Range of Motion tag:www.paulbendix.com,2007-08-15:/range-of-motion/1 2012-02-06T01:26:05Z A Wheelchair Odyssey Movable Type Publishing Platform 4.0 Security Settings tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.808 2012-02-06T01:25:45Z 2012-02-06T01:26:05Z I can see a shift, really, honest, and this is essential to keep in mind as, well, so much of the musculoskeletal reality sours. I mean it really has been hard, post-flight to work all the kinks out of my... Paul Bendix
Actually, I was in the Caltrain Board meeting, my first ever. Not to be confused with the Advisory Committee of the same rail line, which I not only attend but now actually chair. Cheers for chairs, I always say. I had been declining this august post for some time. Enough already. The gavel is now mine, for the monthly meeting of us advisors. And I report on the advisory goings-on live and in person to the actual Board. Bored being an understandable response to all this, gentle reader, but do bear with me. For the details matter, if one is trying to do anything in the real world, and now and then one does. Which brings me back to the Caltrain Board gathering. Actually, it was chock-full of most interesting information about what is really happening along the line. Californians are dabbling with the ever so slightly 21st century notion of high-speed rail. A debate that contrasts with, say, the argument over the London-Birmingham HS2 in that the Midlands already has good regional rail service and we do not. Anyway, Caltrain is poised to share tracks with a train route that may, or may not, get built, its engineers have to accommodate both options, and the whole thing is enough to make a sane person flush himself down the nearest urinal.

And being one who keeps track of urinal proximity, I was doing this as I waited my turn on the Caltrain Board agenda. Just in case. Things did go on and on. These meetings seek, in fact welcome, the views of one and all. Which brings me to the most astonishing part of the proceedings. A constituent from San Joaquin County, an altogether different neck of the woods not remotely served by Caltrain, had made his way to the podium. Having submitted his speaker's card, he was having a go at Public Comment. For reasons that are unclear, although Asperger's would be a logical explanation, his native voice could probably be heard back home, three counties away. His natural decibel level, coupled with the podium microphone, produced a startling effect. Speaking like a human bullhorn, this one-man hailer held forth unabashed. Which he should have been, considering that he had nothing to say of procedural importance. Complaints about Caltrain station staff, that sort of thing. An example to us all, he was. Introverts, you have nothing to lose but your inhibitions. Go for it, he was telling us.

And these days, I am. Consider last night's astonishing performance at Keddem Congregation. I, bringer of challah, managed to get stuck in rush-hour traffic, throwing something of a wet towel on the kiddush prayer. And, worse, half forgetting the rules about food. We now eat vertebrates that swim, not those that cluck about the barnyard. I half suspected this, but brought a chicken salad anyway. A potential source of great shame, but not on this occasion. Fuck it. I have other fish to fry. Not to mention chicken. I am not going to dwell. It is possible to acquire a sense of proportion, even late in life.

Maybe. I do retain an achy soul. Meaning, Jane can be gone for five hours, and the experience feels like five months. It seems hopeless, this. I maybe it is one of those facts of the human condition. Some wounds, at least in some people, never quite heal.

And why? All I can say is that there have been protracted periods of aridity in my life. A desert, of sorts, which I could never separate from the real one. When my father moved us, our bachelor household including my brother and me, into a condominium in Riverside, California, there was a definite shift. Yes, this was still the desert, but evidence of irrigation was everywhere. Historically, the place had been the home of orange groves. And there was a time in the spring when the white blossoms and their fragrance lightened the suburban atmosphere. A season balanced by the near brushes with freezing weather in the winter when oil-fired smudge pots lit up among the groves. Not that at our end of town oranges were much in evidence. The condo development crept up the slope of Mount Rubidoux, giant desert boulders decoratively overhanging the lawns and swimming pool. Still, there was no keeping the desert out of our home.

At this point, after four years in my father's post-divorce household, I was full of adolescent impatience. I will never know if my dad, somewhere in mid-single-parenthood, decided that he could not afford a housekeeper or determined that we no longer needed one. Nor did it ever occur to me to ask. Somehow this series of middle-aged women cooks and cleaners stopped flowing through our lives. Upon reflection, the most likely answer has much to do with my father's penchant for do-it-yourself projects. In our first apartment in Riverside he had screwed all sorts of things into the living room veneer. This probably included pictures, perhaps a wall clock. Whatever. Even at 16 years of age I knew better. Lacking the wisdom to keep such observations to myself, my remarks sparked endless Oedipal power struggles. Somehow my father did not know these things. Perhaps he had never rented an apartment. I hadn't either, of course, but strangely my eyes were open.

