speaks Spanish to her, but downright grateful when I can manage my one word in her native Portuguese.  And what I remember, seemingly cannot forget, is how each sensed that something was a bit off in the demeanor of Draeger's frequent wheelchair shopper, and asked.  And I told them.  The death of a wife.  Minnie gave me a hug.  Sandra gave me a Tomme de Savoie.  And I gave them...whatever it is we give each other in this mortal coil.  Naturally, almost automatically, I introduced each of them to Jane.

But the little jabs, actually, more like black holes, keep coming, keep reminding.  From a wheelchair perspective, one reminder has assumed epic scope.  On the order of something cinematic, a movie set, perhaps.  The Spangler Mortuary, where Marlou's body rolled forever out of sight, returning as a remarkably heavy bag of incineration-defying minerals...well, what is happening there defies interpretation.  The place had a white column neoclassical façade to it, a storefront version of George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon.  And now that the columns have been squared off, in an apparent attempt to get the place dressed down for office space, the Mount Vernon look seems even more pronounced.  The mortuary is no more.  Serves them right for what they did to my wife, a tiny voice says.  A reminder that we need reminders.

It was Paul, my weekly volunteer, who quietly suggested that we might read Mourning and Mitzvah, a book that has been sitting on my desk for three years, together.  Slightly embarrassing, but reality.  This suggestion from one observer that something remains to be done, some final chapter, or additional chapter, to be added to the death ordeal.  And I take this suggestion from a Catholic volunteer under lend-lease to Jewish Family Services...as a sign.  A sign that I must listen and submit to the wisdom of others.  And just give it a go.  Yes, if I don't look at the thing myself, Paul and I should do this together.

My chances of having a look at this particular book is extremely slim, by the way.  Books have been accumulating around this apartment for years, some read, some half-read, many unread.  And when I ponder the situation, the only book I can really see is the big one, The Book of Life.  How it is coming to an end.  No, I do not know the outcome or the precise number of pages left.  But the certainty that these are the final chapters, that is enough to bring me to a curious halt.  Why bother?  This is the sentiment that takes over.  There isn't time to read all these books, it seems.  How many more trips can I take?  Travel seems increasingly arduous.  Can I stay in shape, and what is the shape of 'in shape?'

Which makes for shapeless days, the undone accumulating.  Twitter.  Once the province of birds, is now the actual focus of my publicist's clearest instruction.  Learn Twitter.  Which does not exactly set my heart atwitter.  For worse, one does not learn to twitter but to tweet.  Reminding me of nothing but Tweety and Sylvester, animated figures from cartoons now more than half a century old.  I shall wear my trousers rolled.  Now that I am no longer on a roll, it seems, but stuck somewhere between neutral and stop.

Who wants to rent office space in a former mortuary?  Who cares?  The dead are everywhere, that is the point.  In Mexico, they wisely come to costumed life and dance about on an annual holiday.  They are all over literature.  And literature isn't all over, just the lives of literati.  Literature is littered with literati.  All dead.  Get used to it.

Which, honestly, I am trying to do.  This is what those existentialist guys were talking about, facing the void.  No avoiding the void, for it has a way of claiming one's attention.  The piles of books are going to pile up.  Iris Murdoch's home, depicted in the film 'Iris,' sums up my natural state.  Piles of junk.  This unsorted.  This forgotten, this not attended to.  Loose ends, loosening and getting looser.

There is another Paul, working in my local bookstore.  'What does it all mean?' I say to him in the second that my credit card people spend talking to his bookstore people.  He chuckles.  Don't know, he says.  Ha ha.  There is a Christmas rush on, after all, and this is hardly the time.  Which must be why I ask the question.  There is hardly any time, it seems.  Or there is plenty of time.  And the question is sobering enough, the answer superfluous.  And I buy his book.  And it may get read, or not.  But I buy it.  And for now, that is enough.

Fact is, having one of the guys at Peet's snap a cover on my latte has the effect of making the steaming drink safer, particularly coupled with one of those cardboard insulators...but who wants safe?  Why not throw caution to the caffeinated winds?  And so I am working without a net, bouncing my way down University Drive, latte open to the elements, such as they are, and to my surprise they aren't.  The sun is so warm on this particular first day of winter that cold seems barely a concept.  

I feel the chill more than in previous years, it seems.  And the fact that I have more years under my physiological belt than in previous years seems not the point.  The point being to stop and smell the roses.  Or is it the coffee?  One is metaphorically urged to smell one or the other, and the fact that I can't recall which does not matter either.  Particularly in front of Draeger's, this town's haute supermarket, where the brick wall behind the bicycle rack gently radiates the sun's warmth.  A microclimate on a street corner, if one thinks about it, and one is.  The rear tires of my wheelchair slide into a spot made for them between bike rack and bollard.  The sun is glorious, December in California, chestnuts roasting in some open fire somewhere else.  The electric doors gently whooshing open and closed, locals doing their bit for the national economy.  And yes, I am so glad that I don't have to suck this latte through a rectangular plastic slit.  Much more like a regular coffee cup this way.  Café society moved slightly outdoors.  And the latte goes down so much faster this way.  After all, this is America.  No time to waste.  

A shove or grab from a passing shopper, and me snapped awake for my doze.  The person...likely that woman clip clopping toward the parking lot with her shopping cart...having done what?  I look for the wallet dangling from my wheelchair control.  Everything there.  Final sip of latte.  No.  My God.

A dollar bill, no a five dollar bill, has been shoved into my cardboard Peet's cup.  Right into the latte...no, that's wrong, there wasn't another sip.  No, into the empty, half dried cup.  I want to run after the woman and...what?  Explain, say something.  Because the misunderstanding, I now see, can be laid at my feet, as it were.  One could slightly blame me, if blame is to be apportioned.  For there was that moment, head tilted back to absorb sunrays, cardboard cup thought not to be empty, clutched on my lap.  Passersby could get the wrong idea.

Giving chase in the Draeger's parking lot would be a bad idea on more than one score.  The problem having to do with what would ensue.  Excuse me, but are you the woman who just...?  What?  Assumed I was indigent?  Wanted to help?  Tried to help?  Good for her, anyone would say.  Certainly she thought something along the lines of 'good for me.'  And what would be the point of our imagined conversation?  Setting the record straight.  Who is keeping this record?  And what does it matter if it is or isn't straight?

Humor.  A good joke here, but a shared one.  And I'm afraid that this woman might not laugh.  Besides, exactly how would I deliver the punchline?  It would need to be punchy, this line.  One cannot have a long-winded conversation over this matter when the answer is simply, wrong guy.  I was just finishing my coffee, I might say.  Snoozing for a moment in the sun.  No, it's not worth it.  Somehow, the more I would protest, the less credible.  Besides, she did give me something.  An awareness of who I really am, how extraordinarily lucky I really am, and how thin a line separates people of good and bad fortune.  A metaphorical experience in many ways.  For in America it is as though a momentary slippage, taking one's eye off the monetary ball even for an instant, can mean disaster.

Menlo Park's beggars.  Let us call them that.  There are several, and they are in and about the suburban center.  And they do have cups.  And they do ask for money.  And I do avoid them.  Thing is, I am out and about with such regularity that there is no real avoiding them.  I say hello.  I did give 10 bucks to George, the quasi-homeless guy who opens the door to Peet's.  In recompense for noticing that I had left my hat behind one particular day.  Aside from that, my judgment is rather withering.  Somehow, I feel I am being done.  Manipulated.  I am not begging - why should they?  Instead of just talking to them, getting a sense of who they are, what's happening.  Why not?  Why not at least try?

The feeling that accompanies me everywhere, out and about in the world, is vulnerability.  What if the wheelchair breaks down?  What if I am hit by a car?  What if I am robbed?  Problem is, there is a reality base here, but also a penumbra, a haze of fears at the edge.  And there is no need.  None of Menlo Park's regular street beggars are going to harm me.  No reason why we can't talk.  Happy Holidays.

