Range of Motion tag:www.paulbendix.com,2007-08-15:/range-of-motion/1 2010-03-10T06:43:38Z A Wheelchair Odyssey Movable Type Publishing Platform 4.0 Right tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.562 2010-03-10T06:43:02Z 2010-03-10T06:43:38Z Paul Bendix If M. Swann had his way, then I get to have mine, and it leads from Peet's Coffee and straight up the street, the actual pavement, that is, to my home.  Live Oak Ave., named for the fact that it is singularly dead, cars rolling by at the rate of one approximately every five minutes, and is virtually devoid of oaks.  And after 17 years, it is my way, M. Bendiques' way, and if the route hasn't carved out its place in literary history, my wheelchair tires have.  

What tree blooms white in the spring?  Pears?  Almonds?  Rudimentary Menlo Park botany seems to have eluded me.  Never mind, for the tree has not.  Its white petals fly proud.  And like any grand boulevard, the passing scene is best viewed from the street.  Which is why I am doing this bold thing with my wheelchair, rolling straight up the pavement as though I owned the street.  Traffic be damned.  Throwing caution to the vehicular winds.  It's been a year since my wife's death, almost, and while my emotional state varies, things are trending upward.

"I need to get up the driveway."  I like the way I have said this to a gardener whose parked pickup blocks my progress.  Blunt, utterly American, and appropriate to the circumstance.  The gardener's mission, blowing leaves about one of the neighboring apartment blocks, is hardly critical.  Nothing about his work requires blocking my route, the way of M. Bendiques.

"There's the driveway," he says.  I have anticipated this, do not flinch, and point with my available hand.  There is a place at the bottom of the ramp from sidewalk to street where the concrete drops a sheer inch or so, a vertical wall, imperceptible to anyone driving a car, but probably noticeable to a bicyclist and unmistakable to anyone driving a wheelchair.  

This one-inch lip does surrender its pout.  It gives way and gently droops from sidewalk to asphalt, in one spot.  That's the place where Joe, the landlord in the front four-plex, poured a helpful bit of concrete, creating a mini ramp for my use.  An observant guy, Joe.  He had watched me kicking my wheelchair into high gear, ramming my way up the inch-high barrier and bouncing, often with a bag from Trader Joe's, toward my home.  Historically, this Joe has played a key role in my Menlo Park life.  Crutching about the neighborhood 17 years ago looking for a post-divorce apartment, I encountered Joe watering the lawn, we chatted and he directed me to Tom, who has been renting me one or two apartments, month-to-month, ever since.  I do not own the apartments, but as we say in California, I own my space.

The gardener backs his pickup truck down Roble Ave. to make way for my wheels.  Joe having made the way for my wheels years before.  Life is difficult, but it is more difficult trying to do everything alone.  I get by with a little help from my friends.  I help myself to what is mine.  Neither experience comes easily or naturally to me.  But both indicate a certain vitality.  Marlou has been dead for almost a year, and I am coming alive.  Blooming like the trees, whatever they are.  Obsessed with garden pests, whatever they are.

And I have researched the latter thoroughly.  Little eggs have cropped up under the lettuce leaves.  Something has chomped down viciously on the red cabbage.  But the culprits are shadowy and elusive.  They defy capture or even identification.  Mentally, I have erected a sort of guard tower over my two raised beds, spotlights sweeping back and forth, machine guns ready.  But nothing moves, only cowers, perhaps burrows.  And in time the patrols must stop, the sentries must go home, the fortifications come down.  I'm considering the dismantlement of the anti-squirrel netting.  

In short, the day offers an essential question: who gets to live and who gets to die?  One must be clear on this point.  No question where the squirrels, aphids, snails and cutworms fall in terms of agricultural right to life.  But what about me?  The answer lies way beyond biology.  In fact, the answer lies at Trader Joe's, right by the cut fruit department -- yes, there is one.  I had rolled up behind a tall store employee, a guy jabbering away in a southern accent about bread and how he stacks it while some hapless shopper listened.  He turned around, revealed himself to be Chinese, this being America, or at least Greater San Francisco, and I asked him to grab some apple slices off a high shelf.  I thanked him.  Not a problem, he said.  Yes, I wanted to say, it is not a problem.  For you.  Or for me.  Feeling good as I was.  Full of life.  The right to a life.
]]> Birthday tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.561 2010-03-06T23:57:22Z 2010-03-06T23:58:20Z Paul Bendix How long had Marlou been in bed?  That is to say, how long had she been on her deathbed?  I cannot remember so much of last year's dying, and this detail still eludes me.  What I recall is that her parents had gone home, spent a few days in Hawaii, and then I had called them.  Don't rush back, I tried to tell them, for things aren't that bad yet, and the preposterousness of their trans-Pacific travels was hitting me hard.  They were 82, after all.  Don't rush back.  Now it seems the message was for me, not for them.  There was every reason to rush, of course.  Marlou's life and illness were uncertain, but the direction had become clear.  Returning today or tomorrow might not matter, but next week?  Next week was a long and uncertain distance away.

The talk I gave to the Bay Area Expert Witness Association, or whatever it was, that was 15 February or so.  Life being essentially ironic, my invitation to address these particular people seems resonant with extraneous meanings.  I was already witnessing a lot, about to witness more and becoming expert.  Nevermind.  By 1 March, Marlou was in bed, and getting up and out of the bed had become difficult, was becoming more so by the day, and events were coming at me like an enormous highway construction machine.  You see them late at night on the local motorways, lit up like a stage, creeping along in their enormity, smashing or smoothing or paving, crew standing about in hard hats.  Constructing that feels like deconstructing.  

And there was Marlou in bed, looking as though she did not know what had hit her.  Although she did.  She may not have known the details of her death, or wanted to know, in advance.  But the fact of it, that was always there.  She never flinched from acknowledging the end.  She knew she had a year or years and carried on anyway.  Traveling long distances.  Singing in a community chorus.  Losing her hair, vomiting, and still getting up each day.  And having witnessed it all, what was there to do but shake my head in admiration and stand by?

And then came the birthday.

What is a birthday and what does one do with it?  We made it a point to celebrate each other's.  Always.  And with the disease and its distortions, birthday celebrations only intensified.  My 60th, for example.  At that point Marlou was high on crank, one might say.  And one does say.  What was the stuff?  Steroids, I guess, drugs given to mask the effects of chemotherapy.  And, one kept thinking, if the mask is this extreme, what are the actual drugs like, the so-called therapeutic ones?  

Questions of this sort floated by, floated away in the confusion, and really they were minor.  Marlou was on what she was on, and the steroidal speed had her "on" switch pressed down hard permanently.  So I turned 60 with a flurry of iridescent versions of the number 60 floating down about the room, ceilings draped with paper decorations and Marlou lining up an extensive program of group singing, CDs piled and ready, a small number of invited guests standing about bewildered.  And I, for once sensing the tenor of the evening correctly, toasted the love of my life.  Once all the extroversion was over, it was a relief to fall into bed together.  At least we had that.

We still had that with Marlou abed permanently.  And at night, holding hands, side by side, staring into the ceiling darkness felt much as it always had.  For night reveals the blank uncertainty of life, its vastness, its petering out or ours pleasantly merged together.  As were Marlou and I, bed drifting like a boat, heading for the falls, perhaps, but for the moment, only feeling the current.

And then came the final birthday.  Marlou's was on 6 March, and since no one forgot, neither her parents nor me, the day must have been on our collective minds.  One well-designed feature of Jewish holidays: they begin at sundown.  This makes eminent psychological sense.  Once things grow dark, they grow inward and their resonance comes at us.  It's there already with the dark of the previous eve, so go for it.  Start acknowledging.  Light the candles, stop the food, whatever gets you in the flow.  So there it was, 6 March, following 5 March, Erev Marlou.  And there we were, the three of us, gathered at the foot of the bed, Dick and Joan smiling birthday smiles at their dying daughter.  Me at my wife.

The hospice nurses were buzzing about already.  But not just then.  There had been a break in the medical action, I suppose.  But the air was heavy with the question of the misery creeping across Marlou's face.  What could be done about it?  And if nothing could be done, would it drag us with it?  This medication or that medication?  Was the doctor coming or not coming and did it matter?  Surely there was some good in this moment.  It was Marlou's birthday.  And the three of us were standing there bedside.  What happened?