Having grown up with servants, including a cook, my father had not a clue about kitchens. Still, like all of his household tinkering, the kitchen began to intrigue him. He bought The Joy of Cooking. He acquired a pressure cooker. He undertook shopping, all of it, returning from local supermarkets laden with items he recognized, though their preparation eluded him. And today another part of this historical puzzle may be falling into place in my mind. Half recalled, half imagined. My father did not like the cuisine of our home help. After all, the latter were local women, hapless enough to have fallen into domestic jobs in the early 1960s. Probably badly paid. With expectations just as low. Riverside just wasn't a servant sort of town.

Having taken on housekeeping himself, increasingly my father arrived home from his doctor's office laden with pots, pans, kitchen gadgets and, of course, grocery bags. Underneath all this was his adjustment to divorce. Which had hardened into a matter-of-fact misogyny. And while the impulse toward domesticity might have proved healing and opened our home to friends, neither thing occurred. No, this was my father's solo journey. And unfortunately it included stops at the local Safeway meat department. Tongue. Sweetbreads. Liver. These things, he assured his sons, were standard dinner fare. And we were going to cook them. I don't know if my father's family ate nothing but this stuff, that was the implication. A good German household transplanted to New York City. My father's birth announcement sits in a family scrapbook somewhere. It bears an address on Riverside Drive and is entirely in German.

My father had no grasp of even the most obvious culinary instruction such as 'lightly sauté.' His activities in the kitchen, fortunately confined almost entirely to weekends, came too late in life for him to get traction. As a result, he used what he knew. All sorts of medical and surgical tools appeared right next to spatulas and stirring spoons. Sauerbraten, a German pot roast, required  stuffing and tying with string, according to The Joy of Cooking. No problem, for my father had curved suturing needles handy and went about sewing the meat into form. Half-moon-shaped metal pans of the sort that dotted his medical office now turned up at home, all the better to scoop this or that portion of cooking liquid from a simmering pot. Forceps, of course, were ideal for plucking this or that out of a pan. Whatever term I used for this misbegotten assemblage of clinical and culinary hardware today escapes me, but certainly it was something along the lines of 'gross.' It appalled me, the entire scene. The tongue or whatever meat du jour. The instruments and, yes, soon an autoclave...to sterilize which things for what purpose now lost to history. Perhaps my father saw a pleasing Germanic order to these mixed implements. The larger point had to do with the outcome. His food was appalling. The worst offenses coming from the pressure cooker, hissing out its rhythms, disgorging its bland and obliterated vegetables or or cuts of meat sweated down like shrunken heads.

Years later some psychologist or other questioned the origins of my own cooking. Was I trying to take the place of my mother? Doubtless. I craved female attention, maternal concern, in any form at that time of my life. And anything that produced a semblance of cozy love seemed worth the effort. Only that it wasn't. My brother and I, despite our squabbling, essentially took over the kitchen together. We displaced our father as much as possible. One essential stratagem was to make something in sufficient quantity to dominate the refrigerator throughout each weekend. Still, my bored father couldn't resist. Whenever he saw a window of cooking opportunity, he had a shot. Still, I and my brother gradually gained the upper hand. Like so many things in life, I, or we, resented this. Yet it was a matter of survival, in some sense, and the options seemed few.

If I was appalled at my father, I seem to have been equally appalled at myself. For not having a single date in high school. Well not quite. For barely dating in university. I was behind in life's race. And then I was injured and out of the race altogether. It is only now, late in life, that I understand that things moved slowly for me in the early stages, then got under way...and kept going. Yet something did get lost in the process. A fundamental sense of security, I would say. Which is the fear that things won't keep going...despite all evidence to the contrary. ]]> Real tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.807 2012-02-02T02:55:29Z 2012-02-02T02:55:56Z I joke that the human genome contains a finite number of trips to Costco. The humor lying in the experience of rolling oversized shopping carts over an acreage of concrete floors peopled with humans and forklifts, sounds echoing off girders... Paul Bendix
My Uncle Bob died on Monday, forcing a similar decision. Spend a day flying to snowy upstate New York, attend his service, then fly home? A gut call, as they say, or more a musculoskeletal call. I could feel the trip in my lower back. And the feeling was not a good one. Actually, a direct line leads from Uncle Bob's service to the headquarters of Best Buy in Virginia. I was schlepping around there in my era of corporate employment and ambulation, writing some silly article about the company's use of Apple computers. And dying.