It is the spirit behind the action that counts, I was thinking as Jane navigated Saturday night Bay Bridge traffic into San Francisco.  For we have had quite a marvelous, yet strange, afternoon at the Berkeley Repertory.  The Knee-High Theatre is visiting from Truro, Cornwall, with a production of a Grimm fairy tale, The Wild Bride.  They take on anything, these people.  And their secret, if there is one, is that they are operating on a different level.  This is my only conclusion.  Does this one result of developing theater in a Cornish barn?  Something about it works.  And read the program.  The bio of the play's lead briefly mentions his Guildhall training but mostly stresses his organic farming.  Expanding, by the way, having acquired a couple of additional acres.  If the troupe's ingénue seems unusually malleable, that's because her last stop was not the West End but Cirque du Soleil.  They are all from somewhere else, these people, in terms of the stage world.  Which accounts for...whatever I am trying to account for.  As for the other people in the story, the larger story, well accounting for them is more difficult, but no less important.  Let us start there.

I invited a couple of young friends, thirtysomethings or late twentysomethings, hard to say, to The Wild Bride, thinking they were bound to enjoy some theater.  I was wrong, quite wrong.  They found the experience rough, harsh and perhaps a bit shocking.  Which fits into the bigger story, the American national story, let us say, in ways that still have my head spinning.

There is so much theater out there to choose from, so many traditions and techniques, what makes the director of The Wild Bride select a bit of Brechtian this or some of expressionistic that?  The spirit, that is the thing.  This woman, Emma Rice, lives an observed life, this is clear.  She has not only a respect for legend and tale, but a firm grasp.  I only wish my own grasp of mythology and folktale was up to the task of explicating the production.  But it simply isn't.  I will say that certain things ring a bell.  The play begins with and is animated by the Devil.  He is there from the first, and that fact alone either resonates with a certain view of life...or it doesn't.  In my case, this rings true as crystal.  The devil at the crossroads actually describes the opening...a situation that sounds a distant bell, devils turning up at a crossroads in more than one tale, I think.  But I confess I'm not sure.  And it doesn't matter.  The distant bell gets rung...a deep reverberation...all that is important.

In her program notes, actually an interview, Emma Rice says it best.  The Grimm tale is about all of life.  Thing is, one has to have lived a bit of life to understand what she means.  Moreover, one has to observe what one has lived.  And this is the marvelous thing about theater.  She keeps trying to get to the core, what is at the heart of things, the story, the big one, unfolding in the background.

There is an even bigger, that is to say incomprehensible, story unfolding in these United States.  I understand it from my perspective or think I do.  But in discussing the play with the younger friends who joined us, it was clear that my understanding had its limits.

It is a savage story, The Wild Bride, involving the chopping off of hands, the kidnapping and implied abuse of a young girl.  No wonder that there are certain Grimm fairytales that adults have always deemed too grim for kids.  Who knows if they are right or wrong, these adults?  In any case, it is this child versus adult perspective that probably holds the key to our different reactions to the play.  There are moments in the story that depict highly stylized sex, others that symbolically portray the tale's mayhem-ridden plot.  For example, to fulfill one of the Devil's requests, the title figure must be proven dead...and this demands the delivering of her tongue and her eyes.  To comply with this request, the bride's distinctly less wild husband substitutes the tongue and the eyes of a fawn.  The stage version of the latter being a wireframe puppet deer operated by a very visible human...the ripping out of tongue and eyes represented by red dangling ribbons.  Yet we feel it viscerally, this highly stylized stage reality of violence.  Somehow we feel it more strongly than the on-screen blood in the typical feature film or TV drama.  

On stage, or at least on this stage, we get to the spirit.  The play's spirit has gotten to us.  The Grimm brothers' story has gotten to Emma Rice.  An oral rendition of early 19th century folktales got to the Grimms.  Life got to the folktale tellers...and we feel some hint of this Ur energy, even this removed, even in a comfortable theater in an American university town.  Enough to make someone quite uncomfortable, but in a most productive way.

Making me fear that my young friends may be afraid not only of stage violence but the threat of violence always lurking, without and within.  That part of the zeitgeist, that thing that is particularly American but also universally human.  Which, and this is the interesting artsy question, rings oddly hollow in much of its banal, mass media representation.  Is this due to overexposure?  

Or detachment of violence from story, that quality that some term 'gratuitous.'  Which insulates harsh and cruel experience from that big story, the human story.  And this is the odd thing about great theater, the sharing of a universal narrative.  How it is impersonal, the character of the wild bride being played at various times by three different actors, sometimes spoken, sometimes danced, sometimes mimed.  The actions of one character occasionally performed by another.  And yet it is deeply personal for, it touches a shared note.  And it is the hearing of that note together that makes this what it is, a ritual as much as an entertainment.  With the happy discovery that one does not remotely preclude the other.  And perhaps one cannot exist without the other, not really.  Which is why it's a play and a revelation, and even stuck in traffic I cannot get the thing out of my mind.

Problem is, the play had an ending.  And the larger story, the two younger people who did not enjoy their hours in the theater at all, it still goes on.  Which is fortunate.  Their story's ending will occur long after my own, but I'm still concerned about the plot.  There are only so many plots, after all.  One of the many discoveries of the Brothers Grimm, I suppose.  In a society that does not know its own myths and therefore crudely enacts them, often in the most frightening ways, it is easy to be lost.  Actually, it is inevitable.  Just not all the time.  And for a few hours in Berkeley, Jane and I were in that other time, mythic time, timeless time.

The wheelchair guys, you will remember them, have just repaired my Swedish model, and not only that, dramatically amped up the speed.  Pretty good, right?  Perhaps not, upon reflection, and reflection is what it is all about.  Where, after all, am I hurtling at such a rate?  Lunch?  Peet's?  Trader Joe's?  Please.  None of these locations demands the wheelchair equivalent of a TGV.  Though if there is such a thing, my Swedish model would be well on the way.  And, you heard it here first, for future improvements in the performance of wheelchairs, in any dimension, I would not look to the United States of America.  Sad, for we have more than enough technical and manufacturing capability to lead the world in this particular niche.  What we lack is a stable market.  And I stress the word 'stable.'  Locked in the most savage internecine battles over healthcare, the US has become a most unattractive place to sell wheelchairs.  Enough to make one wince.

And speaking of wincing, what else can one do in the face of achieving Medicare status, a.k.a., 65 years of old age?  As I just have.  The reality of which is still reverberating, but not unpleasantly.  And this is the most remarkable thing, not to mention the most surprising thing, that I found the whole experience most enjoyable.  One could attribute this to Jane, of course.  She has not only an openhearted attitude toward the birthday experience, but an open-ended one.  It should last several days, Jane believes.

Key here is the sort of blank-eyed response this elicits from me.  Composed of several things.  A certain mistrust, for one.  Can she be serious?  What is the trick?  Or put slightly differently, what is the catch?  An incredulity that does not spring from nowhere, for Jane is as overstressed as a person can be, up to her neck in Christmas decorations, Christmas costumes, Christmas carols, Christmas hymns, Christmas sermons...and more than I want to imagine.  But there it is, one person under duress who genuinely wants me to have as expansive a birthday as a human being can manage.  Because, the news gradually sank in, she means it.  On a birthday, a person is special, let us say.  And let us say it again and again, which she has.  And for once in my lengthening life, I actually listened.  That is the strange thing.  But why?

Throughout the day, the celebratory day, this question loomed in the back of my mind.  Perhaps 65 represented a safe zone.  Okay, I have gotten here, notified the authorities that my life has been a sufficiently long one, particularly in view of the scant neuromuscular wherewithal.  Having achieved this status in terms of mortality, well, all the rest is gravy, as they say.  Could that be it?  

Suffice it to say that I went with the celebratory flow.  Eat out or eat at home?  I kept thinking that Jane was tired and needed to go out, but she had nothing to say but pshaw.  So we had a spectacular dinner table of fresh Pacific fish, equally fresh brussels sprouts grown in the coastal soils of Pescadero, just over the hill...like me...all in my own, my very own apartment.  And what more is there except...chocolate cake from Draegers, placing me right on a caloric collision course, escape impossible...but I am a better man for the experience, never mind the waistline.  Think of the shoreline.  Source of the sanddabs we have had just before the dessert course.  Preceded or accompanied, I cannot recall which, owing to the intake of red wine, by Jane's present.  A dinner party game, and more on this later, but the thing I would least likely buy for myself, and full of a certain statement about the lighthearted end of existence, the human's capacity for the sprightly.  Humor.  Just for me.

My receptivity to all this being the surprise, a most pleasant surprise after six and half decades of Bracing for the End.  An afternoon spent, in the language of wedding planners, something old, something new....  'The Artist,' the European silent film - a new silent film - full of whimsy and delight and, most welcome on this particular birthday, little of consequence.  It is also full of twists, particularly one at the very end.  Yes, the plot leads us on a merry chase until arriving at a why-didn't-I-think-of-that moment.  Which is worth deconstructing.  