What could happen?  Marlou's sensitivity to noise had only heightened.  Sounds bothered her when she was healthy, and when she was in pain, they assaulted her.  That may have been one reason why no one sang Happy Birthday to You.  But there was another, starker reason.  The birthday wasn't happy.  We could feel it, all of us, certainly Marlou.  The vomiting and nausea wiped out any thoughts of birthday cake.  And presents?  Presence was all Marlou had left, all we could exchange.  Any conceivable gift either enhanced or mocked the situation.  A new bathrobe would be the last bathrobe.  Deathbed flowers or a plant?  Too funereal.  There was nothing to buy, nothing tangible to give.  Still, I think Joan managed a card.  It was very brave, in retrospect, for she is a sensitive woman and must have felt, deeply felt, the futility.  The last birthday card.  I couldn't do it.  I did not give Marlou a card.  She could barely read her mother's.  The cards that arrived in the mail got arranged by someone else, perhaps Joan, along the window.  I can't say that Marlou noticed them.  She was noticing less and less.

In short, it was a hopeless birthday, the beginning of hopelessness itself.  Of mounting horrors.  And for me, the startling sense that there was nothing I could do.  Our human exchanges were diminishing.  There was barely time to say hello and goodbye.  Life, what was left of it, was gradually being consumed, consumed in pain.  Which was, in retrospect, true for both of us.  Marlou was dying, the "we" of us was dying, hope was dying and the future was dead.  

A year later, the future has survived.  It's not even on life support.  Or is it?  What has happened is still happening on some level.  And Marlou's birthday has returned.  It is drifting into port, like an abandoned ship.  Even skipperless, I am glad to see it.  Only a couple of weeks ago, the nation stopped working because Washington and Lincoln were born on days in February.  And we remember.  We remember their faces are on our coins.  We remember to stop working.  We've forgotten everything else.  And that's okay, because they've forgotten us too.

Marlou loved what was manly in me.  Define manly?  She didn't, and I shan't.  I'm hyperconscious and self analytical enough.  She knew what she liked and let me know it.  And when what was manly lacked confidence or expression, she had a way, an effective way, of helping me find myself.  My better self.  Marlou liked men, weaknesses and all.  I'm not sure that my own mother did.  But Marlou did, growing out of an essentially good rapport with her father, I would guess.  In any case, I am conscious of this legacy, how she helped me advance in ways unexpected.  And in ways unexpected, a year of grief is giving away to a year of less grief.
]]> Movements tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.560 2010-03-05T05:30:18Z 2010-03-05T05:30:47Z Paul Bendix It is one of those memories the body distorts, playing it down, trying to half forget, certainly minimize, as though to make room.  Room for the journey.  Journeying in a room, or at least a compartment, being what the overnight train to Seattle is all about.  It's about 24 hours too, long enough to encounter every anomaly that freight trains pounding tons of bauxite, Toyotas and winter wheat can do to the track below.  It's an entire day sampling the violent jerking that occurs over the occasional loose rail or ancient junction.  

And ancient, it is.  In fact, the Union Pacific's line from Los Angeles to San Jose still relies on hand switches.  That is, UP personnel get in pickup trucks, drive to some point in the track and manually pull a lever to enable, say, a train to shift into a siding or the Coast Starlight to pass a freight.  Very retro.  Very 19th century.  Very Third World, and very contemporary America.  Never mind.  For the wild track only adds to the effect.  Particularly moving between cars where metal floor plates slide like drifting continents, while leaping up and down in remarkable simulation of an earthquake.  Particularly thrilling as one tries to stumble into the dining car.  

But one forgets, fortunately, the ticket bought, trip begun.  And the train starts rocking, stopping only occasionally when the Starlight berths at major stations.  Otherwise, it shakes one all the way to Seattle.  Movement about the train feels like a lateral mountain climbing expedition.  A handhold here, bracing the crutch there.  And in the end, the scenic ordeal drifts into Seattle's King Street Station and forgets itself.  Until the next trip.

Fortunately, the body remembers.  It remembers everything.  It remembers that it's a long way from Tipperary.  It remembers where Tipperary is, how to spell it and why it's different from Topiary.  It remembers its a long way from last year to this one, and to pay attention when you rummage about the refrigerator.  

It's the silly shelves, isn't it?  They hang off the refrigerator door like balconies on a tacky hotel.  Some jars and bottles are too tall, and others are too low.  The quadriplegic hand, its guidance system ever failing, reaches for one and invariably knocks over the other.  And always at the worst possible time.  Such as a leisurely dinner of the bachelor sort, not so much cooked as assembled on the Masonite 1950s breakfast bar strategically across from the refrigerator.  So while the mind is on NPR's becalming account of the nation's decline, whomp goes the black bean sauce, the jar not only tilting on its side but losing its top.  Just as the quadriplegic loses his neuromuscular way, and in questing after the metal top, knocks over ancient bottles of tartar sauce, Russian dressing, and miscellaneous dreck that really and truly belongs deep in the Palo Alto landfill.

Unfortunately, all these experiences, judgments and observations stream past faster than tracer bullets.  The bottom of the refrigerator shelf has been slicked, greased down like the hair of a 1950s high school boy.  The jars fly every which way.  The top to the black bean sauce is hard to distinguish from the enamel shelf underneath it, bad neurology being what it is.  I've got it.  No I don't.  Yes I do.  The top, and along with it a small cardboard box.  I know immediately what it is, or fear I do, and for once I am right.

And it is a long way to last year.  As the days tick down to 2 April, and the horrors of Marlou's dying come at me, so does the fact of the year.  All 365 days of it, one after the next, and the worst of it encapsulated here in this cardboard.  What's inside?  Enough phenobarbital to kill anyone several times.  Why?  Because a year ago the hospice nurses made ready for an unpleasant alternative.  Unpleasant.  That is my word.  An eventuality, let us say.  That Marlou could, if she wanted, allow herself to be knocked out until she died.  The facts are as stark as described.  And thus the box.  The optional phenobarbital.  Forgotten, having slipped behind semi-empty mustards and soy sauces.

I made it a point at the time to request that the hospice nurse have a thorough go at the refrigerator.  Marlou had just died, and I had the presence of mind to say this.  Sorrowing over the one awaiting the hearse, I could feel the pull toward the crematorium.  As though it seemed the best place for me.  A frame of mind in which spare doses of phenobarbital were best out of reach.

So there it is, back in reach.  And here I am fresh from what has become my transformational ritual.  A journey, not a trip.  Hardly a way to get to Seattle.  A scenic ordeal that mimics rebirth.  All of which may sound a little overblown.  But it's what I need.  A reminder that what left me weakened to the point of helpless a year ago, has transmuted.  Now it seems an outrage.  Outrageous fortune.  And fortunately I am raging.  Quietly of course.  But active, tangible and present.

The Coast Starlight covers almost 1400 miles in its 36-hour run from Los Angeles to Seattle, but this doesn't account for the total movement.  For every mile the train moves north, it must make measurable progress east, west and upwards.  These are the useless motions, the rattles, jerks and lurches over the rough track.  Would I enjoy having the whole thing smoothed out?  Well, yes.  Or maybe not.  The rigors are part of the experience.  I opted for the train, not for the death.  Yet each has throw me off schedule, imperiled life and limb and, I must admit, taken me places.
]]> To Lunch tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.559 2010-02-25T02:33:31Z 2010-02-25T02:34:04Z Paul Bendix It is an equivocal time, spring, especially if one is inclined to see the darker aspects of all seasons.  Things are sprouting madly.  'Things' include not only garlic and Swiss chard, but snails and aphids.  There is a biological race underway in my garden, and the sheer concentration of those on the flora team makes for vulnerability.  Plant defenses are much like my own.  In the absence of mobility, there is prickliness, thick skin and toxins.  Root for the home team.  They stand and fight.  

However.  Given that I am relatively mobile compared to a head of red lettuce, why not seize the advantage and launch various chemical agents against the attackers?  Organic chemicals, of course.  Harmless to humans, and not quite harmful enough to pests.  But worth a biochemical try.  I have a European friend who disapproves of snail killing.  Illustrating an interesting and essential difference in the experiences of the New and Old Worlds.  Explaining that snails are an invasive species, that they wreak ecological havoc on the fragile California native plant population, none of this pulls much weight.  The European experience, of lands civilized and domesticated so long ago that wilderness is utterly remote, makes a living creature a living creature.  As they say, we are coming from different places.

I am coming from the shoe guy.  He is Chinese and replaces the last of the Caucasian generation of cobblers.  Which means little in the long run, for there will not be a new generation of Asian shoe guys.  Our chats have revealed this, rambling exchanges and stumblings around the second-language barrier, a sense of conversational gaps as large and empty as much of his premises.  Someone has been working on shoes in this mercantile location since 1902, according to a sign over the door.  Inside sits a dusty and clearly disused Singer sewing machine, a treadle model.  A wall of unclaimed shoes.  Dangling leather belts.  Shoelaces, shoe sole inserts, shoe powder, shoe arch supports, shoe polish, shoehorns and, probably back in a corner, shoo flies.  Don't bother me.  