Dying of heat. In central, coastal California the climate is remarkably steady. Temperate and predominantly dry. Heat exchange in the quadriplegic body being what it is, even spring temperatures in Virginia pose a challenge. Messrs. Best Buy, headquartered in a famous...or for a company headed toward bankruptcy, infamous...Richmond facility, all modern architecture and art and energy-efficiency, was uncomfortably hot. A sign or remark from the company rep showing me around explained the simple fact. The air-conditioning was set at an energy-efficient 80°F, or thereabouts, which was fine for anyone with a normal sympathetic nerve supply to their sweat glands. But not for me. It had a strange effect, the heat. Followed by the flight home. Something in me got too tired, and it took too long to shake, whatever this deep bodily fatigue was. Never again, said every cell in my being. Ha ha, said something else. After all, life has demands. Keeping pace with the latter, while living in one's body as it is...the challenge is not a small one. For who likes giving up? Was I going to stop working? Stop making business trips? Stop going to Virginia? What was I not able to do, overall?

Go to Rochester, New York, it turns out, in 2012. My brother went in my stead...no, that's not quite right. He, our, brother represented the three siblings. Which, despite the loss inherent in my admission of 'I can't do it,' there is this. A cooperative spirit. The very essence of something the siblings did not grow up with. That this sort of thing that can blossom, whenever. Thing is, my January trip home from the UK took some getting over. In retrospect, I sat too long watching Virgin Atlantic's splendid assortment of films. A few more trips up and down the aisles would have made a difference. Or maybe not. It must mean something, being 65 years of age.

Or does it? That is the other thing. A friend is preparing her husband's birthday party, his 60th. She has chosen a 70s theme. Sitting across our lunch table, I tried to take this in, how the 1970s could be a motif. The disco era, perhaps. She mentioned bellbottoms and, yes, perhaps that was part of it. I am just slightly older, so matters of quick changing fashion appear differently to me. Late 1960s, I would have said, regarding bellbottoms. Nevermind. My real challenge is seeing the 1970s as a period or style. For me, it was my first full decade as a disabled person. A time of challenge for me. And viewed as an epoch, it seems at best an afterimage of the combative and creative 1960s.

Which means what? That the 1960s was a time when I was still neuromuscularly intact, still capable of bounding about? Or something in the nation was still intact and mobile? Or both? Not a fruitful speculation for me. More to the point, if the 1970s had a story, I missed it. My own was predominating. It simply squeezed out the rest.

And yet I am old enough to have experienced decades that are now the stuff of party themes. Costume dramas. Comfortably in the past. Actually, I recall owning a velvet suit. Something I bought in London, circa 1970. It seemed cool at the time. And did I have any real occasion to wear it? Perhaps not. But I am glad to have bought the thing. To fit in with the times and look even vaguely contemporary. I even recall going to a disco with my friend Michele. Which would have been the late 1970s. A quick web search turns up a picture of John Travolta and his familiar disco stance, white suit and arm over head. Saturday Night Fever. Probably telling that I never saw the film. But I distinctly remember my disco night in North Beach, a San Francisco neighborhood once peppered with nightclubs. There was loud music, marijuana, liquor and cocaine. I took in some combination of the latter, doubtless. Mostly I remember dancing. Truly a 'dance without steps,' (title of my book out in May). But in those days I had enough balance to stay upright and enough stamina to keep going for a while. I probably sat out a few numbers. Whatever. I was there, taking part. Yet it didn't matter at the time, and it still doesn't.

I can't take it lightly, that whole decade. The times did not take me lightly, after all. They pulled me down, got me heavier, gouged my feet into the earth. A largely unpleasant experience, but with a discovery at the end. That the earth has its own time. Real time, it turns out.  A concept at war with our contemporary real-time. Raising no questions about time and many about 'real.' ]]> The Grabber tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.806 2012-01-31T21:40:42Z 2012-01-31T21:41:05Z 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... Paul Bendix
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. ]]> Mortar tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.805 2012-01-31T00:30:54Z 2012-01-31T00:31:15Z 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... Paul Bendix
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. ]]> Old Enough tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.804 2012-01-29T01:07:42Z 2012-01-29T01:08:23Z 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... Paul Bendix
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. ]]> Peach and Pit tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.803 2012-01-25T20:40:19Z 2012-01-25T20:43:08Z 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... Paul Bendix
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. ]]> Dawning tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.802 2012-01-24T14:54:25Z 2012-01-24T14:55:10Z 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... Paul Bendix
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.

