January 2012 Archives

Wish I could capture my current mood. No, nothing literary here. I mean actual lassoing, bringing to ground and branding. Rope that sucker. Break it and put it to good use. Let us not quibble about rodeo life. Let us get on with it.

But not at 4:30 AM. Not a good time to wake up and...well, there is no 'and' at such an hour. At that point in the early morning, if you insist on being awake, you might as well join the coach passengers en route to Singapore. At such an hour everything is out of joint. No sense in getting out of bed, is there? Long day's...or is it night's...journey. Equally pointless and stationary.

The essential facts of disabled life are insecure. Which is to say they are frightening. It's like ripping the floor out of your car and driving down the motorway at 70 mph. You see a little too much pavement. You see a little too much period. Take last night, the actual night part of the night, a.k.a., evening. I was headed for a chat with my congregational brethren about Isaac Babel. A book group being one of the few things powerful enough to get me out in the evenings. Jane kindly waited in her car while I got mine going. My estimate - at least five weeks since I had driven the van anywhere. High time, of course. One must keep up one's driving skills, that is the thing. The other thing is turning on the lights. Always helpful at night, headlights. And I was more than halfway to my destination when I discovered they were off. Easily remedied, of course. But not without a few self-directed curses. Just to keep in shape, as it were.

And so in this fashion I made it all the way across Palo Alto. A risibly tame journey, of course, which is precisely the point. How could such a short and easy drive be fraught with anything but boredom? The answer came shortly before departure, as I was opening the door of my van. It took several tries before the mechanism would allow my wheelchair lift to deploy. Safety backups, and all that. The unfortunate history behind this involves several failures. The door and its drive chain need to be adjusted. The van is constructed of add-on hardware from another time. In fact, the van is from another time. What else can one say of 1995? Once inside safely, conscious that Jane was waiting and watching, I could not help but gaze at the clouds swirling around my Ford. The exhaust was rich with petrochemical history. The fact that it was visible at night having to do with carport lighting and the viscosity of the fumes.

Never mind. One does not think about these things until under way. And then they loom, the possibilities. What if the door fails to open when I get to my friends' bungalow? The same fear returning on the way home. Would anyone be meeting me at home, someone from the book group asked. I pooh-poohed this, of course. Independence being such a prized commodity. Which brings one to an essential disabled conundrum. How to stay both active and aware. Which seems to involve building fear into the equation. Making room for a life of frequent, and surprisingly small-scale, anxieties. There is no way around it. And the only way is forward. Which means an inevitable psychic collision...along about 4:30 AM.

The other reality being no morning help. Team Filipina just happened to be occupied. Jane was hitting the pulpit at the crack of dawn. There was nothing for it but to get my own self up, showered and into neuromuscular action. And here I must note what can only be called progress. I did call Jane, by prearrangement, on my way in and out of the shower. For it is a danger zone, Tile Land. The scene of one broken hip already. Unfortunately, action must be backed up by awareness. Damned if I wasn't angry at myself, quite angry throughout the early morning.

The maddening getting on of socks taking up a tremendous amount of time. One slipup after the next, crossing the legs to stabilize the paralyzed one. Trying to one-handedly snare the maximum amount of toes within the elasticized sock band. Dropping the sock, of course. Repositioning the paralyzed leg, and so on. Cursing myself all the while. And to what end?

No end, that was the point. On and on it went. Well, this might be overstating things ever so slightly. Maybe 15 frustrating minutes. Long enough to keep one's dressing skills in functioning order. And as for the frustration? Well, I sort of battered it down. While it resisted. The breath of life needs to blow through such moments, aerating and lightening them. Moments of disabled life, and any life, are hard and frustrating. Welcome to adulthood. Let it happen. And it's okay. Get frustrated, get the joke, if possible...but get it out.  Something like that.

Unfortunately, I kept looking at my watch. Too much time had passed, it seemed. All my life had gone this way. Everything delayed, too late, too little. And then, having rolled into my office, damned if in the middle of getting on my leg brace I didn't have to pee. A familiar juncture, and the way forward is always clear. But not at this particular moment. The way forward seemed to involve getting the leg brace on, dammit. That is to say not being interrupted by things paralytic and urinary, thank you very much. Which, in retrospect, is neuromuscular madness. The quadriplegic bladder is always living on borrowed time.