He doesn't at all, actually, and in fact I find enormous comfort in the inefficiencies of his operation.  He never writes down my phone number, issues no claim check to customers and seems to have a sliding rate scale whose movements upward and downward reflect his own internal barometer.  More important, he has agreed to work on my shoes.  My old shoes are so old that they are no longer manufactured.  Anywhere by anyone.  They have certain quadriplegic-friendly characteristics, particularly their size which allows for my plastic leg brace and a tongue sewn into the shoe in such a way that no amount of one-handed leg maneuvering can drive inwards toward the toe.  So he happily repairs them without commenting on their internal skeletal failure.  The leather is separating, and disintegrating, but the guy has a sewing machine and glue, and something about this process has great appeal for me.  I am held together by similar forces.  And the soul likes old things.  In Menlo Park this is as old as things get.

I am old and my experience of this town is old and getting older.  I'm rocketing my wheelchair up Santa Cruz Ave. to get to Amici's Pizza before Alan does.  We are going to have a Jewish middle-aged guys lunch.  This will begin by a ritual acknowledgment of the pizza and its calories.  In this moment, although we are not quite davening, we are atoning for the fat-carbohydrate enormity of what we are doing, showing that we are conscious, nobody's fools and accept the guilty perils ahead.  To show we are savvy, there's also a broccoli salad.  No calories there, Alan says.  Except for the olive oil, I point out.  He pokes a fork in the liquid accumulation on the bottom of the salad plate, pointing out that it is a suspension, with the shiny floating globules in the minority.  Water is thicker than blood, I want to say but don't.

But all that lies ahead.  For the moment, I am high on the main street, the main guy on the high street.  My wheelchair is at full bore.  Nothing, not even the cracks in the footpath, can stop me.  Ahead I see a blond toddler atop her tall young dad.  She is a good 7 feet above me, but I wave anyway.  Neither respond.  He is talking to her.  Where is Taylor?  Can she see Taylor?  I want to tell them both that I can't see naming anyone Taylor.  It used to be a surname.  But I used to be a toddler myself, and so many things have changed.

I do try to keep up.  Friends insisted that 'Avatar' was part of the zeitgeist.  One had to see it, for it would be talked about for a long time.  Oddly, this may be true.  The film does solidly establish 3-D.  It is worth seeing for that alone.  I have never seen Al Jolson portray 'The Jazz Singer,' but it did up the ante in terms of sensory input and was, in contemporary parlance, a game changer.  The game is changing much faster these days, of course, but at least briefly 'Avatar' does break new ground.  Most gratifying, it portrays a sort of war between the forces of, for want of better words, sustainability and the rape-and-plunder corporate state.  Yes, it is ponderous, heavy-handed and middlebrow, but as these things go, quite endurable.  The thing cost half a billion dollars.  Plenty of bang for buck, but hardly that much imagination for buck, but you might as well go see it.  I now qualify for the senior matinee.  They make you give back the 3-D glasses.  Check it out.
]]> Bills tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.558 2010-02-24T07:00:22Z 2010-02-24T07:00:56Z Paul Bendix Midday traffic on Caltrain having dwindled to a nothingness, I see my chance and take it.  The disabled seat is empty.  Not the space for wheelchairs, but the actual seat that asks occupants to surrender it.  Not to a foreign power, and one must note that World War I ended in a railway carriage, but to a cripple.  Or as the sign puts it 'persons with disabilities.'  I rarely have the chutzpah to demand separate spaces for both my wheelchair and my tush, but the train is empty, so what the hell.  A formidable rain is falling, the economy is falling and I am now falling into an empty seat, perching my leg on the opposite wall.  That's the thing about this seat.  It faces a wall, or a bulkhead in airline parlance.  Keeping the right foot elevated is among my life ambitions, and with the rain and the decline of all things, the rails and I head south.

I have been to see my accountant.  He has given me a bill.  No, it is not a bill, but it feels like a bill, and that is one of my essential and structural flaws of character.  Things are only how they feel.  Unless I think terribly hard and wrench my consciousness toward reality.  No, Bill, my accountant's appropriate name, has not given a bill, but the IRS will, unless I preempt them with a $32,000 check on 15 April.  Why, Bill wants to know, did Marlou put the money in the trust?  I stare at him dazedly.  My eyes glaze over at such times, matters of financial instruments and accounts and taxation first confusing me, then putting me to sleep faster than a fairytale potion.  So we dissect this matter.  What is the problem, I ask?

The money should have stayed in Ohio, Bill says.  In a sense, I agree with him.  The 401(k) money would have had a warm summer of corn stands and fireflies, a harvest autumn and a bracing winter.  Instead, it took up residence in the Schwab offices down the street from me, here in our region of colorless climate.  The question is why.  My response is why not?  What I really say is that I got a check payable to Marlou's trust and deposited it there.  And there it has stayed, sheltered from the rain but not, of course, the tax man.  

Bill wants to know what she was thinking.  I tell him the truth, that she was lying in a bed, our bed, secondary brain tumors spreading in her brain like mushrooms after a storm.  And at least someone, our friend Laurel, I think, remembered this State of California retirement account, run by some company in Cleveland.  Which under the circumstances, and the circumstances were dire, seems to have been as much as anyone could manage.  I spare no oncological detail in my account of these matters, because I want to get Bill off my back.  Which happens quite nicely.  Now he wants to know the cost basis of certain transactions in Marlou's retirement savings.  I want to know what a cost basis is.  He tells me, and I feel reasonably pleased, although the financial lingo seems unnecessary.  Not to worry, I will get him his cost basis.

The trackside Peninsula slips by, rain streaking the windows, clouds hanging dark.  Bay Meadows was once a racetrack, a vast greenery all in an oval, muddy horse path around it, with covered bleachers and bars and a restaurant or two, and now it is in a fascinating state of post-apocalypse.  The place is being demolished for something more commercially viable and, doubtless, less aesthetically pleasing.  An enormous pile of timber and beams sits in the former place of the grandstand.  Across the way, a temporary lake has formed in a depression.  Odd how the train is so empty.  But things, including racetracks, change....  Startled awake...I was dozing...a dream fragment lingers with underworld fright.  Marlou has died.  That was the dream.  Nothing more.  But stark and savage as a child's primal fear.  Marlou has died.  As though I didn't know.  And perhaps I didn't on some level.

A newfound anger is assailing me with the approach of Marlou's yahrzeit, her death's anniversary.  It is hard for me to feel this, yet it is a clarifying experience.  It puts things in their proper perspective.  The weeks leading to her death so disoriented me that they truly felt like months, the days and nights in a rolling state of crisis.  And, yes, on some soul-saving level they angered me.  My life already had enough challenges.  I had every right to shake a fist at the heavens, scream and kick the shit out of something nonsentient.  But at the time I didn't.  Now, the anger has a liberating quality.  It's like crawling out from a collapsed building.  It demonstrates that you have a right to be somewhere other than beneath heaps of rubble.

As for this fragment of a dream, being startled by Marlou's death, what does this mean?  That as Jung concluded, the human soul cannot conceive of its own death...and by inference, the death of someone close?  This mystery only deepens as it clarifies.  There's more to come, but at least things are changing.
]]> Things tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.557 2010-02-13T04:14:51Z 2010-02-13T04:15:20Z Paul Bendix What does it mean when it takes an entire day to fumble about with life until one sits down at the keyboard and has a go at another blog?  What does it mean when despite the most advanced anti-squirrel netting money can buy, the expensive seedlings recently purchased, for reasons no one can recall, have been nibbled into miniscule stubs?  It means things are out of sorts.  It means Marlou's photos are still up and staring at me from prominent positions in the sitting room and the office.  And I remember this short Jewish guy from my senior year at Berkeley who was dating someone I knew and shared observations on this thing.

This thing.  And that thing.  It was an era of things.  I had a thing for her.  She had a thing for someone else.  Which was why we were into this thing.  What were we going to do about this thing?  Something.  The short Jewish guy and I were discussing the mirror thing.  When one took LSD and stared at one's self in the mirror this thing happened.  Whatever it was, the activity was remarkably engrossing.  That there was an image of yourself staring back at the image of the person looking at the image, and when you thought about it, which you did, it was a remarkable thing, this thing.  One thing after the next.  Yeah, the mirror thing, the Jewish guy agreed, yeah, it was quite a trip.  In retrospect, the trippiness of the mirror thing seems full of youth, and pleasantly so.  People who do not know who they are and, if lucky, want to find out, and so find themselves staring at themselves in mirrors and finding the whole experience remarkable.  Which, it is.  LSD or not.

Which brings us to the photo thing.  The shots of Marlou each reveal something different.  She was quite beautiful.  She was quite warm.  She was courageous.  She was, that is the point.  And now she is not.  And this is the sort of photo thing that billions of people have experienced, the puzzlingly vivid sense of a spirit and then of its absence.  Marlou had one portrait posed, taken after her first chemo, a scarf around her head in homage to Vermeer.  In her brutally realistic assessment this was, she thought, the last time when she would look beautiful.  The disease and its chemical combatants would take their toll, she reasoned, so it was time to get a memorial portrait done.  