For one gets to that moment through a process of muffling.  Much is purposely left out.  Selectively excluded...not to give too much away...which has the effect of limiting what is possible in the film.  Creating a different sort of focus for the action.  A narrow range of possibilities, which leads us down a sort of garden path, plotwise.  Ending in a most pleasant and ironic discovery.  Paralleling my life with a disability.  Or perhaps any life with or without disability, for all I know.  The only verdict being the one I give myself: Happy 65th.

One guy was a plumber and the other a package delivery person, and damned if they weren't both sitting there, each in his van, each only about one street away from the other.  Okay, separated by one hour.  There is that.  But if one is looking for conspiracies, the sense of being watched, surveilled actually, trust me, there is abundant evidence.  Yes, yes, it was lunch hour, and it was cold, and it is not summer time and the livin' is not easy.  Such are conditions in this, our Bay Area.  Or more exactly, one neuromuscularly compromised version of the Bay Area.  Never mind, I tell you, they were out in force, The Watchers.  Good thing I was watching too.  And in the middle of this, I was watching the stars.  Rather tricky at midday, but there they were, briefly flashing before my eyes on the southbound platform of the San Carlos Caltrain station.  And let me explain that I do not frequent this particular locale during my lunch hours, but a man does have to renew his disabled transit ID.  So there I was, presenting myself for one of those bureaucratic exercises that are arbitrary beyond imagining.  Had I completed the application?  No, I was not applying, but renewing.  Oh.  Sign here.

Fortunate for the Peet's just down the road, newly opened in San Carlos, and if one may say, singularly attractive, what with its elevations of plateglass and solar heating almost to excess.  So in other words, I was significantly caffeinated by the time I returned to the Caltrain platform.  And pervasive anxiety coupled with a bit of Peet's may have accounted for the ocular starburst.  The Web revealing this moment to be routine among those who have the occasional ocular migraine, which seems to include me.  Which is not unpleasant, considering that we have to belong to some group or other, and I can count myself among the optical migraine enthusiasts.

As for the members of the mobile workforce enjoying their lunch hours you will realize that the significance of my observation, why these people jump out of their own truck cabs like pop-up greeting cards, has more to do with me than them.  Actually, they spark a Proustian recall.  Of year #2 of university life, me employed as only students can be, at something completely inappropriate but moderately remunerative.  A shovel-ready project, we would say today.  One could even have said this yesterday, shovels figuring as prominently as they did in this job.  Ditch digging being the only proper title.  Sewer pipe ditch digging, to be exact.

Could the University of California really been using World War II vintage huts for married student housing in 1965?  You bet.  I have no doubt what they were there for.  Originally, that is.  Something from the war, some sort of temporary housing for...who knows?  Anyway, each of these little stucco houses now had a student family inside.  A toilet inside, naturally.  And a sewer pipe leading to the outside, which invariably clogged.  How this could be a full-time job, going around the married student housing site and digging up sewage lines, one after the next, is beyond me.  But sophomores don't ask such questions.  The Sisyphean nature of this enterprise sailed right over my head.  There was an hourly rate, the times were flexible, and the times they were a changin', but not in married student housing.  Architecturally, the times were late 1930s or early 1940s.  Nothing had changed at all, including, doubtless, this sewer blockages.  That and Ray.

He was a twangy guy, my foreman.  Oklahoma?  Arkansas?  It is a terrible coastal bias to say 'someplace like that,' but so it is.  He was from the twangy provinces.  Ray putted around in what, as I recall, was a three-wheeled scooter.  The thing sounded much like a lawnmower, and even then one would have thought that a electric-powered golf cart could do the job.  Perhaps not.  Maybe he towed things with his gasoline putt putt.  He had the look of officialdom about him, Ray did, making his way about the complex.  Always with a sense of purpose.  And full of information.  We had to complete a form for each ditch.  Not ours to reason why, of course, only to put one's name on the top, describe the project as 'dig up sewer line.'  And indicate the type of dirt encountered.  Ray had simple instructions for this: DG.  Decomposed granite.  DG, Paul, put your DG.  For this advice, I was most appreciative.  Forms and their completion have never been my forte.

It does rain in California, of course.  And on such days there was obviously no work, but I turned up anyway, just to let the Buildings & Grounds office know I was still a serious person.  Follow me, said Ray.  I either walked with him or rode in his putting scooter, I can't recall.  We came to one of the married student bungalows and stopped.  Ray loosened a wire mesh leading to the crawlspace under the house.  We crawled into that space, Ray and I.  And that was that.  This is what one did when it rained.  You hid under one of the bungalows and waited things out.  We actually had to lie in the dirt, Ray and I.  That was all.  Ray played a transistor radio very softly.  Country and Western.  Time passed.  But not nearly fast enough.  After a couple of such work shifts, I was ready to throw in the towel.  I was feeling too much like Anne Frank and Albert Camus combined.  Filling in forms would have been more fun.

So there they are, the guys in their vans, waiting for...whatever the next thing is.  Unlike Ray's experience, today theirs is closely monitored.  They probably have to account for every second.  Their whereabouts is GPS-monitored.  And they aren't doing this to supplement their student incomes and pay the modest quarterly fees of a state university being no particular challenge.  It has all changed.  The times and the man.

One is out there, on the primal edge, legs pounding away on the 8:30 morning exercycle to nowhere.  The bicycle may be stationary, but the blood supply isn't.  In the California December exertion is all that makes this possible for your typical quadriplegic...actually a quadriparetic, the distinction all the more critical when the afflicted person is working an exercise machine with his legs.  Yes, it is the blood flow that counteracts the cold flow, vis-à-vis night temperatures in the 30s Fahrenheit.  Things could go wrong, as I keep saying, here in the cold storage of my carport.  The concrete slab traps the night's temperatures, a reminder of the dark even as the sun continues to rise, the day opening and warming.  But for now it is my legs that are doing the only effective warming.  They are my lifeline, and I am conscious of this, how fragile it all is, my neuromuscular existence...with possible scenarios unfolding, just in case.  Just in case the cold does something to my legs, thwarting my ability to stand, and I am stuck here.  There is some slight basis in fact behind this.  Cold always being unpredictable with my oddity of a nervous system.  The limbs get more spastic or less spastic.  That is to say, there is generally an overall tightening of the body, while the same cold can make extremities relax.  All speculation.  We will see, I tell myself, legs flying about the morning air.  I really should memorize my upstairs neighbor's phone number, just in case of moments like the one being contemplated.  Just in case.

There is that sense of pushing things, not letting the fear of cold stop me...the fear of the unknown, really...that makes all this worthwhile.  Yes, the exercise is good, but still being able to do something of muscular substance on my own, risks be damned, that is even better.  As to the cold, there really is not much historical experience to account for my current fear.  Except one occasion.

The Porchester Baths.  They do not exist anymore, according to a quick web search.  Although Westminster Council now proclaims something called the Porchester Centre, providing for multiple sports under one roof.  And why not?  The Porchester Baths were old and out of date when I first used them.  Which was probably in the autumn of 1969.  And whatever complaints I may have about the temperature in the locker room, what transpired there was much more than anyone could have expected.  Despite the downside, which will reveal itself shortly.

Of course, by British standards, the Porchester Baths were not old.  I believe they must have dated from the 1930s.  My sense is they were actually Turkish baths, steam rooms, and perhaps even a public laundry.  The swimming pool, all that concerned me, was only part of the operation.  The 'old' aspect was the temperature.  The changing rooms may have been totally unheated.  They certainly felt that way.  Never mind, for I was young and hearty and determined in those days.  And Bob, almost exactly my age, was in his own way equally unstoppable.

We had a natural affinity.  Before I had even met him, everyone among the extended German Jewish clan of Bendixes in and around London had assured me that we looked a bit alike.  We were not at all alike temperamentally, but we balanced each other well.  Bob was more outgoing, fun-loving and lighthearted in approach.  That he had this capacity for the antic in the company of a person who was recent incapacity was still feeling very tragic, added up to a gift.  