A situation compounded by that other situation, the bathmat. The one with the rubber backing for non-slip security. Which if anyone is present, such as a member of Team Filipina, easily gets picked up and put away. Being otherwise in the way of the 65-year-old man limping to the toilet. But not an insurmountable obstacle. Just a nuisance. Never mind. There would be no bladders getting in the way, and no bathmats.

So what is a man to do but grab his grabber? The latter being a long-handled device with a mechanical hook. Because just then, on the spur of the moment, I thought of this approach. Grabbing the bathmat with the grabber, while en route to the toilet...the latter journey more urgent than ever. In short, in retrospect, a series of mounting obstacles, the latter masquerading as objectives. Trying to do way too much with too little. Which sets one up for urinary failure, trust me. And the answer being in the future: trust my feelings. And the moral being.... That it is easier to change blue jeans than habits.

You just can't get enough air, I always say, when someone is attempting to rip out your lungs. Gosh, but these would have been helpful words earlier in the morning. I was on the phone, having a little chat with my book publicist. So gratifying, by the way, to have one. At least in the abstract. In any case, I began the meeting with considerable ire. The book, after all, was messed up. Printed without the right stuff on the back cover. Well, not so much 'right,' as anticipated. After all, everything, books included, has a production schedule. About nine months for humans, in one example. And so on. But I had lost track of this essential limitation. I had changes, and changes to the changes, and a few additional slight adjustments to the changes...not only right up to the 11th hour, but past the 11th hour. How many hours does it take to make a book, anyway? Hardly the point. In the end, the back cover was not what I expected. Not that I have seen the back cover. And no one, absolutely no one, cares one way or the other. Judge a book by its back cover and...well, you can't, can you?

Funny thing, as the meeting rolled on, my spirits did not improve. The publicist was chatting about Twitter. And actually if she had been twittering about chatter, it would not have made any difference. The whole thing was still not going down well. Or coming up poorly, as lungs do when they are being ripped upward from one's own chest. I found myself speaking rather tautly. As though not getting enough air. Hyperventilating, hyper cautious, hyper period.

Actually the whole thing, the entire lung-ripping experience, is lodged in some deep, yet remarkably accessible body memory. I have been through this before. Though not recently. It is like being shoved ever so slightly toward work. Schedules. Deadlines. Objectives. Oneself being shaped and squeezed like mortar on a mason's board. Slapped up 'long side the head, shoved into position. Purposeful and impersonal. Like a job.

Funny thing about jobs. While I do not miss the business world...there are always jobs. That is to say, new things that need doing in a finite amount of time. In short, with this book, I am back in the saddle, as it were. And it is remarkable to watch the self dig in its heels. The damnedest thing. Oh, it is fine writing. Quite splendid traveling. And wonderful having my life of options. But one needs the demands of others. And, at least for me, the more objective demands of the 'real world.' Overall, the experience is not unlike that of the exercycle. Keeps one in shape.

While I joke about the visceral response to all this, the truth is no joke. My body does actually react in a profound and total way. And it's a way that I recall from doing this before. Inertia might be the simplest description. Although judging by the total discomfort, the truly somatic sense of everything being squeezed in the wrong direction, something profound must be under way. And that is the thing. However profound, this is not a time for profundity. This is a time for getting things done. That is to say, more or less the opposite of what my particular personality is all about.

There is a thread to it, if one only looks hard enough, and there is even a tally at the end. I believe it is one of those hallmarks of human personality, which of these perspectives we choose. The latter is most easy to adopt. In our 'production society' is certainly the most familiar. What did I accomplish today? Versus, what was the theme of the day or the lesson of the day? Or even more maddeningly wafty, what emerged from the day? Thing is, I am much more comfortable with floating about with the latter yardsticks. But something judgmental forces me toward the more material. What did I accomplish today?