It is a beautiful portrait.  But not my favorite.  Qualities of character come out in the other photos, particularly the later ones, the ones closest to her death.  She had a lot of soul, and in her last photos, and her last months this is what comes flooding out, the living essence of a person.  Struggling, despairing and hoping that the living could go on a bit longer.  Perhaps it's the human condition distilled, and framed.

The photo thing.  I am one half of the photo thing, and it's hard to say what occurs on my side of the glass.  There are changes.  Marlou's photos are no longer overwhelmingly painful to regard.  I can stand looking at them.  I can think about their qualities and even their meaning.  She is gone, and someday I will be gone.  And something of me will live in the regard of people staring at my photo.  Until no one remembers.  Because we all collapse into a great biosystemic forgetfulness, absorbed into the roots of trees, blown about the deserts, adrift in the oceans.  Until we find bits of ourselves staring at fellow pine needles, dusting a dashboard in the Grand Canyon visitor center or staring at a Japanese gill net.  Go figure.

Meanwhile, my patience remains low, but my concentration is gathering force.  I recently read a book.  Not unprecedented, but difficult in the last year or so.  Mentally sticking to things has not been easy.  As for the impatience, its source is often elusive.  But it is generally a signal that something unpleasant is going on inside me.  Something painful, which this does not stop me from self-flagellation.  I may be impatient with others, but I am positively full of denunciations for myself.  Things go wrong, don't they?  And when they do, it's my fault, isn't it?  I've tried to probe the psychological roots of this.  As a child, perhaps I needed fantasies of control.  I wasn't good enough, but I would make myself better.  Who knows?  All I really know is that Lorna, the neighbor woman who rolls in in the mornings to help me get dressed, has been holidaying at her mountain cabin.  Leaving me to dress myself.  Using whatever shortcuts I can.  One of which relies upon talcum powder, and more on this later.  Here's what every solitary quadriplegic should know.

Keep your socks on.  I am not speaking metaphorically, but offering genuine sartorial advice.  Don't take your socks off at night.  Leave them on, because putting them on one-handedly the next morning may drive you over the brink.  Just the thought of crossing one leg over the other, stretching the opening of a sock between thumb and fourth finger, and trying to loop the entire thing around your toes...it is utterly galling.  So leave your socks on.  Just overnight.  Overnight is not forever.  Well, it is sometimes, but for the time being let us put that aside.  For now, we are buying time.  One can shower later in the day when help is about.  A friend, neighbor, someone.  A sock-putter-oner, whoever that person may be.  And, yes, in dire moments, just leave the socks on for the entire day.  Which adds up to 24 hours and never did a sock or a foot any harm.

Underwear.  On bad days, it's just another encumbrance.  Especially if you aren't doing anything too physical or too public, just dispense with it.  At least this was my decision one day last week.  After all, it occurred to me, there was talcum powder.  I had awakened with my socks on, slipped into trousers, slipped into shoes without orthotics and jammed my feet on the wheelchair footrests, thoroughly prepared to roll into downtown Menlo Park for a double latte.  Final task, pour talcum powder into my open fly, thereby satisfying many of the functions of underwear with one shake of a handy container.

Before you scoff, consider that this quadriplegic has achieved at least the outer semblance of attire in approximately 1/3 the normal time.  Done and ready for caffeination.  The latter being the mourning person's drug of choice.  Thus, the little shake of talcum powder, and in two shakes, out the door.  Of course, it is morning in the a.m. sense of the word, a pensive and distracted time for me.  Which explains why in tipping the talcum powder, which happened to be Walgreens jumbo size...on sale in a two-for-one special...yours truly did not aim with the precision required of the moment.  Instead of through the fly and down around of the male equipment, the powder went spilling down the zipper and across the lap.  

Which occasioned at least five minutes of personal self denunciation.  I was stupid, a fool, a failure, an idiot.  And once I had that out of my system, there seemed a fairly simple remedy.  Roll outside and give the trousers a quick brushing.  Which would have been fine, but at precisely that moment my neighbor Buffie emerged on her way to the carport.  I tried to roll my wheelchair back inside, but I had already maneuvered myself close to the chrysanthemums, intending to give them a white dusting.  Oh, hi, she said.  Hi, I said, I spilled something.  She nodded.  Buffie has a seven-year-old, after all, and has seen worse things, many worse things.  She nodded, genuinely unimpressed by the white powder I was brushing off, and told me about her latest adventures in the world of finance.  In fact, she kept talking, while I kept cringing, until I stopped.  She simply didn't care.  

Nor should I.  Which was information that could only be discovered when a person went outside, tuned in to someone else and forgot for one long moment about the mirror thing and the photo thing and the death thing.
]]> Red Winter tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.556 2010-02-07T06:19:42Z 2010-02-07T06:20:13Z Paul Bendix
Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course.  This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe.  There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France.  So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway.  Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds.  More interesting is why it took me so long.  In fact, why now?  What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce?  I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.

René had them.  Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz.  Not that it matters.  Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me.  Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass.  I am deeply respectful, however.  It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow.  You are cool.  You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over.  You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source.  You are the man.

I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings.  His name, significantly, is also Paul.  On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening.  So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth.  So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools.  And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds.  Which didn't take long.  And there they were, dated 2009.  Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.

And then it came back to me, well halfway.  How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them.  And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce.  Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago.  Just a solid red lettuce.  I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it.  So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment.  Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it.  For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen.  Why?  Beats me.  I know what would happen.  I know what will happen.  This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.

There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell.  Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant.  How it was when Marlou began dying.  There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in.  I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden.  My brother insisted.  I wanted to do it, and he was going to help.  The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process.  The squirrels got the first seedlings.  Then came the netting.  Then came the spring.  In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.

So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome.  Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time.  Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go.  And so I planted last year's seeds.  God knows how many will come up.  But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing.  And there's more to come.  After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package.  Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one. ]]> Red Winter tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.554 2010-02-07T06:17:10Z 2010-02-07T06:17:38Z Paul Bendix Rouge d'hiver.  Doesn't the name sound cool?  Particularly when attached to a head of lettuce.  Years ago, more than I wish to admit, I grew the stuff in my raised beds in another part of Menlo Park, in another marriage, in another mood.  And lettuce, having very little interest in moods, burst forth from the ground in this way that is uniquely rouge d' hiverish, which in this case means leaves as light as crepe paper, extraordinarily delicate.  And, one must add, quadriplegic-friendly.  No one needed to cut this lettuce.  The stuff folded around a fork as though it wanted to be eaten.  Winter lettuce, red at that, and supposedly French.  A company named Shepherd's Seeds, all haute and boutiquey with a beautifully illustrated catalog, sold me several packets of rouge d'hiver, and then promptly went out of business.

Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course.  This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe.  There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France.  So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway.  Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds.  More interesting is why it took me so long.  In fact, why now?  What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce?  I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.

René had them.  Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz.  Not that it matters.  Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me.  Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass.  I am deeply respectful, however.  It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow.  You are cool.  You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over.  You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source.  You are the man.

I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings.  His name, significantly, is also Paul.  On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening.  So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth.  So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools.  And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds.  Which didn't take long.  And there they were, dated 2009.  Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.

And then it came back to me, well halfway.  How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them.  And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce.  Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago.  Just a solid red lettuce.  I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it.  So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment.  Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it.  For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen.  Why?  Beats me.  I know what would happen.  I know what will happen.  This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.

There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell.  Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant.  How it was when Marlou began dying.  There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in.  I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden.  My brother insisted.  I wanted to do it, and he was going to help.  The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process.  The squirrels got the first seedlings.  Then came the netting.  Then came the spring.  In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.

So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome.  Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time.  Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go.  And so I planted last year's seeds.  God knows how many will come up.  But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing.  And there's more to come.  After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package.  Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
]]> Red Winter tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.555 2010-02-07T06:17:10Z 2010-02-07T06:18:27Z Paul Bendix Rouge d'hiver.  Doesn't the name sound cool?  Particularly when attached to a head of lettuce.  Years ago, more than I wish to admit, I grew the stuff in my raised beds in another part of Menlo Park, in another marriage, in another mood.  And lettuce, having very little interest in moods, burst forth from the ground in this way that is uniquely rouge d' hiverish, which in this case means leaves as light as crepe paper, extraordinarily delicate.  And, one must add, quadriplegic-friendly.  No one needed to cut this lettuce.  The stuff folded around a fork as though it wanted to be eaten.  Winter lettuce, red at that, and supposedly French.  A company named Shepherd's Seeds, all haute and boutiquey with a beautifully illustrated catalog, sold me several packets of rouge d'hiver, and then promptly went out of business.