Bob was a doer, wanting to accomplish things.  Without ever telling me to 'get on with it' British-style, his being led me in that direction.  It may even have been his idea that I try swimming.  Which struck me as a bad idea, I recall.  But he inspired confidence in some intangible way, and so I trusted him to accompany me in the shallow end of the Porchester Baths, a 1930s era swimming pool, if memory serves me.  There I progressed like a child, thrashing about in the shallows, until I gained confidence and began swimming for the far, deep end.  And from there it wasn't such an impossible reach to actually do a lap.  And another.

Do remember that this account of 'swimming' comes from someone who has one functioning arm and leg.  The dysfunctional arm and leg did not remain on the dry concrete deck, one must point out, but accompanied me, both reacting to the cold water in unpredictable ways.  They tightened, not unlike my balls.  But the latter are of little use in a swimming pool, and the stiff arm and leg were an actual encumbrance.  Fortunately, I was not in the company of someone given to much introspection over such matters.  This was time for action, aquatic action, for much like the carport exercycle of today, the only way to deal with the water temperature in the Porchester Baths was to move.  And move I did, learning to flail as best a semi-quadriplegic could.  It is entirely likely that the other swimmers were alarmed by my technique.  Controlled drowning would not be an unfair description.  Here, I suspect, Bob made himself invaluable in ways that were utterly unobtrusive.  Such was his British knack, the smallest word or two, intonation communicating 90% of the message, which was 'thanks, but he is fine.'

Swimming had its benefits.  It still does, but changing my clothes has become just complicated enough for me to get in water much less often.  Still, I must confess, this is probably a foolish choice.  Who knows exactly what happens to the disabled person in a swimming pool?  Something good, that is the only answer.  I have heard physical medicine types talk about the simultaneous virtues of buoyancy and muscular activity, and while this is certainly true, the sum total is even greater.  In short, I emerged from the Porchester waters not only exercised, but improved, endorphins or good energy or something bounding about my 22-year-old system.

Back in the cold locker room, Bob helped me dress.  In 1969, Britain had ideas about heating that have since fallen away.  There was still a certain belief that money spent on heat in a changing room was unnecessary.  This was a public place, after all, serving British people, hearty and proud of their indomitability.  Why waste?  Heat the swimming waters, to some extent, and the rest was unnecessary.  At least, that is my take on the matter.  

Even with Bob's help, I could not get dressed fast enough.  Nor could I get into Bob's heated car fast enough.  We drove through West London, heading for his parents' home, where we must have planned to have dinner.  I asked him to turn up the heat in his car.  Once inside the door of his parents' centrally heated townhouse, I expected the chill to abate.  It did not.  I had a cup of tea in the dining room.  My teeth were now chattering.  I crutched upstairs to the sitting room, feeling as though the 70°F interior was actually more like 40°F.  I could not get warm.  In the end Bob's twin sister Caroline must have suggested the bathtub.  I filled it with hot water, got in and waited.  It took a while, but this did the trick, bringing an end to the hypothermia.  For that is what it was, the body chilled beyond its ability to warm itself.  Perhaps to be expected when a person's movement is so restricted.  A new discovery, a defining of the neurological edge.  I had pushed it, of course, and mostly to my benefit.  A certain pattern getting established.

Naturally, I returned to Porchester Baths.  At that time, Bob worked for a British corporation that made cement.  I had no idea that it would take me almost a decade to find full-time work anywhere.  I envied him, naturally, but he was at pains to set the record straight.  It was a job.  It was good to have a job.  But his work was dull.  The routine of office life was hard to get used to, he told me.  Understated British code for fairly intense dissatisfaction.  Bob was destined for greater things, it turned out, and so was I.  For now, he had this convenient fact of working life, that he was somewhere in the West End every day, and it was not hard to meet for a bit of exercise at the Porchester Baths.  Which we did, on one particular evening perhaps a year after my first dip in the swimming pool.  

We emerged into a summer night, most likely, or a fairly warm autumn one.  I wasn't shivering, that is the point.  I was going to hobble with Bob the few blocks to either the Marble Arch tube station or the bus stop.  Doubtless tired from my swim, I probably said something about how it was hardly worth it, the difference between crutching to transit and just heading to my bedsit in Holland Park being not that different.  I might have said this, speaking wholly from emotion.  My room in Norland Square was a good two miles away.

Why not, Bob must have said.  And so we were off, me hobbling down the Bayswater Road.  The real goal was to get as far as we could before I gave up and boarded a London Transport double-decker bus.  What was the worst that could go wrong?  That in the long reaches between bus stops I might collapse?  Possibly.  But after surviving the hypothermia adventure, relearning to swim and simply making it through an entire year in this cold foreign city, why not indeed.  Soon Hyde Park was drifting by me.  A normal view to anyone else, it seemed, but utterly exotic to me.  Something I only saw, when I saw it, from the bristly upholstered bench of a bus.  And it was all there, the normal world, visible in the failing day, able-bodied couples out for a stroll, someone kicking a soccer ball across a distant lawn.  And at least I was up and moving with the rest of the London populace.  Not waiting for a bus or a ride from Bob.  Not waiting for anything.

Who knows how long it took me to get to Lancaster Gate?  But incredibly there I was.  And somehow even to the next tube stop and neighborhood, Queensway.  Even on to Notting Hill Gate, where I must indeed have been flagging.  But when one is in sight of a quadriplegic world record, nothing gets in the way.  There is no giving up.  There is also almost nothing else, one's mental state being badly worn down at the peak of such exertion.  

I had forgotten about my stairs.  I do recall that much.  But there at the very end of two miles of hobbling were these high stone Victorian steps.  Somehow I got to the top of them, Bob asked if I was all right, then left.  It was only about 8:30 PM, but I immediately went to bed.  My legs were shaking, and things neuromuscular were generally off, but this was a milestone, of some sort.  Two milestones having been achieved, if one wants to get literal.  And what did it mean, and what did it add up to?  A negatively stated positive.  Why not?

At Marlou's yahrzeit my brother and my cousin both recalled how she had encouraged their kids to travel abroad.  Marlou was a devotee of the American Field Service, a redoubtable organization that arranges international family stays with students in their third year of secondary school.  These stories acquired magnitude with the passing of their principal character.  For this was what was left, a human's impact on the world.  It was never intended, this effect, just given.  This is what is left.  All that anyone can leave anyone, I was thinking.

I am still thinking this as I sit opposite a fortysomething friend who is going through a divorce.  He has things I don't, particularly a couple of kids.  Moreover, he has had a certain suburban stature, living on this street, serving on that board.  And now it is all coming apart, or so he feels.  I feel for him.  I have been down this road, I say.  And now the metaphors are mixing, and not unpleasantly.  His life on his street, my life on my road.  And kung pao shrimp, which we now order.  His heart isn't in the Chinese food, I can see.  His heart is broken and battered, and I can see that too.  The other thing I can see is that life goes on, and his life will go on...and stay tuned, I want to tell him.  Actually, I do tell him something like this.  That that midlife can be a time of tumult and of loss and even transformation.   

It has always seemed such a misbegotten thing, my turbulent childhood, then my shattered 20s mostly spent, as I recall, looking for work...the latter only appearing in my early 30s.  Nothing to brag about, I have always told myself.  And now if not quite bragging, I am, as we say in California, sharing.  His street, my road, some shrimp, what the hell.

'Ride 'em, cowboy.'  These words take on an entirely different character coming from a Brit.  The cowboy narrative belongs here, to me and my people, I was thinking as this moment erupted in 1981.  Hard to recall exactly how it happened, but my former London neighbor, Martin, had arrived for a visit.  With time short, we had flown to Reno and turned ourselves over to Messrs. Hertz whose first car literally died in the airport parking lot.  I was driving the second one now, and precisely how this is possible...well, it's slightly eludes my memory.  After all, I am now rather anxious about driving my own specially equipped van, let alone an ordinary Buick without custom controls.  That was what Hertz had given me after the first car had died.  And why Martin wasn't driving, I honestly can't recall.  Perhaps he wasn't used to traffic on the right, although he has traveled enough for this to seem unlikely.  Perhaps I was driving because I wanted to be driving, wanted to show him the sights while he looked on.  Which he was.

We were climbing the relatively scenic highway out of the Reno high desert toward Lake Tahoe.  Martin was discoursing as always.  Fantasizing was more like it.  He was singing 'I'm an old cowhand from the Rio Grande...' at the top of his British lungs.  Not exactly his first time in the States, but the first time anywhere but New York.  Nothing about our drive seemed particularly cowboyish to me, but we were passing the occasional barbed wire fence, cattle probably visible in the fields, and that was enough for Martin.