                *                *                *

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. ]]> Leaving tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.801 2012-01-20T04:58:12Z 2012-01-20T04:59:57Z 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... Paul Bendix
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. ]]> Brighton tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.800 2012-01-15T12:52:37Z 2012-01-15T12:53:19Z Paul Bendix Grief.  Its absence okay, yes relative absence, teaches much about its presence.  There is no other way to account for departure from the Queen Mary 2.  In my recollection, arrival day in Southampton was always a matter of chaos.  Mixed with discomfort and boredom.  I have this scene in my mind from my solitary voyage after Marlou's death, a group of us, passengers waiting for the signal to walk the plank.  The gangplank, that is.  We were sitting in the Queen's Room, a sometimes ballroom, sometimes tea room, suitcases everywhere, waiting and waiting.  Hundreds of people.  Waiting for God knows what and for God knows how long.  I recall this interminable moment in the ballroom as both bleak and frustrating.  The party was not only over but long forgotten.  And we were long forgotten.

It was nothing like that on Tuesday.  Into the dining room as always for a roaring English breakfast.  Back to the bar to hang around for all of 15 minutes, then a wheelchair escort who arrived to seemingly do nothing, although my assessment was shortly to be proved wrong, for damned if this man didn't part the waves of passengers queuing for the gangplank, gently shooing them all out of the way so that my brother and I could happily exit.  It took little time to find our bags.  Five minutes to the railway station, the London-bound train rolling in five minutes after that.  Short read on the rails, a fleeting cab glimpse of the West End, then back at the St. Pancras Novotel.

And by week's end it was reassuring to be heading back to that hotel, this time via a train from Brighton.  My room all of five minutes away from the platform at St. Pancras Station.  The train, electrified of course, gently slid out of the stop at Gatwick Airport and into a comfortable hundred miles per hour en route to Croydon.  Always a surprisingly green and pleasant trip from Brighton.  Are these the South Downs, this gently rolling farmland?  And is this Surrey or Sussex?  Why is this village named for three bridges?  They are railway mysteries, these, and the most baffling is the most hard to articulate.  It comes with the setting sun, at 4 PM this time of year.  The stark outlines of leafless trees, the spires of churches, the electrical pylons and smokestacks and chimneys, all of this winterscape darkens as the sky briefly reddens.  It is the day's end.  

It seemed, when I lived here in my twenties, to mark the daily end of everything.  Another day lived, or survived, the sadness of things emerging with the winter's early dusk.  And occasional rail trips, like this one, for some medical purpose, or some social reason, but never frivolous or impulsive.  I had little money.  I had no future.  It was hard to see beyond each day.  Although each day my disabled body grew more into itself, settled down into what it was, forgot what it wasn't.  And the winter nights were cold, and I got about places with an aluminum crutch that clicked.  Until I was home in my room.  And my room was my home.  And it wasn't much, and neither was my life.  But I had a life.  Incomprehensible, futureless, but better, or certainly different, from the alternative.  Gunned down on a Berkeley street, and somehow I had gotten here.

The travel experience shunts one backwards and forwards in time, in and out of trivia and profundity.  Yet it is all one thing, revelations coming on all planes at any moment.  In the bathroom of the Novotel, my brother has grown weary of mornings.  He showers first now, avoiding the sodden floor and miniature puddles that remain from my wheelchair splashings.  For me, it is safety first in the Novotel shower.  The thing is designed in the most fashionable and sleek French manner, that is to say, a stainless steel minimalism prevails, and of course, there are no railings.  With the possibility of collapsing back onto the wheelchair while showering, first and foremost in my mind, where the spray goes matters relatively little.  As long as some of it hits my body and my body does not hit the tile, at least not at a bone-snapping velocity, I could care about the rest.  I know this horrifies my brother.  As travelers, we are very much the Odd Couple, neatness being Richard's province.  Survival being mine.  And this is all part of it, the travel day.

And this particular day began at St. Pancras Station.  The essential mystery boring into my brain: how could a train on the north side of London make it to the south?  Rolling out of the station the answer revealed itself, a tunnel, then elevated track, the Blackfriars Bridge across the Thames...then as usual through the Southern Region of the former British Rail.  At Brighton, a struggle with the Czechoslovakian cab driver who assured me that he had to belt me into his taxi, whether a good or bad idea, one I rejected out of hand.  It had been difficult enough getting into his back seat.  Damned if I was going to worry about the rest.  A bouncing journey to Hanover Crescent, then there they were, Martin and his new wife, Pang.  And within moments somehow there we all were on the Brighton front, sitting in a fish restaurant, the English Channel lapping practically at our feet, brilliant sun beating through the glass almost making the place hot.  And something in me, some yearning for British sustenance, makes me order not only fish and chips, but whitebait.  The latter being a miniaturization of the former.  Fried madness, it is, but there you have it.  Or I have it, sitting on my plate, and getting heavier by the moment, as am I, another effect of travel and the middle-aged metabolism.