Rouge d'hiver did not go out of existence, of course.  This guy Shepherd did not own the recipe.  There's still red, there's still winter, and there's still France.  So there's got to be this light, utterly delicate lettuce, so fragile that it's easy to see why the stuff is not available at my local Safeway.  Fortunately, in the almost two decades since I first planted the stuff, the web has arrived, and a quick Google search turns up several sources of the seeds.  More interesting is why it took me so long.  In fact, why now?  What is it about the rainy month of February in Menlo Park, 10 months after my wife's death that has me tracking down one particular lettuce?  I'm not staying up all night thinking about this one, but the question has snagged just enough cells in my brain to sort of work its way to consciousness.

René had them.  Rouge d'hiver available from Renée's Seeds near, if I recall, Santa Cruz.  Not that it matters.  Not that it registers, actually, for although Renée must have substantial ground to be raising and harvesting seeds, the precise location of her acreage eludes me.  Nevermind, for these days everything moves from screen to mailbox, first the e-mail variety with your confirmation, then the tin version, with very little respect for the landmass.  I am deeply respectful, however.  It's awe-inspiring, these cute little lettuces, once seeds as insignificant as bits of cracked pepper, now salad candidates, and you did it, you made them grow.  You are cool.  You with your rouge d'hiver, which all your foody friends gush over.  You're not just a backyard gardener, but a source.  You are the man.

I have a morning helper, a young former-Stanford man who has dropped out of making money and taken up the cause of Catholic Social Services which, courtesy of some exchange arrangement with Jewish Family Services, half explains why he volunteers to help me get dressed in the mornings.  His name, significantly, is also Paul.  On a recent Friday, Paul walked in the door on one of those sunny winter days that make one think of gardening.  So, what the hell, once the socks were on and trousers at a decent level, I decided it was time, time to rip open René's postal shipment of rouge d'hiver and sprinkle the suckers over the tilled earth.  So I wheeled to the door to the pantry and told Paul where to poke about in search of gardening hand tools.  And, while he was at it, might as well pull out a few packets of leftover seeds.  Which didn't take long.  And there they were, dated 2009.  Rouge d'hiver, two packets, one open.

And then it came back to me, well halfway.  How I had gone through the same sort of web search last year, found seeds, ordered them, and, I am certain, planted them.  And they produced perfectly ordinary red lettuce.  Not the singularly light, gossamer of a lettuce I had grown years ago.  Just a solid red lettuce.  I didn't so much recall this, as deduce it.  So Paul and I didn't even get to Renée's shipment.  Oh, it's there, all right, and I'll have a go at it.  For now, I felt obliged to sow last year's seeds just to see what would happen.  Why?  Beats me.  I know what would happen.  I know what will happen.  This is a small-scale version of the film Groundhog Day.

There's going to be a lot of this sort of thing, I can tell.  Like it or not, time moves in years, and things are coming back to me, painful and unpleasant.  How it was when Marlou began dying.  There's something about such an experience that is so overwhelming that it can't be taken in.  I remember at the time how poignant it seemed to be putting in a winter garden.  My brother insisted.  I wanted to do it, and he was going to help.  The twin impressions, trying to make things grow and trying to accept that things die, hung over the whole process.  The squirrels got the first seedlings.  Then came the netting.  Then came the spring.  In the warm days everything burst into life including, though I have virtually no memory of this, the rouge d'hiver.

So the memories are coming around, which is inevitable, and while challenging, not entirely unwelcome.  Whatever got missed the last time will get faced this time.  Something in me needs to see what happened, acknowledge and, perhaps, let go.  And so I planted last year's seeds.  God knows how many will come up.  But that seems to be one of the many mysteries I am probing.  And there's more to come.  After all, I still haven't even opened Renéee's package.  Maybe her rouge d'hiver will turn out to be the right one.
]]> Losing Trust tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.553 2010-01-29T22:15:25Z 2010-01-29T22:16:24Z Paul Bendix
It was up against a lot.  Within a couple of weeks of my return from a very pleasant stay in Britain, I began to feel cross, preoccupied and easily fatigued.  I found myself staring at the pictures of Marlou that still face me from her desk and the entrance table by the front door.  One particularly haunts me.  It is the photo of Marlou taken four months before her death, looking utterly vibrant over dinner in Stockholm with Beth, my cousin's daughter.  Missing from the photo is any sign of the courage it must have taken her to make such a trip, to bother to connect with distant family in a distant city, with her energy and time running out.  I remember Marlou falling into my arms as she emerged from the airport taxi a week later, frightened and lost.  I remember feeling the same way, with an added layer of ineffectiveness.  I remember all these things because I need to remember, because nine months is too soon to forget them.  And once I tuned back in, replanted my roots in grief, my anger and distraction diminished.

The hat was keeping an eye on me.  The San Francisco region's rainy season is short and concentrated and has been making itself felt mightily this January.  I resurrected the rain hat as the storms gathered, wound its chin cord around one of the handles of my wheelchair, and kept forgetting about the thing.  I emerged from Café Borrone one night on my way to the Menlo Park Chorus rehearsal and saw that the hat, the very one supposedly wound of the back of my chair, had been thoughtfully placed on one of the tables.  

Protecting myself from the rain became something of an issue in my early 20s.  There was no issue for me, and that was the point.  Living in London where light rain or drizzle were almost incessant, it made sense to go about with rain gear.  Friends, observers, psychoanalysts, all who noticed me, seemed to gauge my sense of self worth and quality of personal nurturing and care on the basis of what I was doing about the weather.  When things were good, I went out well jacketed, hat on head, often with a companion's umbrella...holding an umbrella being too much for available hands numbering one and grasping a crutch.

So losing a rain hat and not even knowing it was missing, then having the thing turn up, seems full of good fortune.  Cosmic intervention, if one wants to push it that far, and I do.  Especially when the damn thing happens again a few days later.  Same scenario.  Rainy weather, and I was making the shopping rounds of inner Menlo Park.  Heading back from the supermarket, damned if that canvas hat lying in the street did not look a lot like mine.  I scooped the thing up and, yes, it was mine, blown off the back of my wheelchair, but still around.  A metaphor for protection and caring, as before, but now with a street-hardened indomitability.

As for the garden, everything is healthily postnatal, miniature green seedlings sitting there in the ground, confused, dazed and seeking a purpose.  The sun should be purpose enough.  And there is more than ever, for the rains and winds sent one giant oak toppling just over the back fence.  And Tom my landlord seeing a growing crack in another oak had the tree cutters in to lop off a few more branches.  The sun now rises over my garden early in the morning and stays risen, light cascading all day long.  Nothing has responded yet, save for the Swiss chard which is practically yodeling with delight in the cold rains.  But it won't be long.  There's enough garlic planted back there to depopulate Transylvania.

Still, my moods are constant, my grip weak.  My computer gathered itself together like an evil spirit last week, kneading its own innards, until it was twisted into a digital lump of coal that would not start.  Naturally, I had not backed up the day's work.  

I had lost a day.  I had lost everything, my incompetence revealed, my stupidity obvious.  For the computer had been doing this.  I had been calling in computer service guys, available adolescents, anyone who knew more than I did about the digital world, which is to say, anyone.  So, I knew the computer had been stopping.  I knew better, that is the point.  I should have done something.  On and on it went, until a friend reminded me that sometimes one needs to not only turn a PC off, but unplug it.  Wait a few seconds.  Turn it on again.  And voilà.  I was back in digital action.

But still laden with inaction.  I don't know what I'm doing.  Everything seems tenuous.  The whole enterprise could fail at any moment.  At night, coming in alone from chorus rehearsal, I feel like one of those people whose car tumbles off a mountain road and lies injured and unseen for days.  What if I get mugged?  What if I get hit by a car?  What if I lose my keys?  Once inside, the perils never stop.  What if I fall in the bathroom, the wheelchair blocking the door?  I have an answer for this one.  A sort of complete scenario worked out in my feverish brain.  I would lie on the bathroom floor and, presumably having made several efforts to get up, work on ways to turn on the heater with my foot.  Or possibly the leg of the shower chair.  In short, there would be heat.  Until there was too much heat.  Then I would have to turn the heater off.  Activities like this would occupy me for the entire night until...who knows?  So what if I wasn't answering the phone?  That would not mean anyone would come breaking down my door, would it?  I could be lying on the bathroom floor for days.  With mental content like this, the news from Haiti seems superfluous.