Well, let us applaud my one hour on the recumbent exercycle. Enough to blast a certain amount of arterial sludge to one side, I would think. Enough to get the lungs grabbing at oxygen molecules most effectively. Followed by a well-timed visit from Perry, Stanford trainer and physiotherapy assistant, who put me on the treatment table-rack, forcing my limbs and joints back toward the normal. And, if one is literal minded and counting, these two events comprised more than two hours, that is to say, more than 25% of the standard workday. Or some much higher percentage of the productive portion of the standard workday. Therefore, let us lighten and brighten and acknowledge the happy completion of these tasks. Onward.

Lunch with Phyllis, al fresco in the globally-warmed January afternoon, temperatures bordering on the spring-like. The drought now an inescapable fact. Never mind, for we talked of travel, somehow a mutual pathway. Trips and loss being interwoven in both of our lives. Spouses departing in one direction, we in another. And with my body aching in the wake of Perry's stretching, I was off in yet another direction. Toward Peet's, of course. Long enough to process the New York Times, jettison the newsprint on the handicapped table, and head home.

Home being the scene of an earlier domestic crime. Vandalism and property damage, at the minimum. Idiot, idiot, being my own refrain in the aftermath. Utterly unnecessary, for the cause was oblique and mysterious. And perhaps not even negative in origin.

If you spend your days in one, a wheelchair easily becomes an extension of the body. Which explains why speed settings may vary wildly, irrespective of the task or conditions. Actually, in one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for moments, I recently had my wheelchair control adjusted. Both speed and acceleration increased at the high end, cranked down at the low end. But I omit the nuances. There are also special settings for turning speed, for example. In short, the chair handles quite differently.

I think of 'fast' in terms of overland travel. That ever so gratifying battery-driven bounce down Live Oak Ave. Which translated into my apartment, means zipping from kitchen to office, bedroom to hallway. But comes with a certain amount of baggage, vis-à-vis control issues. Which was the last thing on my mind in those moments post-exercycle, charged with endorphins and significantly shattered, but might as well do a thing or two before Perry arrived for my stretching. When...bam...turning to head from living room to desk and turn on a little Internet music for the next physical medicine hour, I hit something. Actually, the back of the wheelchair whipped around, acceleration and turning speeds now being what they are. Which broke one of the plastic handles that adjust headrest. The cracked black section went flying. Yes, I went flying into a brief bout of self-recrimination. But only briefly, which shows a sort of progress.

My speed setting was on high not because I was careless, but because I was in a moment of exuberance. An hour of mega-aerobic exercise behind me, so time to dance. An even bigger thing was behind me. Just the previous day I had made it through the annual physical exam. Me and my prostate will happily get through another year.

So the day's accomplishments? Add to the above me collaring the inbound Perry and asking him to retrieve some plastic glue from the pantry and re-affix the amputated part. Mission accomplished. Which doesn't even include that supreme achievement. After days of suffering with a faltering TV, a quick call to the cable company and a miraculous discovery of the reset button on the set-top box (note slick use of consumer electronics jargon), and I was back in home-entertainment business. As for the day's mysteries, well, it seems that I must earn my admission to this special zone. And I have.

Which brings us to Isaac Babel. Actually, my local Jewish congregation's book group brought me to this singular writer. And for the second time in my life. Interesting what comes with the passage of time. No, not interesting, thrilling. Yes, my lower back aches, my sense of balance worsens daily. But in this rereading of Babel, I can see that all is not lost. In fact, I seem to have more of a sense of this stuff than ever. Naturally, I remain uninformed. Even those steeped in Judaica, Yiddishkeit and all the rest cannot possibly be ready for Babel. Even Babel probably wasn't ready for Babel. His days must have been long and, of course, his life was short...and how he crammed such a world into his brain seems inexplicable.

I like, first and foremost, his inexhaustible energy of assertion. This is true and that is true and everyone can see why, just look at these details...none of which add up. Babel flings his reality up at us, characters popping into existence without explanation. Unless there is an explanation, which is invariably not to the point and explains absolutely nothing. Thus, one character is likened to that medium-short rabbi in the neighborhood...whom we have never met and will never hear of again. Telling us nothing about the character, implanting a detail that only tells us there are rabbis everywhere in Odessa. And setting the stage for yet another assertion, whatever it may be. But surely readers of Babel all have their favorites. One of mine involves the scene of the gangster Benya Krik in the midst of robbing a safe while he 'tells stories of the Jewish people.' We don't know which stories. We don't really care. The audacity of the character and his situation more than suffice.