A pixieish figure, we have about the same height, but not the same demeanor.  Martin is all twinkly.  His round face beams often.  His is an antic mind, lightly dancing about the topical landscape.  Tending to delight in whatever takes his fancy.  And fairly recently divorced, almost any reasonably attractive woman was taking Martin's fancy on this particular trip, I could see that.  The flight attendants on the short hop from San Francisco.  The blond Hertz agent.  All this randiness only temporarily on hold while we made our way up the mountain.  A drive that should have taken roughly half an hour, but now lengthening and threatening to stop only about five miles short of Lake Tahoe.  For the car was sputtering, incredibly a second rental dud.  

Such ill fortune did not seem possible.  But here I was, pulling off the road, embarrassed as though this was my doing.  Somehow I thought that if I opened the hood, Martin could spot trouble.  He found all this a matter of great merriment, absolutely confident in his own total ignorance of things automotive.  There's a bonnet, he said, and every appearance of an engine under it...and what do you want me to do?

One gets the idea, wholly inaccurate, that able-bodied people know everything that the disabled don't.  Still, I found it embarrassing, how our scant couple of days around Lake Tahoe had already turned sour.  Or so it seemed.  Martin slammed the bonnet.  I started the engine, and new even sicker sounds blasted intermittently from the tailpipe.  I put the car in drive, and it died.  I tried this again, this time pressing the accelerator, and it died a bit slower.  We were not in a place for complete and terminal automotive death, the Sierra winter being what it was.  We were not even in a place to await a tow truck, my impatience being what it was.  I gunned the engine, floored the accelerator and the car leapt off the shoulder, tires screeching, gravel flying and Martin twinkling his ride 'em cowboy encouragement.  

Stopping in front of one of the big gambling hotels at Lake Tahoe, I more or less double-parked at the Hertz stand, grabbed my crutch and hobbled inside.  Definitely time to be assertive, to rouse a certain level of ire and demand another, mechanically infallible car on the spot.  Bad customer service may have seemed the issue, but for a disabled driver survival is the more powerful motivation.  We rolled away from the hotel in a huge period gas guzzler, an early 80s behemoth of uncertain breed.  Martin was still twinkling.  The Hertz girl had large breasts.

I lead the way.  This was my land.  Martin probably knew as much about Lake Tahoe as I did about Lake Lucerne.  Water spots with reputations.  He probably never dreamed he would return to this Sierra gambling resort.  His life was at something of a low ebb.  There was the divorce.  And the career.  When we had lived more or less next door, Martin was a photographer for the London Sunday Times.  His trademark style was black-and-white, mercilessly grainy close-up portraiture.  From the late 60s on, people like Michelangelo Antonioni had undergone the Martin treatment, their pores, wrinkles and scars blown up for the Sunday enjoyment of Times readers.  His work was as trendy as that of his subjects, and by the time I met Martin it was sadly on the wane.  He had a new baby, a disturbed wife and, effectively, almost no job.  For a while, he worked in a local pub.  At his daughter's second birthday party, Martin resurrected some magic tricks from his boyhood and delighted all.  He was tireless in this way.  In retrospect, money for gifts, even an elaborate party, were probably in short supply.

The magical birthday party act impressed several parents.  Someone hired Martin to do another birthday party.  Then another.  A born impresario, Martin knew when he had something.  His birthday party magic business was soon an established fact in West London.  And naturally it didn't stop there.  A couple of years after I had moved back to California, Martin and I met for lunch.  Which proved surprisingly complicated.  Martin had an office now, actually a basement.  He was making and selling his own magic tricks, advertising them in amateur magician magazines.  There was no sign on his office door bell.  Part of the shtick, he told me, all twinkly in his basement shipping room.  Not that there was another room, but packaging and mailing was all that seemed to go on here.  And if someone really wanted to visit Martin in his premises...well, the locale was supposed to be secret, like the magic tricks themselves.  Number 57 Lonsdale Crescent, or something like that, descent of some wrought iron steps and a knock on the unmarked door.  Martin knew how to weave a mystery out of virtually nothing.  Which drove people mad, but in the right sort of way.  The success of his tricks drove him all the way to the world of stage magicians like David Copperfield, then major acts in places like Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.  God knows what Martin designed for these particular illusionists.  But this became his business.  Which expanded into magic books.  Magical thinking being completely absent from all this, Martin being more realistic than most of us.

Which gives me heart at this particular moment.  Having not exchanged e-mails for about a year, I just got in touch with Martin, hoping to see him next month.  He responded quickly, explaining that he has leukemia and has been in hospitals for much of the year.  A January visit?  Uncertain, he told me.  No illusions.  No magic.  Just Martin.  Or maybe Martin and me.  Wherever, I told him, including some hospital near his Brighton home, if need be.  Uncertain if I have something to offer him or he has something to offer me or both.  One never knows, that is the thing.  I can only offer the wisdom of Woody Allen.  Most of life involves turning up.

The 8:39 from Menlo Park pulls into the San Francisco Caltrain station amid a flurry of apologies from the conductor for the morning train's ten-minute tardiness.  I have barely noticed, delighting more in the sense of flying along, more or less nonstop up the Peninsula.  Leaving Burlingame speechless and San Carlos stunned as the northbound rush-hour passengers flash by on the way to more important places.  At San Francisco my personal bladder conditions are so favorable that I head directly for the city trams.  Naturally, the electronic display is promulgating lies about which tram will appear on which platform.  The 'Center of King Street' is supposed to have an M-line tram in seven minutes, but damned if one doesn't slide into place after I have hustled to the 'Center of Fourth Street' for the T line...where after another minute-long wait I am on board and rolling.  The driver refuses to take my fare.  I point out that I need a transfer, evidence of my bona fides.  He hands me one.  We are rolling.

It is the J Church tram that I need, of course, which means getting off at Embarcadero.  Where, seeing an M-line car departing with the same destination as the J line's, I drift into a mild panic.  Certainly, I shall be late for my dental appointment.  Hardly surprising, for I have been late for dental appointments in San Francisco's Noe Valley for decades.  Everyone there knows that I am journeying from the southern suburbs, at the mercy of trains and trams.  Thing is, both the J and the M are bound for Balboa Park, and I am fearing that being old and clueless, the ravages of time have left me in the transit dust, that if I had boarded the M I would get to my dentist that much faster.  But, no, as the driver explains, the trams take very different routes.  I want to know that at the juncture of my existence and Medicare, that I have not completely lost it.  Admittedly, I lost part of it long ago.  Even the middle-aged likes of Salon.com overwhelms me with popular singers and popular culture and popular everything about which I know nothing.

Aboard the J car an obese girl, a twentysomething with studs and bracelets, the whole enhanced body spilling out of her blue jeans, is carrying on somewhat grossly on the opposite bench.  She accuses the girl next to her of crapping in her pants, a discussion broadcast to half the car.  She rocks back and forth on the bench, does the fat girl, overcompensating, one suspects, for not being part of the svelte American dream.  Above us is Market Street, far away from the dark tunnel and the fluorescent islands that open periodically to display people and shiny marble floors, all in transit.  Somewhere past Van Ness station, the tram struggles to the terrestrial surface and the girl, the obese one, tells her friend that we are about to experience a very neat turn.  

I want to tell her, yes, the quaint 90° curve into Church Street is something to love.  Nothing big in terms of world records, just in terms of personal preference.  It is something to behold, man and his pleasantly comprehensible mechanisms, nothing virtual or pixel-based, but a steel-wheel-screeching curve that points us toward Noe Valley.  Right on, big girl.  But I say nothing.

The real curves, the ones I have been rounding for almost 40 years, come at the top of Dolores Park, where the steep climb levels off and the J Church line follows the serpentine contour of the hillside.  The tracks abandon the streets and maneuver through a rail channel of S turns, 19th century wooden houses no more than an arm's length away, flowers from neighboring gardens trailing over the walls even at this time of year.  It seems so toylike this tram route, slow and winding like something out of an old neighborhood of Naples.  Unchanged.  Both memorable and stable enough to allow one human life to orbit around it, me now, to me then, and the changing world itself.  All a puzzle, an intriguing puzzle, and somehow I am still here.  And I will not be forever, but the J Church could be, it seems...forever defined by that which follows me.