When did I lose Marlou's trust?  Did I ever really have it?  Did I deserve it?  These resonant questions have been plaguing me for the last day.  They come like a plague, because I am in a plague-receptive phase.  I know the question, the real question is much more mundane.  I cannot locate the file, containing Marlou's trust documents.  They're just pieces of paper, I know.  The lawyer has already promised to send replacements.  I need to settle down.  I'm trying. ]]> Grasp tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.552 2010-01-19T03:10:42Z 2010-01-19T03:11:10Z Paul Bendix
Virtually on her deathbed, Marlou made me promise not to eat dinner out of a saucepan.  This seems a splendid idea, and I do adhere to it, more or less.  It's just that Marlou never quite grasped the graspability of the smallest stainless steel pot in her arsenal.  It's a shallow, one-serving sort of pan.  Actually, it is the approximate depth of a serving bowl.  Its handle is well-balanced.  So it's a grab, heat and eat sort of pot.  Or pan.  And the multipurpose elegance of cooking, serving and eating from a single thermal-handled stainless steel container, call it what you will, is so obviously attractive and staggeringly efficient that for the quadriplegic it is impossible to resist.  

Germans even have a word for this sort of thing, the eintopf.  Okay, the word refers to a one-pot meal, some sort of complete dish cooked in a single vessel, but I maintain the concept applies to Marlou's pan.  It's a one-pan.  And I say this deadpan: I can't avoid it.  I was born to one-pan cooking, and may my deceased love forgive me.

Consider that I not only have this pan at the ready, but a more or less complete dish to heat in it and eat from it.  It's a rich Singapore stew, which makes me both happy and even a little proud to reside where I do on the Pacific rim.  A doggie bag left over from Menlo Park's finest Asian restaurant and ready to be dumped into this attractive little pan.  Heat and serve, a retailing slogan from my youth.

Any practical minded person would note the ludicrousness of my pan shelf.  Actually there are shelves, two of them, and they face the stove, which seems to me rather logical.  The only problem is that they face the stove myopically, staring a little too close at its white enamel side.  There isn't enough room.  The arrangement is not a practical one.  It's even hard to say where the pans are on the shelves.  Unless one is an expert.  

And I am.  I know my pans.  They are divided into two camps.  There are the ones I bought, cheap and serviceable, and the ones Marlou bought, balanced and elegant and stainless steel.  Rather narrows the field, doesn't it?  The pots have one kind of handle or the other.  And the one I am looking for, the Marlou-handled pan, well, it can't be far can it?  I'm certain the pan is lurking under one of my pots.  No, apparently it's over there.  No.  There's only one candidate handle visible, and it's in the far corner, the most distant corner, and the most hard to reach.  Not to worry.  I rise from my wheelchair, bend and grasp.

What happens next is best depicted in the film version of Wizard of Oz.  The bad witch tries to grab the ruby slippers off the witch just crushed by a house, and the corpse legs retract.  They curl up in the most improbable, in fact, unimaginable way.  And yet I was totally convinced as a kid, as I am now.  Material objects do this.  That's why the Marlou-handled pan, nestled comfortably in a spaghetti-straining stainless steel pot, name unknown, purposely eludes my grasp.  I reach for it, knocking it slightly, and the handle turns.  It swivels a comfortable 180 degrees.  It was pointing up, but now it is pointing down.  It is wedged against the wall and between the stove, and is now out of reach.  

Even if I wanted to take the neuromuscular risk involved in bending to grab for the handle...and take the chance of falling and being wedged in the kitchen overnight, or, perhaps, longer...the wheelchair behind me, shelf on one side, stove on the other, wall ahead...I can imagine it all....the maneuver is impossible.  There isn't enough room to bend and grab the pot.

Stupid, I scream at myself.  You are stupid.  I am aware that this is a dangerous moment.  While my inner bad parent erupts, there is a heightened chance of things going awry.  I stare down at the pots and the only other object in view.  There is a serving tray, a wooden one, and next to it is a wooden frame.  Does the frame go with the tray?  I don't know.  It's one of those household objects that just sits there being a household object.  Doubtless Marlou would know what the thing is or was.  All I know is that it is within my line of sight, my frame of reference, and being big, is something I can grab.  

I do.  I grab it and knock the handle up.  The pan, nestling in its smooth, round strainer, swivels up, then down.  I knock it again.  Another rotation.  Again, and this time the strainer topples over on its side, the handle of the pan wedges on the shelf, and life becomes possible.  I grab the pan, put it on the stove and open the Singapore stew.  

Damn.  I had forgotten that this stuff contains crab legs.  The friend I was dining with must have cracked them for me.  Nothing more quadriplegic-unfriendly than crustacean food packaging.  Still, there it is.  I haven't fallen.  I haven't defeated myself.  There is a one-pot meal in its pan.  And it is heating.  Outside the rain is falling, and California isn't going to descend into a dust bowl anytime soon.  Things have turned a corner.  And with a little Tabasco sauce, the world will continue for at least another day. ]]> Lettuce, Red Romaine tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.551 2010-01-18T02:28:12Z 2010-01-18T02:29:23Z You know it's time to get out when you have this anxious need to stay in, the sense that everything out there is too cold, too harsh, too threatening. Borderline agoraphobia? In my case, I put it down to a... Paul Bendix You know it's time to get out when you have this anxious need to stay in, the sense that everything out there is too cold, too harsh, too threatening. Borderline agoraphobia? In my case, I put it down to a nose job. More precisely, to last week's dermatological gouging adjacent to my nose. 

Into every life a little dermatology must fall. I know it's no big deal. But being on the hypersensitive end of the human spectrum, a little Mohs surgery goes a long way. A pencil eraser. I would say that was the approximate size of the plug the surgeon removed. She insisted on showing me the hole, the red crater left after she had had a go at my face. There followed a light discussion of her handiwork and what we might consider next. Leave the crater as is? Or kind of knit things together. Convenient little crease there along the side of your nose to close up the surgical crater. The little scar that will look like a little fold. And then to get a close-up view of your skin being darned like a sock, facial flesh being stitched together like so much upholstery, well, it's all somewhere between humbling and unnerving. Not to mention the cutting. The body knows when it's being cut. And something in it cuts out. No wonder I've been tired for days.

Not that any of this is on the scale of getting shot in the neck. But it has reverberations. And at 63, the reverb hits harder, I swear. It's enough to make one hop in the van and drive up to the haute garden center. In these wealthy Silicon Valley suburbs, oversupplied with stockbrokers and Persian carpet showrooms, people have a remarkable capacity to pour money into landscaping. I consider myself more sensible than most. But not today. Today I'm feeling physically fragile, exceedingly mortal, and cost be damned. I am going to plant brussels sprouts come hell or high water. And the high water is coming. Rainstorms, big and cold and persistent, are sweeping down from the Arctic. It's time to plant. And I have returned from Britain with this obsessive belief in my ability to grow the winter crop of brussels sprouts this late in the California season. It doesn't make sense. It may not be possible. But I'm determined.

Somehow in the economic downturn the Roger Reynolds Nursery has produced an impressive crop of new prices. Things that were costly before are now priced at the brink of credibility. Thing is, there just aren't that many people around selling brussels sprouts seedlings. In fact, Messrs. Reynolds have cornered the market in Menlo Park. It's their road or the high road. And there are high prices on the high road. Something in me physically shakes at the knowledge that Trader Joe's, gourmet grocers to the masses, sold an entire stalk of brussels sprouts for $2.98. The seedlings cost $3.98 per pot. That is to say, one fledgling plant that may someday produce one stalk of brussels sprouts, but is nowhere near that point now, costs considerably less in infancy. When one considers the blood meal, bone meal, labor intensity and general spilkes that will go into this seedling en route to its harvest stage, the $2.98 Trader Joe's stage, this is a transparently losing proposition. Which, a friend told me, isn't the way one should look at it. It's the enjoyment of growing plants, she said. What is that worth? Never mind the quality, feel the width. Never mind the slaughterhouse scrapings, packaged as blood meal and bone meal, which cost as much as a good meal, the kind that comes on a plate with a glass of red wine. I felt lucky to blast off from the Roger Reynolds planet $175 lighter.

There's no accounting for luck. Just as I return from the nursery, Avery, my seven-year-old neighbor, is skipping down the steps from his apartment. Buffie, his mom, his right behind. I can tell it's been a strenuous single-parenting afternoon. Mother and son seem quite happy to help me get the plants in the ground. The skies are menacing. Time is short. To hell with agricultural practice. Blood meal, bone meal, steer manure, all of it gets layered and sprinkled atop the cover crop, just turned under by the gardeners last week. Yes, I know, it should all be mixed together, but that's just too bad. The rain is on its way. I've got help. This stuff is going in the ground, and the ground is going to be prepared in the most expedient way.

I guess that wiser, more experienced folk, a.k.a. parents, would have some sense of what a seven-year-old is and isn't. I think there's some part of the brain that isn't completely connected in kids. Or maybe it's connected to the wrong parts. I can't recall this, having heard the details on the radio. All I know is that Avery has two hands, two arms, and a willingness to get my garden in gear. 