All beside the point.  For the point is this incredible moment.  Martin, ravaged by a year of leukemia, half that time spent in hospitals, a plastic chemotherapy port dangling from beneath his shirt sleeve...and he is in every important sense quite okay.  He jokes as brightly as always.  Sensing not only the irony of things but the truth of things, the wisdom beneath the surface.  The Greek restaurant owners love him.  Pang, whom he met in Thailand only a year ago...at the same moment that his disease blossomed...and although she seems to take the recessive role of the Thai woman and is not deft at English...loves Martin more than any of us.  And this is all as poignant and sad and wonderful, as life itself.  For I have known Martin in three marriages.  To his credit, he sees the good in all of them.  As an observer, my view is not so sanguine.  Never mind, for we have arrived here, on the Brighton front, opposite one of the famous, and sadly burned down, piers.  And love sometimes takes a lifetime, or much of a lifetime, to finally arrive.  And beneath the badinage...and he is quite a wit, our Martin...this is the simple truth.  Where is love?  Right here on the Sussex coast, in this solar-heated restaurant run by Greeks.  Who, whatever their difficulty with modern economies, are still awfully good at baklava.  Yes, I cannot resist the stuff, and have this as dessert, along with, of course, a macchiato, British drug of choice.

One thing about the UK, there are systems and yet there are not.  Buying my return ticket to Brighton at St. Pancras, I encounter an awkward moment.  Should I or should I not attempt to use my Disabled Person's Railcard?  Oh, what the hell, and so I flash it at the woman behind the counter.  She informs me that my card is six years out of date.  Oh, I say, feigning surprise.  Sorry, love, she tells me.  

Yet my ticket proves to be of the disabled discount variety.  Mission accomplished.  And in the grander scheme of things, the system that is not a system produces yet another wonderful result.  I am halfway between Brighton and London when it occurs to me: how will I get off the train at St. Pancras?  By then, the rushhour will be in full force, and it may be hard enough to get myself by the doors and virtually impossible to summon the guy with the ramp who will get me off the train.  Which I worry about only mildly.  For some reason, system or not, it is all going to work, and who knows why?  Here is the station.  There he is, the Sikh with the ramp, and I am off and rolling to the Novotel.
]]> Enough tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.799 2012-01-09T17:29:31Z 2012-01-09T17:30:38Z Paul Bendix In the Commodore Lounge...and I can only apologize for the name...the ocean unfurls itself in 180° of magnificent windows.  Built into the prow of the Queen Mary 2, it seems a bar in name only.  More like Goldfinger's living room.  It is so far from the center of the ship, where the action is, few guests seem to venture here.  A series of people, usually readers, each with his own window, alone with his thoughts, alone with the sea.  Signs announce that at sundown the shades will be drawn.  Why, I asked a waiter.  The bridge, he pointed out, is right above us.  Lights spilling from the lounge will interfere with visibility.  

And visibility is what this bar is all about.  Miles of endless sea rolling toward you.  Miles that part and roll off to either side.  And this is where I am sitting on this particular morning, the last morning essentially, for the Scilly Iles and the Bishop's Rock lighthouse just to the south, all this stuff is only 70 miles away.  In fact, doing the math, we are essentially there.  The ship must dramatically slow down for its last miles through the English Channel.  At 3 AM we stop altogether.  The ship picks up its harbor pilot by the Isle of Wight.  Then straight up the Solent in the dead of night.  It will still be pitch black when we look out the window and find the curious facts of land.  Cranes and buildings and Southampton.  But for now, at this moment, there is still plenty of vastness, rolling water.  

And, my God, dolphins.  Did I really see them?  They curve up and out of the water in formation, just like the Rockettes, dorsal fin to dorsal fin.  In the distance is a tanker.  I believe in that.  These dolphins could be a 60s flashback.  No, they are the real thing, for everyone else on the ship seems to have seen them.  Along with a couple of birds.  We are nearing land.  Bags must be packed and outside the door by midnight.  It's all over almost.