I do not linger in Noe Valley.  Too bad, for on the way to the tram all I see is interesting places for lunch.  It is a center of Interesting Places, 24th St.  But today is all about the journey.  One knows this the way one knows anything.  And sure enough, arriving at the tram stop at Church & 24th Streets, damned if a J car isn't pulling up.  Miraculously it has just loaded its ambulatory passenger load and needs to roll only another couple of meters to the wheelchair ramp.  I wait while the mechanical steps retract, then I bounce aboard.  A good transit day.

An hour later, rolling southbound in one of the more modern Caltrain cars, I am positioned out of easy sight of a window, which is all for the good.  With my concentration pleasantly narrowed, I am seeing how it is with the most creative humorists...whatever a humorist is...in Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny, a look at the likes of Mort Saul and Woody Allen and Ernie Kovacs and so on.  I am of two minds, how the author can grasp the ambiguities of human character and the general zeitgeist, rendering both and interweaving them in a most trenchant way.  And the sheer work involved, for Nachman has details and anecdotes and perspectives that must represent hundreds of hours of interviews...the labor hidden, of course.  Only the completeness and the breadth visible to the reader.  Which makes the hidden Peninsula pleasantly forgettable and the hour-long ride easy and swift.

At Redwood City, the conductor asks me to move so that he can load another wheelchair.  In these more modern cars all it takes is a sort of simple folding metal surface to bridge the platform's wheelchair ramp and the train car.  I stare idly, wondering who is boarding, watching the metal bridge deployed, the unseen wheelchair advancing...then, crash, the bridge slips out of place, the visible legs of the disabled passenger suddenly inclined downward...then the whole disastrous scenario miraculously rewound.  I can hear that the two conductors have gotten the wheelchair back on the platform.  I can also hear them asking the passenger if he wants an ambulance.  This, I have to assume, is part of the drill, something more lawyerly than useful.  Some passerby is chanting 'lawsuit, lawsuit,' making the gratuitous ambulance offer sound wise and prescient.

Who knows where this incident will lead, I am thinking, so suffice it to say that the situation tests my loyalties.  And the answer is simple enough, that I have two, both to the rider and the ridership, as it were.  And I feel torn.  No sense in covering up for Caltrain.  Though, I would say, there is nothing to cover up.  The metal bridge slipped, and if anyone wants to know, I have some ideas about why.  Sad that the passenger was frightened, as I certainly would have been, doubtless angry at the next stage.  Such incidents should not happen, but they do, and this one deserves attention...as does the remarkable commuter train line, patronage up 10% in just the last two years, an historically all time high.  And at this point, all I can judiciously say is: I was there.

Is it a certain capacity for illusion that gets knocked out of the disabled psyche?  Taking off from Phoenix airport, gazing down on the half-filled lagoons of some half-completed and possibly half-abandoned resort development, I shake my head in something between disbelief and sadness.  For at several thousand feet the puny oval of ponds, some filled and some empty, Polynesian palm trees planted at their sides...the whole thing shrinking in pathetic scale as the plane climbs and the brown mineral moonscape of the empty lower Sonoran Desert establishes itself, horizon to horizon...well, anyone can see how silly and desperate this is.  Lakes in the middle of the desert.  Denial.  Or have I got it wrong, the spirit anyway, and this effort at lakes and greenery and golf is actually quixotic and romantic? 

Surely it began that way, all foolishly bright and hopeful.  And now it is all on the brink of falling apart, a century after Arizona became a state, and no one knows.  Except, of course, Werner Herzog, who will not make a film about any of this silliness.  For it's too obvious, the chain of land grabs and water grabs and suckers looking for some place cheap to live in the sun.  But even Herzog would appreciate the Fitzcarraldo roots of all this.  Someone dreamed.  And then it turned into a venal nightmare of a stage-set city growing out of the sand dunes, water rights bartered away to ensure that there's not even a future to it all.  The Central Arizona Project, requiring such vast federal largess as it did, sprang from a treaty that ceded millions of acre-feet of water to, you guessed it, Southern California.  What were they thinking?  What were they dreaming?  And so what if the whole thing will in the next decades become a vast desiccated nightmare?

One thing about the disability experience: it is inherently shared.  The dependency is inescapable, and yes, if one is lucky, the interdependency can be most enjoyable...at least at most times.  Nightmares tend to get shared, as do dreams.  And with more than one person involved, fantasies of whatever origin tend to get brought down to earth.  Thing is, there is also a time to soar.  Which is always the wrong time, it turns out.  But never mind.  Soaring is important.

Jane's dog Bixby remains my avatar.  I would follow his every word, if he had any.  Instead I follow his paws.  He has been to hell and back, this dog, giving him a certain credibility.  I love Bixby, that is the other thing.  Let's start with the greeting.  The two dogs, Isabella and Bixby, rush into my apartment and fly around in circles, a canine dance of joy.  Then there is the stage of interaction.  They are rescued dogs, after all, and relationships are tricky for them.  Since they do not speak, and we communicate exclusively through projection, what happens next is equal parts predictable and fascinating.  Isabella needs to be petted.  For 24 hours, around the clock, endlessly.  She approaches me like a supplicant, almost fawning, head down, whining for attention.  Bixby goes into orbit, slow orbit, often including a few approaches.  That is to say, he wanders the apartment in circles of various sizes, occasionally stopping by me for a tentative petting of the head.  This progresses into orbiting past me, a form of sidling, at which point I pet him more aggressively.  Stopping Bixby in his tracks.

Hard to say if Bixby is borderline autistic or receiving direct transmissions from Mars.  In any case, during our petting sessions he has a way of looking anywhere but at me.  While panting, of course.  Bixby's panting seems borne entirely of anxiety, not exertion.  But we are talking petting, not panting, and after a minute or so of stroking, while I patiently repeat Bixby's name, gently but unmistakably, these days he actually turns his head around and tentatively looks me in the eye.  Contact.  When you've got the doggie version of Asperger's, this is progress.  And it has taken us about two years to get here, Bixby and I, an experience that is heartening.  Actually, heartwarming.  Poignant, also.

It is hard to say who is more buoyed by all this interaction, Bixby or me.  But he has one definite advantage in doggie mobility.  True, Bixby may have inhabited some nutcase's East Bay house with 25 other dogs...and the sad evidence remains.  He doesn't know how to, say, fetch a ball, retrieve a stick or any number of normal forms of play.  However, with the healing passage of time, he can get downright exuberant.  Bixby prances.  In moments of excitement, he lifts his inordinately furry paws high as the knees of a drum majorette.  With a doggie baton, he would be complete.  He barks, prancing to no purpose except joy.  In short, he has dreams and has emerged from a nightmare, and he keeps emerging.  As do we all, it seems.  A time to prance.

Death by cold or cold as death itself, such are my coastal Californian intimations.  We have had some frosty mornings here, and if my reaction seems overblown...well, try experiencing such weather changes from within the positively operatic world of quadriplegia.

Menchu has helped me dress.  She has fed me a bran muffin.  We have discoursed upon her days as a nanny and caregiver.  And now there is nothing for it but to charge once more into the exercise breach, dear neuromuscular friends.  I must say one thing on my own behalf.  Wool socks.  I not only own them but this very morning have donned them, with help from Menchu.  A simple acknowledgment of weather, of my own limited sensation, of reality.

Still, once I am on the exercycle and Menchu has snapped my bike shoes onto the pedals and I say goodbye and she says goodbye and we mutually wish each other a Californian nice day...the want of meteorological niceness in the day becomes apparent.  No, there is more, considerably more.  It is slightly scary to be out here, my limbs locked into a machine, and feel the night's cold rising from the concrete of the carport.  Beyond, in the open drive between apartment buildings, there is sun.  It is reassuring, this solar-heated patch of pavement, and I gaze at it as my legs pump the pedals around and around.  

Even more reassuring are the comings and goings of my neighbors, most heading for work, Tom, my landlord, heading for parts and purposes unknown.

The fact that they are neighbors is important here.  For if I got into some sort of cold-derived danger with just anyone about, the complications would be much greater.  Strangers would require an explanation.  What is the man sitting on the exercycle so upset about?  True, the presence of the adjacent wheelchair might offer a clue.  But only a clue.  My neighbors have seen me in action, and in inaction...my recent fall from the rowing machine required neighborly assistance...so they would get the general idea.  And what is the general idea?  Hard to say.  But much of existence feels dangerous to the wise quadriplegic.  Some of it actually is.  And in the difference between predicted and actual danger, I live my life.