And the details. If one thinks about it for a moment, Odessa's shtetl world with its livestock and sweaty humans can only be rank and foul. And in the midst of this steps Benya with his cream-colored trousers and raspberry boots. Thing is, we know how he steps without being told. We put two and two together, just as the characters do. Everyone in Babel's world is calculating and recalculating...the odds, the debts, the merits. Whatever. The point is, I could not really grasp all this as a young person. I have grown old enough to appreciate Isaac Babel.

Reading. It is both a good and a bad sign that immersion in an author's world can be so disturbing. Yet this is the simple truth. Take Michael Ondaatje's latest. The Cat's Table is hardly heavy going. In fact, it is full of the prankish spirit of boyhood and dances along quite lightly until it begins to scream ever so softly. As with all good writing, the nature and origins of that strain emerge slowly, gradually coalescing into another consciousness. We have been pleasantly deceived. Well, at least in my particular case 'pleasantly' is overstating it. I find such shifts in my reader's underpinnings to be unnerving. Reading alone can be unsettling. Unfortunately, this is much like being alone. Which one is, of course, and which says more about my overall level of anxiety than anything else. Something insidious this way comes.

Of course, to avoid this quality is to avoid life. To me, it is like the difference between the film of Ondaatje's earlier hit, The English Patient, and the novel.  The film is at times stirringly romantic, at others stark, with a thread of appealing mystery. It is another matter with the book. In spirit, the latter has a similar progression to Ondaatje's newest novel, a growing sense of unease building, its nature and origins vague. Only language can steer us in this way. Yes, the author is a fine one, but the reader must be with him to make it all work. Evenings, alone in my apartment, immersion in any literature of shifting ground can mildly destabilize me. Better turn on the news, check my e-mail, do anything but slide down the author's slope.

Why such anxiety? The possibilities.... A sense of my own physical fragility. The fear of life's inevitable end.  What is it, this primal unease? The product of a disturbed childhood, with the parental foundations of family life ever crumbling? Doubtless. But the origins do not fully address the feelings of today, nor their value. Unease being useful. The opposite of complacency, an anxious fissure through which knowledge may just seep. So, despite my evening disquiet, I would not want to paper over this crack in my well-being. Better open than closed, one might say.

My Tuesday volunteer Paul told me some time ago that he would prefer to hang out with me around my dining table in the mornings -- rather than waltzing out for caffeine and distraction at Peet's. Funny thing, he has a point. So on this particular morning, we had our chat...a wide-ranging discussion of the psychology of brothers traveling together, his growth in dealing with interpersonal matters at work. Followed by Paul doing some gardening, me hitting Peet's on my own, and now this. My moment of examining consciousness. Reading, disturbance and what makes both unsettling and productive. Having someone quietly around, office door closed while Paul reads....  Me alone with my thoughts but not alone in my apartment, well, it has led to this pursuit of an elusive culprit. Fear. Nameless and invisible and easy to dismiss. Paul is half my age. Good thing I don't dismiss him.

It is almost complete, my reading of The Cat's Table, and something in me balks at finishing the job. For the events of the plot, if one can call it that, are aligning in such a way that the tension is going to resolve. A surprise and an outcome are imminent. But I avoid the ending, because I know it is somewhat beside the point. The story is a story, of course, and I am looking forward to the final twists. But the persistence of unsettling things in a narrative is of much greater interest. We will discover what has unsettled the protagonist soon enough. What it is to be unsettled...what it feels like and the implications...all this ripples on and on. Horrifying or comforting...no one can say.