What should we do first, I ask him? This seems to me a very generous approach, giving Avery credit for being a little mensch. Nothing condescending, everything pitched to the adult in him. Which, if I was to look him in the eye, would not be present. Avery's adult is on holiday. Ominously, his mother casually observes that her son hasn't been so jokey and giddy in weeks. Apparently this is a strain I bring out in kids. And whatever I'm bringing out in Avery is quickly slipping into high gear.

First, this what-shall-we-do-next ploy holds little interest for him. He is already jumping around and dancing and ignoring what might be called long-range planning. The only range is short range. I grab a pot, then Avery grabs the same pot, knocks it out of my hands, and we have a tense, teeth-gritted sermon on the fragility of plant life, the necessity to treat green things gently, particularly little green things with roots intertwined sold in tiny pots that cost four dollars each. Brussels sprouts, Brussels, Brussels, Brussels, says Avery. It's now hands-on. Avery grabs a pot, I grab his hand and slow his grabbing into extracting. How many plants do we have in this pot, I ask him? Avery tosses his head around like a punching bag. Bots, pots, pots, he says. His mother is making him lunch. I'm wondering if it's kosher to ask her to fork in a little Valium. 

Thing is, despite the hyperactivity and penchant for silliness, Avery has the knack of separating plant roots. In these four dollar pots, discovering that what looks like a single seedling is actually two or even three intertwined, is like hitting the triple word score in Scrabble. I praise Avery. I tell him that he is a very cool kid, that without him none of this gardening would be happening. He is now making his tongue flick like a garter snake. Gosh, Avery, I say, can you read this label? Lettuce, red romaine, he says. Lettuce, red romaine.  Lettuce, red romaine. Lettuce, red romaine. He is now dancing between the garden beds. I can't even get his attention.  Lettuce, red romaine.  Lettuce, red romaine. I respond. Avery is insane. Avery is insane. This sends him into an even more acute frenzy. Tom, my reclusive landlord is upstairs drinking the afternoon away, praising life for not sending any kids...and I am worried for the future of my tenancy. Lettuce, red romaine, says Avery, and now you have to say the insane part. 

I have him, it seems. He wants something from me, my contribution to the afternoon's doggerel. This is something to work with. The truth is that Avery's frenzy stirs up considerable feelings in me. Like, should I join in or cool him out or run away? How out of control is out of control? Is this 'bad' behavior? Or is it Dionysian frenzy? Are kids supposed to be seen and not heard? If so, what is supposed to be seen and heard? Or not? I don't know. 

All I know is that when it's over, Avery's mother Buffie helps me cut open two packages of protective netting which we stretch over the raised beds. There are predators in these suburban parts. I am one year older and wiser and remember last year when my tender young seedlings were mowed down like soldiers at Verdun. Never again. It's the black squirrels, the ones that have migrated across the United States to go after anything that seems edible. In short, things are wilder than they seem. More fragile. And with enough care, flexibility and hope, remarkably durable.
]]> Frost tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.550 2010-01-16T01:05:48Z 2010-01-16T01:06:34Z When the earth was flat, things may have been conveniently simple, but life's possibilities stretched on and on, the only edge being the one you fell off. When the planet got round, at least it had a shape, something you... Paul Bendix When the earth was flat, things may have been conveniently simple, but life's possibilities stretched on and on, the only edge being the one you fell off. When the planet got round, at least it had a shape, something you could throw, for example, as well as catch. Maybe even peel. Which explains why I see the year as a sort of crest and trough. Even if time has no topography, we make our own.

There's a major event that occurs in January, my annual physical. The examination/hurdle that gives me a sort of physiological drivers license for the next 12 months. Which coupled with the dermatologist's check of my skin, offers a sense of clear sailing or ship sinking. Combine the two events and you can get a long day.

For a man of my age, health seems to revolve around the prostate. Remarkable considering that I've never seen the thing, have the sketchiest idea of its function and care little if it is large nor small. But prostate size, like that of its six-inch companion, matters. 'It's pretty big,' said the internist who gave the thing its annual probe. 'But smooth,' he added. I waited for the other shoe, the third shoe, to drop. In the last year of my life enough shoes have dropped to fill a Nordstrom warehouse, so I was pretty wary of what was to come. But that was it. Big prostate. Big deal. See you next year.

But not without showing me what a great computer jockey my M.D. considers himself to be. Others, specialists in various clinic departments, toss around data casually, he said. Pull up my files, the doctor was saying, and you get all this extraneous information. But not with him. He was a cool guy and had sorted out the chaff, like my prescription for athlete's foot, and got right to the wheat, the big stuff, like the fact that I am a quadriplegic. Why he wanted to show me this was not entirely clear. But there's something about me that encourages people to talk. In fact to, as we say in America, share. I tried to shift the subject more in my direction, seeking pointers on weight loss, the effects of a British Jewish Christmas being what they are.

And if I had been alert, my misguided tendency to encourage others to talk would have leapt out at me. For I asked what he recommended for weight loss. And he told me, literally. Heavy cardiovascular exercise, he said, was just the ticket. He had been on some sort of macho exercise marathon and dropped 25 pounds. It also seemed to me he's dropped his wedding ring, but I am not a reliable observer of such matters. There's a story there, but it's his story. And maybe that was the whole point. My story, my health story, is for the time being pleasantly boring.

Speaking of boring, that's what's in store for me 15 minutes later in the dermatology department. Yes, I have a couple of wonky basal cells, and plans call for their removal.  Mohs surgery, so-called. Slicing away, examining what's been sliced to see if that's all, and if not, more slicing, followed by more seeing. And how long does it take, this interweaving of minor surgery, cell analysis, surgery, analysis? How long is a piece of string? Was there really a Frederick Mohs? Or is it an acronym, More Of His Skin? It doesn't matter. I'm there at 9:15 AM and depart at 5 PM, having glimpsed in the mirror offered by the surgeon a large round crater next to my nose. I urge her to sew the thing up. Long Day's Journey into Dermatological Night. Yes, by the time I roll outside, darkness is falling. Odd twilight on the train platform. Why not? It's winter after all. Only a few days ago I was in Britain where 5 PM is pitch black night. For all my resilience, I feel vulnerable when it comes to change. Do I really expect everything to remain as it was in California?

One of Marlou's colleagues from work says hello to me on the platform. We board the same train, and for a few minutes I am back in the deathly, poignant spring. Marlou's heart is still beating, beating in other people, and recognizing this brings a moment of tearful recognition. It's good to have Marlou alive in spirit. Painful, but good.

For the year is turning a corner. Not the calendar year, which is a paper fiction. But the real, seasonal one. It ascends on a prostate, tips over a skin surgeon's knife and lands, where it always does, in my vegetable beds. One cannot say much for the cover crop this year. It sprouted reluctantly, barely took root, but none of this matters, for it's over now. The gardeners came by this morning, blew a few remaining dead leaves around, and were set to hit the silly road before I put them to serious agricultural use. I handed Guillermo a pitchfork, and he set to upending my cover crop in the most methodical fashion. Roots in the air, stems in the ground. He refused payment. I had to press some cash on his boss. There is old life and new life and my life, and the days are lengthening, and I'm determined to grow brussels sprouts even if they don't experience a sweetening frost. I've had my own frost, and that will do.
]]> Wine tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.549 2010-01-14T02:19:50Z 2010-01-14T02:20:26Z And so by the fourth night, things British and distant and escapist having seeped sufficiently out of my system, the insomnia and emotional turbulence that had preceded my trip, returned. My psyche punched in for the grief shift. And things... Paul Bendix And so by the fourth night, things British and distant and escapist having seeped sufficiently out of my system, the insomnia and emotional turbulence that had preceded my trip, returned. My psyche punched in for the grief shift. And things were as they were. And how did I expect things to be? Perhaps a little more peaceful and untroubled and less burdened by anxiety, as they had been for my last cold and pleasant days in London. Which is, of course, ridiculous, and not even desirable. This is where I live, on Roble Ave., Menlo Park, and here and only here can life's battles be fought and its deeper knowledge found. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Which is extremely boring, by the way.

What disturbs my sleep? If I knew, it wouldn't be disturbed, would it? But there I was, staring into the shadows cast by the nightlight on my ceiling, listening to the 5:30 AM sounds of Caltrain and mentally going over its weekday rush-hour schedule. Which insured about 20 minutes of silence. Then at 5:55 AM the start of a train crescendo, whistles blowing and bells clanging and engines rumbling north and south with mounting frequency. And with commuting reaching its fever pitch around 6:30 AM and the mind sadly stuck in its own track, what was there to do but sadly swing my legs over the bed, fling the torso up and down a few times until it clicked into the sitting position, and admit defeat? I considered the day ahead, vacant and needing to be filled. And not enough sleep.