The exercycle is actually a one-legged operation, and there just isn't enough musculature working in my body to generate sufficient heat...on certain days.  One of which might be this day.  Also, I am now a Medicare client, almost, and although cardiac fitness is one thing, cardiac immortality is another.  Hard to say how much circulatory strain the body experiences under moderate conditions.  It must be worse under heat.  Possibly worse in cold.  Whatever.  I just imagine something going wrong, me being trapped in the cold, and more or less freezing to death in my own carport.

What happens at the beach?  Jane and I are headed there this afternoon, December on the Pacific coast not being so terribly different from June.  As for safety, parked at one of the county beaches what could happen?  Mechanical failure and a wait for the Auto Club?  An attack by one of the nation's roaming psychopaths?  The latter always seems a distinct possibility.  But this could, of course, be me.  No, the ocean feels safe, as does the car park, as does the car.

The freshness of the sea, its surges and endlessness, never fail to please.  Hour after hour.  Decade after decade.  And yet what I often feel at the seaside is not contentment.  In fact, it has to do with running out of possibilities.  This, the San Mateo coast seems to say, is as good as it gets.  

It gets better actually, driving along Highway 1 toward half Moon Bay.  Here the beige cliffs are falling away like chunks torn from a big round of halvah.  The day shines so bright, the sun blasting off the ocean in a low and brilliant sheen, that on this particular day I feel less trapped than usual.  Less aware that I am not driving.  That the wheelchair is inconveniently far away.  That getting up and into one of the county park toilets would require vast resources of will that may or may not be available.  

No, instead, the waves command my attention.  They are rolling inbound with the grace of a waterfall, the force of a linebacker.  Each wave hits black rocks 50 meters offshore, explodes into spewing froth, drains and flattens back into itself.  Quite a show.  Jane and I eat sandwiches from a tourist deli in the tiny burg of Pescadero, two miles away.  We have done this many times before.  Each time is as pleasant as its predecessor.  It is good to enjoy small and simple things.

It is a confusing subject, danger and risk.  Even foolishness is a confusing topic.  All these topics converge in a painful recollection from...gosh, must be the mid-1970s.  I had time, that is one of the clues to the epoch.  And this time must have been in the summertime.  What other season would bring a sensible person to the sandy edge of the Arctic's Humboldt current, otherwise known as Stinson Beach?  I was there, and almost certainly with my old friend Joe.  And definitely in a chemically enhanced state.  And in this cannabis-borne moment of abandon who wouldn't want to go for a little quadriplegic wade in the water?  Just a dipping of the toes at the Pacific's edge.  Which I did.  

And which went terribly well until I went down.  Hardly surprising in retrospect, but there I was being rolled like a log by the smallest of lapping wavelets.  Not head over heels, but face over back.  All efforts at swimming, even clawing the wet sands, ludicrously ineffective.  Not only was I tumbling, but my aluminum crutch was tumbling too, all happening with remarkable force in very few inches of water.  Pam was also there.  My sensible kiwi friend somehow spotted me helpless in the ocean.  She pulled me out and up on my feet, and I lived to tell about the druggie foolishness.  And was it, let us say, a necessary foolishness?  What chances are worth taking?  In any case, I do not believe that this daredevil moment was entirely stupid.  I don't know what knocked me down, and I will never know.  And armed with that experience of not knowing, I made it through several more decades of paralysis.  I lived long enough to have a wife and watch her ashes dissolve in the same ocean, not that far away.  An experience we will share some day.

And I lived to have another love.  And I lived period.  And I lived foolishly.  All this and Medicare.

What can one say of a life that is reduced to news of the right foot?  That it is a disabled life, of course, 'my left foot' providing title and focus for some of the best writing about disability.  So don't apologize, I tell myself, and keep your eye on the arch.

BBC Radio 3 has been broadcasting talks from its November symposium on, more or less, The Future of Everything.  Jane and I were listening just the other day to the quite courageous and remarkable Anglican official who refused to kick the Occupy protesters out of St. Paul's Cathedral.  Whose talk begins with a consideration of grounded life.  He doesn't use those words.  But I do.  His 'ground' is religious tradition.  Having essentially no tradition, this experience is foreign to me, but with a stretch I can appreciate it.  What grounds me is, more or less, my right foot and other neuromuscular anomalies.  And there is more.  I keep reminding myself of this, trying to pay attention.  Which brings us to the flower guy.

Menlo Park's Sunday open-air market is a year-round affair, which says something good in itself.  Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor the absence of anything but roots and olive oil shall keep this...and so on.  So I like it when this guy who grows paper whites and other fragrant flowers year-round in Carmel Valley welcomes me warmly when I approach his market stand.  The guy in the wheelchair is a regular customer, the man mutters to his assistant as he wraps up my bunch.  Being known, this is what amounts to stability and relative permanence in a transient high-tech suburb.  And, it must be noted, unpleasant reminders of one's failures.  The parents I still run into from the local high school, for example.  Where my PR work petered out, at best.  That is part of it.  Baggage.

The idea being that these are the constraints, the earthly confines that keep us from floating too lightly through existence.  Mine is a tiny world, circumscribed increasingly, ever diminishing.  And yet it all gets better, that is the odd thing.  Somehow, there is less possibility yet more of me.  And the boundaries, being uncertain, continually need to be probed.

There's this thing that happens to one's ability to walk if one doesn't choose to walk.  No, the muscles can thrive, if that is the word, under force of exercycle and rowing machine.  But it is proprioception and balance that quickly wane.  Which explains why I was up on my feet this very afternoon, schlepping carefully about my apartment.  Jane was on her way, a break in Sunday church activities.  Which had me up and moving.

My course is a small one.  What makes it seem big are the unknowns.  First, the level of danger.  I seem to be wavering, my balance treacherous, but how serious a matter is this?  I err very much on the side of caution, always trying to keep something to my right.  For that is the dangerous direction.  With the right side of my body paralyzed, should I topple that way, no limb could break the fall.  I would go over like a 2 x 4 post.  To be avoided.  So I start off in the bedroom, the mattress to my right.  Then there is a gap.  Here, in this dangerous open space, my gait becomes mincing.  I sort of shuffle, feeling this is safer.  The big neurologically enhanced steps my physiotherapist has encouraged me to take...well, they are just destabilizing enough to make me proceed very slowly.  Until I hit the hallway wall when I can lurch with relative abandon.  But for all of four or five paces.  For then I run out of hallway and find myself in the perilously open bedroom.  

To add exercise distance I move around the periphery, the open closet to my right, here telling myself that I will fall against a wire cabinet.  Then turning, an IKEA file, then a desk, back to the hallway, and along the entranceway wall.  Then another turning and along some desks, the end of the sofa, the back of a chair, bookcases, a table, then Marlou's glass breakfront.  A hutch, some would call it.  Whatever.  This utterly foreign piece of furniture with its glass windows...one could term it a vitrine...is both substantial and insubstantial.  To slam against it would mean broken glass and sliced skin, more blood than I wish to imagine.  Bleeding to death on the living room carpet not being beyond imagination.  At least mine.

And yet being up and about, seeing my own home, for once, from the vertical...well, it's essential.  In such moments I note that I still have all this stuff from Marlou, memorabilia, knickknacks, favorite objects of hers.  And all this needs a home.  Not mine, by the way, for Hummel figures and so on, they're just not me.  And Marlou wouldn't want this here, all these beloved porcelain figures, tiny teacups and saucers, miniature ceramic boxes...these should be somewhere else.  Destination still unknown, but problem noted.  Otherwise, the case of figurines would vanish into the background of my life.  In fact, were it not for these occasional walks I take about the apartment, the photos on the wall in the hallway would still be there.  Marlou's grandmother, her brother's wedding, a great-grandmother, a high school graduation portrait...all stuff from another person.  Another time.  Not this time.  Debbie, my sister-in-law, took them down and put the photos in a desk drawer just a few weeks ago.

The BBC's speaker, the church official from St. Paul's, spoke not only of having home ground, as it were, but of defending it.  His students, he had observed, were much better at critiquing positions then defending their own.  To this I would add an important nuance.  Defending without being defensive in tone.  Confidently sticking up for something.  Which I am inadvertently doing now.  A lot goes on in a small and confined area.  That this is my life, and it has made me, and here I am.  That my 'small' adventures are as big as any, the challenges of getting about with a half-paralyzed body are more than sufficient in scale.  And that the opposite is to have no ground at all.  Which makes life much easier in some senses.  But quite oppressive in others.