One of the strangest things about aging involves learning. I am quite open to the concept, acquiring new skills and perspectives. In practice, I find myself oddly closed. Witness my publicist's instruction, clear as crystal, to get up to speed in Facebook and Twitter. Oh, I can be as disparaging about the shallowness of social media as anyone - but the truth is that my ignorance is complete. Why not play about with this stuff? I think of my fairly recently deceased friend Clint, role model extraordinaire, who had a way of appearing on the web as a lesbian. Actually, there is more. A lesbian involved in Internet sex with various people in various social media, all genders involved, spanning several continents. In short, at 80 years of age, Clint was into having fun. No one told him not to. Fuck it, being his motto.

Okay, so getting back to this particular dilemma, why not play with things electronic? Noncompetitive play. Objectiveless play. There is, after all, no boss. No parent. No loss of points or loss of face. There is loss of speed, of course. Not to mention loss of interest in things gadgety. Do I dare to eat a peach? Stay tuned.

Have days when you just can't get out of bed in the morning? Actually, you probably don't. Neither do I, for the most part. Although there is that lesser part, and this particular morning was one of those. Let us digress.

I am home, happily enjoying the company of Jane, turning out the lights together for the first time in several weeks. Then turning them back on around midnight. I have the feeling that I am going to vomit. But I don't. And then I do. A few hours later followed by similar events at the opposite end of the alimentary canal. In short, a sort of search-and-destroy mission through the intestinal tract. Source unknown. But in the end I am sapped. Oddly, I can't recall a similar experience for many years. This sort of thing just doesn't happen to me. But now it has, and that my body has recently been ravaged by time and space and Virgin Atlantic, has not escaped me. Whatever. I spent the next day sleeping, then in the evening had a very modest meal, then bade goodbye to Jane who was off for several days of priestly instruction in Florida. Nothing like a good night's sleep to put an absolute end to this episode.

Until the morning. Still a bit weak, I threw my legs over the side of the bed, did the usual kicking action to rotate myself into the vertical. With no result. Nothing was moving, at least not enough. I tried again. Another kick, an attempted situp, then nothing. What was I doing wrong? What was wrong with me? Suffice it to say that these attempts to sit up in bed occupied the next 45 minutes. Fortunately my morning helper knows where the keys are hidden. She let herself in.

But I did have a good three quarters of an hour to contemplate present, future, with a slight seasoning of the past. I am aging, after all. Is this what the future looks like? The backache that I picked up aboard Virgin's 747 was making these situps difficult. But why impossible? Hard to say. I was thirsty, not having quite got hydrated adequately in the wake of the previous day's vomiting. And what now? I really had no answer, except a strange belief that if I could only slide my bottom to the very edge of the bed.... Well, what? I would either slip to the floor or get my torso upright, then stand. In retrospect, this made little sense, but I was desperate. I knew what a turtle can feel like.

When my helper Lorna arrived, she kept asking why I hadn't phoned her. That I could not reach the phone being the simple answer. Lying crosswise in the bed in the usual preparation for getting up...well, I had few options. But it did cross my mind that with my thirstiness, dying of dehydration would be most unpleasant. And there was the opposite, the certainty that I would have to pee in short order. In terms of ways to go, this would not be my choice. For there were dire possibilities here, a perfect storm of bad human assumptions. That I was tired, sleeping in and did not wish to be bothered. That I wasn't answering the phone, because I did not wish to be disturbed, etc. How long would it have taken for someone to unlock my door? And am I really this helpless? Clearly, at times. Am I losing independence? Absolutely. No way around life.

I had two glimpses of mortality. For some reason, probably not biomedical, the night of the vomiting, in the early stages as I sat beside Jane feeling my heart beating and my breaths shallow...I conceived of another end. A heart attack seemed possible. More to the point, I asked myself if I was ready to die. And why not? Always a good question. I decided that with Jane and others I love at my side, yes. The problem is that slightly more than 24 hours later, there was no one at my side. And my side was losing. The end is frequently unpleasant...that is part of the problem. And facing this, well that is on the postgraduate level of existential development. And for now...I am simply too tired. But not too tired to absorb the message. And this is the thing about disabled life. Messages have to get absorbed or no life is possible.