I managed to read a book on the flight home, signaling the return of my powers of concentration. A false signal, it seems, for the novel I had intended to read for the Israeli book club, meeting tonight, has proven too much. Oddly, it has also proven enjoyable. But I'm back to distracted, mental turbulent mode, and here we are.

We. I think of Marlou all the time. In one form or another. Surely we would have found a way to discuss the current health-care debacle. Or would we? Where would we be now in counseling? Working on the ability to handle opposing views? Dialogue improvement? And maybe because I have so recently traveled and recall the idyllic 10 days we spent in a Tuscan country hotel, the other thing comes back to me. How frightened Marlou was. How her fear was my constant concern. And my own fear...well, maybe I'm catching up. Maybe it's my turn.

All the books I haven't read. The languages I haven't learned. The music I can't read. It seems too late to worry about any of these things. But what do I know? Life is a lottery ticket, and you simply wait until your number is called. Things to do. Finish writing my own book, for example. And some, even all, of this may get done. Or not. And I'm not sure I will feel better one way or the other. Good thing there's lunch.

Judy in the alto section of the Menlo Park Chorus has been talking about having lunch for the longest time. Months. So last night at rehearsal's end, I said tomorrow. She said maybe. I said definitely. And so at 12:30 there she was with her husband, and up ahead there was Ruth, another alto, and soon we were sitting upstairs in Draeger's supermarket staring at bowls of soup.

We were talking about Menlo Park's new civic theatre, debating the merits of its acoustics, and wondering about its future. I got myself coupled into the Civic Theater Train just as the thing was leaving the station, and there's no letting go. The place isn't being properly managed. I am convinced of this, and the fact endlessly annoys me. Something must be done. But I'm not going to do it. Things are on hold for me, grief being the only constant. I can't commit, as they say, to any civic projects. Meetings. Letters. Follow-through. Don't look at me for any of this. Still, I can't resist holding forth. I know what needs to be done. I just can't do it. I can't even get a night's sleep. It seems a major achievement that I have finished my soup.

Still, emerging into the grey California winter skies, I feel at least twice as good as I did before lunch. Nothing like a stirring civic issue or two to get the blood going. Yes, I also feel the utter ineffectiveness of my lunch hour chitchat, whither the community theater and what shall we do? Let's do nothing. Straight out of Chekhov. So I'm heading straight for Peet's. I order my usual latte, and damned if the barista doesn't wave me away. It's on us, he says. What have I done to deserve this, I say. But only to myself. I thank the guy, consume the coffee and consider next steps. What to do in this grey and empty day, while I do not like being alone with myself or feeling the last weeks of my wife, her dying agony still hovering about the apartment?

Will Something extravagant is building within me. It happened during lunch. Joe, Judy's husband, is a wine guy. Actually, and no pun intended, this Joe works for Trader Joe's. He has told me about the wine bargains, how there is really nothing like them. I listen attentively. This Joe seems much more committed to wine than to the chain of stores. I'm trying to remember his recommendations. Because, what the hell, time waits for no man, and no wine shall go undrunk. Which makes absolutely no sense, except that I am clinging to my last human interaction and its fruits. Which happen to be fermented ones. So, yes, feeling at loose ends, if that is the word, I am headed for Trader Joe's. In fact, I have even mapped out a mission. Two bottles of each of the three recommendations.

　

The store is empty. Joe the wine guy says Trader Joe's is expanding too quickly. Fine with me. I am trying to remember if it's Blackstone or Bogle I am supposed to buy in the Merlot aisle, and which year? Hi. Strangest thing. One of the trustees of the civic theatre wanders out of the Rioja aisle and says hello. I want to say olé. Instead, we chat about, what else, the theater and its management. It occurs to me that I know this guy. I know what to do. He knows whom to talk to. If I just had two non-depressed brain cells to rub together, a sort of plan would emerge, and both of us would have a little chat with the city manager. And we would get something done. It's all too much.

　

Certainly, it's too much wine. I bounce home with six bottles. One of the clerks almost talked me into buying a case of the French wine Joe recommended. But half a case will do. After all, there are bound to be parties. There are bound to be dinners, at the very least. People to see and talk to and spend time with and drink wine with. It isn't over. Maybe it isn't even ending. But you do have to be careful, for there is traffic and bottles of wine are clinking together in the bag on my lap, and it's the glasses you want to clink. And they're at home.

]]> Time to go tag:www.paulbendix.com,2010:/range-of-motion//1.548 2010-01-13T02:23:07Z 2010-01-13T02:23:49Z At one point, there I was standing at the back of the Lyttleton playhouse more or less high on the National Theatre's production of 'The Power of Yes,' David Hare's highly edifying, even mine-expanding look at the global financial crisis...and... Paul Bendix At one point, there I was standing at the back of the Lyttleton playhouse more or less high on the National Theatre's production of 'The Power of Yes,' David Hare's highly edifying, even mine-expanding look at the global financial crisis...and so what? Well, as a friend pointed out, in relating this epiphanic moment I casually mentioned that I was standing, which is not my normal body posture. And, yes, I had briefly risen from my wheelchair to stretch my lower back, but in the selectiveness of storytelling, standing up has some significance.

I was up, feeling up, and while standing, began conversing with theatergoers in the row just ahead. We were arguing about the play. Is it a play, the woman asked. Aren't these events too recent to be the stuff of theater? We carried on in this vein, making our way to the lobby. And all the time I was pounding with a certain joy. How could I tell these people that it didn't matter to me whether this was theater or theater/journalism or a giant rutabaga? What mattered was that the English middle class had gathered together, live and in person, to grapple with the issues of the day. And I was briefly part of that process. And now I was going home. This isn't home. It just isn't. Or is it? I was glad to be heading home to California, sorry to be leaving home in Britain. And I am one confused dude.

After the theater, I met for drinks with friends and relatives at the Langham Hotel, Mayfair. It's quite a swank place. The wheelchair lift is surrounded by marble, and if the thing worked a little better, one would be impressed. Instead, the most impressive thing about the Langham Hotel was its midwinter flexibility. The hotel's main lounge was shutting down, and the bar had loud jazz in the background, and middle-aged people who want to talk to each other don't fare well in such circumstances. At least, I don't. But the Langham was quite happy to seat us by the fire, and when that felt too cramped, to serve us drinks in another part of the lobby. Pretty cool, I thought. And probably not the sort of experience one gets in the touristy summer.

But early January in London is a dead zone. With snow choking off much of the country, the death was even deadlier. Which is a good thing to remember, it seems to me, for cabs were plentiful. I kept imagining awkward moments in the cold, desperately trying to flag down a taxi. But there were legions of them, swarming about with their yellow lights on, and rarely making excuses about carrying a wheelchair. And yet there was a message. It came with the drinks tab. London is a place where it is easily possible to spend almost $40 on three cocktails.

Time to go home.

At Heathrow Airport, it's a long overland journey from the waiting room of Terminal 1 to the United Airlines flight for San Francisco. In fact, the schlep to gate 48 has a sort of way station, a small desk midpoint where a man stands asking passengers where they are bound and offering the encouraging words that it's only another five minutes or 10 minutes or 15. On the way you get your only look at Air Croatia. Not to mention Czech Air. You also wander in and out of several climate zones. Like all major airports, Heathrow seems to be forever under construction, so the circulatory system of corridors includes a few bypasses, places where a section of temporary hallway has been built to shunt people around something or other. They are unheated, these bypass walkways. They are a reminder of something else. It's winter. That's why there is so much white stuff covering the airport's aprons and taxiways. Snow being a novelty to a Californian, then an annoyance, and now something I would like to see later, from the windows of a train, say. Or next year. Time to go home.

Seated in Tourist Class and contemplating my chicken, I puzzled at the mixture of fortunes. That I had been seated in the bulkhead row and was able to brace my easily swollen right leg on the opposite wall, elevating the foot in the most wondrous of ways, well, this is not to be taken for granted. That I can't seem to get myself published, that I am 63 years old and a literary failure, this was enough to make me shove lunch aside and head for the toilet. After all, this was a British crew running this flight, and one could still use the word 'toilet' instead of the American euphemism. And with all this burbling about my mind, maybe it was no wonder that once on my feet, I took a distracted step there instead of here and quietly toppled. Airplanes move after all, ever so slightly all the time, transatlantic ones in particular. So there I was, not so much falling and sliding down the bulkhead. To the carpeted floor. Fortunately, the passengers around me were occupied with lunch just enough to keep them in their seats. A tall and rather beautiful Indian woman flight attendant levered me back into verticality with remarkable ease. And I continued on my way, aware that peeing is my constant activity, falling is my constant fear, and I was getting a constant message. Time to go home.

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