I think the main person who needs to hear the defense of my apartment is me.  In America it is a badge of something or other to own a house.  At times, my apartment life has seemed very much a failure.  Of course, this is where so much of everything has occurred.  This is where I married happily, became a widower sadly, and found another love.  It is where I found myself in many ways.  That I keep finding more of myself is a sort of miracle.  It all happened here.  Two bedrooms.  One bath.  One life.  And that there is more of the latter, in any amount, that is the other astonishing, yes, miraculous thing.

Putting my best foot forward, that is the thing, and how this was accomplished just last night is anyone's guess.  But it is true enough, this thing about my foot, how it has been cramping, keeping me awake, until last night.  This welcome news has to do with the physiologically disturbing effects of travel, I am certain.  Nothing like a little sojourn in Arizona to get one surprisingly dehydrated...followed by a program of water ingestion yesterday evening, followed by a night without sleep-robbing cramps.  Actually, to put a fine point on things, my foot cramps erupted during the day in Arizona, with a greater than normal need to elevate my leg, keep the pinging under control.  Never mind.  I can live with this, days of jabs in my right arch.  As long as the nights quiet down.  Travel.  Don't leave home without it.

Yes, it had been one of those foot cramping nights, me dropping the afflicted limb off the edge of the bed, a sometimes and partial remedy.  And by 4:45 AM, it was all in vain, and it actually felt good to arise and make tea for the sleep-sodden Jane beside me.  Bathed and attired, I sat ready for launch, and it felt authentically transitional, that moment when Jane lowered the handles of my nylon bag over the wheelchair's headrest.  Luggage and vehicle now united, astronaut and payload off and bouncing over the 6 AM streets.  All of it exciting, the streetlight sheen on the pavement, the absence of traffic being slightly illusive...so that the lone driver who approaches the wheelchair headed the wrong way on Live Oak Avenue veers as though startled.  The street mostly empty of cars but filled with predawn promise.

The real dawn promises to hit me on Caltrain, but doesn't.  The northbound express has been canceled, I learn, and passengers mill until a local train scoops us out of the platform and we progress, station by station, toward the airport.  It is a great indignity, this thing that Caltrain passengers must now endure to reach their terminal.  But I endure it, the subway ride to the first suburb north, then a change to the first airport train south, a half-billion dollar mistake that shall live in infamy.  Never mind.  For we are there now, the airport's driverless tram dropping me at Terminal 1 where the Hispanic staff of US Airways do an extraordinary job of getting me into a bulkhead seat where I sit in an empty row all the way to Phoenix.

Things do change, and one must be reminded of this, for my fears don't.  I simply can't let go of the apprehension that someone, in ways that are fated and frightening, is going to damage my wheelchair.  Yes, this has happened before, several times, but not recently.  Perhaps the airport crews are becoming more accustomed.  Perhaps my Swedish wheelchair is made of sterner stuff.  But there it is.  And having arrived in Phoenix, I am back in the thing and outside waiting for SuperShuttle, when something like gratitude or optimism gets me talking to the dispatcher.  A very skinny black kid with dreadlocks.  People like to be talked to like people, of this I am certain, and it is this knowledge that makes me talk to him.  How is the weather?  How is the tourist trade this year?  Should I have asked my hotel if their own airport van could accommodate wheelchairs?  All unnecessary talk, all designed to give a kid a bit of validation, which I sense is particularly needed here in Phoenix.  Whatever the southwestern reality of the place, this airport is currently East Coast.  

People are arriving for the winter, and they are distinguishing themselves in particularly American ways.  I might follow their example, shunning the slightly feral black kid in the SuperShuttle jacket, a unwanted reminder of the streets they just left behind in Philadelphia or Boston or Cincinnati.  Something, some buoyancy in me, steers things in a different direction.  He choreographs curbside van activity in his own jivey urban way, this kid, while having enough professional sense to say 'goodbye, Mr. Bendix.'  All that anyone can hope from anyone.  I wish him all the best.

I even wish Phoenix all the best, although I also wish that Phoenix wasn't what it is, a wholly artificial cityscape owing no gratitude to taxpayers in the likes of Connecticut who paid for its life-giving water.  The extremity of the place becomes most apparent when the plane begins its descent over Blythe, California.  The Colorado River, essentially the only one in a vast region, is barely discernible.  Green fields flank its sides.  And then nothing.  No, it is not fair to call the desert nothing.  But whatever Northern European inheritance makes me feel that greenery is a norm, mentally turns the next several hundred miles of mineralscape into a waste.  Also inaccurate, for no land is a waste, but this land is hard and flinty and inhospitable to quadriplegic wanderers, let us say that much.  There is life beneath its baking soul, doubtless.  And on this sparkling autumn day, the mountains surrounding Phoenix are all brightness.  The SuperShuttle driver explains as we cover the few miles between the airport and downtown Tempe that the tourist season is better.  Quite a disaster last year, he says.  We turn down Mill Avenue, the main drag just off the Arizona State University campus, and the man explains that the area is populated by hippies.  A quaint term, one I have not heard for decades, and wildly inappropriate to this massive and bland academic town.  America's culture wars go on forever.

I stay at the one hotel in Tempe that has anything like the feel of a neighborhood about it.  I am here to have a meeting with my sister, to discuss some old family matters.  And I am torn between wanting to have lunch on the sunny terrace of the hotel and taking a nap.  After a fairly sleepless night of foot cramps, I opt for the latter.  Later, rolling to the lobby, some sort of small convention is under way.  It's something military, lots of people wearing army camouflage with conference name badges.  I'm Bob.  Lots of Southerners here, of course.  The latter always call me sir, doubtless because of my advancing years, but also because this is what they do.  It makes me suspicious, this authoritarian-tinged sir business, going in and out of the elevator, passing each other in the lobby, but the mystery must endure.  Who knows what 'sir' means to a Southerner?

Tempe, with its air-conditioned buses, palm trees and freshly paved streets, its restaurants and hotels, makes one think this is an affluent place, Phoenix and environs.  I know it as a shellshocked center of the American recession, property values decimated, thousands of holiday homes unsold, many abandoned.  And because I have met a couple of my sister's students, a place of sharp economic division.  One young guy, Jorge, waits tables at a retirement community in North Phoenix.  His girlfriend tends to the elderly in their homes.  Neither is treated well and both are paid poorly.

I cannot imagine discussing these futureless kids with anyone in my hotel.  The conversational opportunities would seem better along Mill Avenue, with the university crowd.  They would probably be ideal at a little coffee joint several blocks away.  It is a dingy, concrete-floored place, but given to excellent cappuccino.  Still, it does not have much by way of food or, more important, brightness.  The In Counter, an apparent chain restaurant on Mill Avenue, offers just that.  Poached eggs and cleanliness and skylights.  When my sister and I are out for a wheelchair roam the following morning, I finally settle on this place, not the grungy coffee house.  In short, I am seduced as easily as anyone.  The next time, I tell myself.  Next time I will have had enough of wheelchair independence and Mill Avenue where the shuttered boutiques are increasingly apparent.  There are 65,000 students just a couple of streets away from here, and if these businesses are failing, surely things are terribly bad.  They are, of course.  And it's not a secret.  And no one is talking in this land of I and me, except to themselves.

Which would be the end of the story were it not for one final we're-all-in-this-together moment.  It's always very awkward arriving at any airport with an electric wheelchair in the belly of the plane.  It's not that I wait nervously, though I do.  It's that I delay everyone and everything.  The entire cabin crew is obliged, or feels obliged, to linger while that final passenger awaits his power wheelchair.  At San Francisco this involves transporting the chair from the plane, across the apron, through a door and to the nearest elevator.  Which can take quite a while.  So what is there to do but have a quick pee, getting one out of the airport that much faster?  Problem is that toilets aboard the typical Airbus 310 are inconveniently lodged under the curving wall of the airplane.  The average able-bodied person would not even notice.  But the standing quadriplegic cannot get his hips forward enough.  One's attempts fall short.  Significantly short, falling on the floor, in fact.  Not to worry, for this is why the toilets are full of paper towels.  Besides, the cleaning crew is going to get to this first-class lavatory soon enough.  Which, I realized, having left the site in a very unsanitary condition, was not true.  The cabin cleaners had, come and gone, and in view of the of wad of wet paper towels in the corner, I could not be going fast enough myself.