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And what does it mean less than one day later, musculoskeletal truth revealed, grim reaper shoved somewhat into the background? Thing is, all it took was a brief session with my physiotherapy assistant Perry...who noted that I was extremely stiff, had lost range of motion and just needed some limb loosening...to get back in independent action. In truth, I went to bed that night full of fears and misgivings, half convinced that this horrible trapped-in-bed thing was going to happen again. But Perry was right. My legs were working just fine the next morning, my back no longer a pained, rigid shell. Up I got, as per normal. He is a sort of master, our Perry. Lucky that he could tear himself away from duties as a sports trainer at Stanford University to work over my body. He has spent his life working for various sporting organizations, the San Francisco Giants among them. Naturally, he is interested in games and their outcome. I do my best with sports. Unfortunately, I barely understand the rules. Actually, I don't understand the games, but I find the crowds' enthusiasm quite infectious.  And so did not mind having the television on in the background while Perry unfolded his treatment table and had a go at my hamstrings and quadriceps.

Of course, I could not see the TV screen, but I could hear the roaring and the commentary. Once it was all over, I talked to Jane on the phone, heard about her flight to Florida and told her about the evening's victory of the San Francisco 49ers, our local football team. Actually, they had lost, and her subsequent e-mails revealed a certain bafflement. Oh, well. Loss, win, and other nuances aside...at least I am ahead in the competitive sport of quadriplegia.

My real challenge these days is to master the phonetic difference between Don and Dawn, my delightful shipmates from Devon. All the options...oral reconstructive surgery, a live-in tutor and voice-regeneration technology...seem rather daunting. So I have decided to reconceive the problem. That is to say, in the best tradition of current American politics, I lay this matter squarely at their feet, Dawn and Don. It is they who have ill-conceived the entire matter. A short, sharp revision of popular culture, and damned if I am not home free. I simply ask those around me to cooperate. Which means thinking, speaking, and, above all, writing outside the box. Quiet Flows the Dawn. The Don of Civilization. An Oxford Dawn...downright rosie-fingered, by the way. A trip to Dawncaster. Don French as vicar. Dawn Quixote. And, of course, at my local Japanese restaurant, a steaming order of Dawnburi. I do ask everyone to cooperate. It's not asking too much.

There I was in someone's home in West London, 1972. The woman was approximately of my mother's age, and I must have been joking with her offspring, for she turned to us, all of us, and said something mildly disparaging about 'you lot.' I knew then, and I certainly know now, that this was a mother lion's cuff to the ear, nothing more. But it stung, this exchange. Such was my state of mind at age 24 or so. Everything hurt. And precisely why, even with retrospective detective work, is something of a mystery. That thing called character, the other thing called childhood, coupled with that slightly more recent thing, getting physically hurt...it somehow all added up to this. In short, moving through life was hard. On the other hand, I was moving, and while excessively permeable to human emotions, I was also experiencing what it was to be human. It was a time of having poor defenses, or seemingly no defenses, which is still better than the opposite. Being always on the defensive. Being closed. So being in a country in which the language is superficially similar, but human communication is markedly different, perhaps that was a good thing.  

The Times, who would have guessed it, has fallen on hard times in London. The genteel Lord Beaverbrook long ago replaced by the Murdochs and all their stripmining crudity.  And here we are. In short, I have little grasp of British life and times. I am merely along for the contemporary ride. I am a visitor. Stepping onto an amusement park ride for a few days, observing as best I can. Which isn't saying much. London has long been a crossroads, but who is crossing these days, well, I do not know.

The British are broke, they keep saying. However, they are not broken. Odd that in a country where things are so visibly old, there is so much energy for the new. Even in tough,  belt-tightening times, the vast Crossrail project remains on track. No pun intended. It is hard to imagine the scope of such a railway tunnel, east-west across all of Central London. The engineering logistics are daunting enough. The huge boring machines for the multiple tunnels, purchase orders signed by the pharaohs, say it all. Taking London into the future, which always means advancing into the past. Some early test bores checked out bone fragments from one of the plague-era burial sites, just in case there was any anthrax or Black Death still lingering below ground. And note that the Crossrail project, or something like it, has been under discussion since 1948. California's debate over high-speed rail has a much shorter lifespan, which gives me hope. Maybe we Californians have not completely lost an ability to think of the future.

Still, too many Britons are out of work. The sort of situation I would find scary. The daily newspapers often speak of a 'lost generation' emerging from the current financial crisis in the UK. And we hear much the same thing in the States. 'Plenty of jobs,' says the older man accompanying me and my wheelchair to Gate 42 at Heathrow, 'but they don't want to work, younger people.' Back home, I would quietly roll my eyes at such a comment. But this man's eyes are so twinkly, his demeanor so gentle, that I give him a chance. What is he trying to tell me that might be worth hearing?

At the moment, I don't really know. The only certainty is that having been hustled by Virgin Atlantic down the hallways for early boarding of a wheelchair passenger, we have found Gate 42 closed. Time for an espresso, of course, and I insist this man have one with me. No, he says, rules. After more than 40 years at this airport, I would say that bending the rules is long overdue. But, no, he won't hear of it. Still, I hear him, give him a hearing, happier when we shift to the topic of travel. He and his wife and his offspring and their offspring...now numbering six grandchildren...go to the same island in the Aegean every summer. Where he gets to holiday in the silent midst of a suffering people, just as I do in Britain. The Guardian is full of articles about the Southern European diaspora. Many Greeks are headed for Australia.

Heading home, not quite but almost, the train from my cousin's provincial station easily does 100 mph. Say what you will, the Brits have it together in the rail area more than we do. More than they realize, too. I swivel my wheelchair so that I can brace my paralyzed leg against the wall of the coach. Which has the unintended effect of closing me off from view, while my ears remain open as ever. Two university students are having a chat about life and money. They know nothing about either, of course, and neither did I at their age. These two are not only glib, but loud. Problem is, the chief talker is explaining, when you leave university you either live at home or reside in a shit neighborhood. Probably with a shit job. This conversation goes on and on, getting increasingly scatological. We even get into intimate details of personal hygiene among university flatmates...the details of which do not bear repeating. And why this information is currently being broadcast up and down the length of the Great Western Railway is beyond me. Fortunately beyond Reading they are no more. Yet they remain, or their essence does. Or the timeless problem they present, that of young male energy, its expression and harnessing on behalf of the community.

Time runs out for the airport helper, and for me, hundreds of us thundering aloft. The Guardian, being read by the man across from me, undergoes a magical change somewhere over Greenland. I can see its essence drained away, the thing becoming an artifact, its vibrancy left behind somewhere. In Britain, of course. We are not there anymore.

It's too much for me, this realization, and I have to pee. Which in my mind is easy, or relatively so. But time has taken its toll, and I am living in the neuromuscular past. What ensues is tragicomical, not to mention instructive. Messrs. Virgin had thoughtfully assigned me to an aisle seat. But damned if I wasn't going to look out the window, adjoining seats being empty in midwinter. So I slid over shortly before takeoff and had a spectacular view of the wing and departing clouds. Not to worry. At least not to worry until a man silently took my former seat. Well, he did offer to be helpful. And so here he is with a close-up view of the partial quadriplegic struggling to stand. Achieving verticality is possible, by the way, but maintaining it proves difficult. I have to swivel sideways, grab the seat back, then shuffle backwards toward the aisle. In theory this should work. But my balance has departed. My joint mobility has moved to Cambodia. And much of the cabin crew is now standing in the aisle exchanging comments on my progress. Or lack of same. I keep slipping and faltering and sitting down, then standing up. They keep referring to me in the third person disabled...maybe we should grab the odd arm or roll him in an aisle chair or dismantle him for safekeeping.

This so infuriates me that I lose control of the situation...especially when one of the flight attendants asks me if I am trying to get to the aisle. I tell him that, yes, I suspect that the aisle leads to the toilets, and having put these two concepts together, have developed a general course. Fortunately, he is utterly unfazed, Britons being born with at least three times the complement of irony genes, compared to the average American. In fact, he is most helpful as I stagger up the aisle. Later, I repeat this experience, realizing that much of the problem has to do with maneuvering in a darkened cabin. Once the daylight is streaming, my proprioception-challenged body knows where it is. Over Baffin Island, of course. The Guardian is turning into dust, like the mystical woman who departs Shangri-La. It is baffling, travel, and it is almost over.