I won't miss the ties.  Putting one on, or more exactly, clipping one on every night seems a bit much.  Whatever it seems, it is in the past.  I will miss Peter and Barbara, dining companions.  No-nonsense Brits, working-class people without an ounce of pretense.  The other couple, fortunately always seated at the opposite end of the table, are a more troubling quantity.  They have a way of talking about Obamacare and the 'so-called homeless.'  I smiled a lot at them.  Said little or nothing of consequence.  Whatever.

It is going to be strange having to deal with the real world.  The land with pavements and curbs and streets.  Getting on a train.  Nothing but land beyond the tracks.  Strange.  And cold.  It is bound to be cold because it is January and it is Britain.  Of course it is also January on the North Atlantic just south of the Irish Sea, but here it is a balmy 55°F.  Downright eerie, this is, for winter in these parts.  Not to worry, for as we advance toward the English Channel the temperature drops, plummets really.  Weather in the British Isles has a certain reputation to live up to.

In short, I don't want to go, but I am tired of being en route.  I have had my dolphins.  I have even had afternoon tea in the Queen's Room, complete with harpist, finger sandwiches, sweet cakes, scones and clotted cream.  Only two hours before dinner.  Madness.  Another reason to leave this ship.  Caloric temptation everywhere.  Enough.  
]]> Roaring Breakfast tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.798 2012-01-08T17:39:29Z 2012-01-08T17:40:43Z Paul Bendix Do not underestimate the profound effects of Cumberland sausage.  It fills the Cumberland Gap, it does, of a morning, particularly this morning.  In between fierce bouts of North Atlantic rain, the sun splays bright upon the waters.  An illusion, my brother reports, fresh from a walk around Deck 7.  Doors on the windward side of the ship are actually barred this morning, such is the gale outside.  He went for a walk, he tells me, bundled and determined.  Nasty outside, he says.  Which is why it is that much more pleasant inside, breakfast roaring with poached eggs and, yes, Cumberland sausage.  Not to mention grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, and also baked beans.  A traditional English couple accompany this traditional English breakfast.  What's nontraditional is that one is in a wheelchair.  We have been comparing notes on the disabled experience, having forged early agreement on, you guessed it, Cumberland sausage.

This man, let us call him Don (his wife does) intrigues me.  We are the same age.  He is happily married, an assessment I make without reservation, having just breakfasted with him and his wife.  He has an adolescent son.  So family, at least this family, seems to have come to him late in life, around 50.  Which makes me identify with him or, more precisely, project.  First, virtually everything good in my life has come late.  The other thing I see in him, or us, is a sort of openness, a generally attractive quality.  This makes me wonder about the lessons of disabled life.  I have the sense that he has learned a thing or two from decades in a wheelchair.  Bitter experience has not made him a bitter person.  Quite the opposite, it seems.  Since I don't really know him, this is all a chance to assess myself.  Which is hard to do, under the best of circumstances.  Still, this man, this foil, presents an opportunity.  To say that I have learned something.  To say that I have an openness myself, whatever attractive qualities would make a woman...Jane, for instance...put up with the obvious mobility limitation, range of activity limitation, and whatever else.  Perhaps we shall meet again, Don and I.  And if not, the topic area has opened.  That my heart has opened by force of life's pounding.  That there is an upside to an existence with so much downside.  That I am not a complete fuck up.  And perhaps, just perhaps, I have something to be proud of.

Good to get ones spirits up these days, particularly in view of the large chunk of extroversion one has bitten off.  This all the more apparent when I went searching for Illuminations.  The latter not being a higher state but a mere location on board the ship.  The name of the cinema-cum-lecture-hall.  Actually, I was rolling there in search of what proved to be a very interesting lecture on the history of political intrigue in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.  If you have half a mind to do so, you can't help but learn something from Cunard's lecture series.  In any case, I was looking for the door, this being a somewhat confusing matter, the theater built on two levels and having many entrances.  When I found it.  The door.  A door, anyway.  I opened it and there it was, Illuminations, lecture in full progress and the front row staring at me.  This proved to be the stage entrance.  No wonder the door was hard to open.  

I back out as fast as possible, but still it has been a mortifying moment, staring from the stage up at the steeply banked rows of expectant faces.  Like some scene from a recurring nightmare, wandering down the hallway at school and remembering that you have forgotten to dress, that you are naked, everything on horrible display.  And yet, I plan to get over it, this feeling.  I intend to look forward to speaking to people, 15 in a bookstore, even five.  I have spent my disabled life largely avoiding this sort of exposure that goes with an audience.  Yet part of me craves the exposure.  I really do intend to get over this, replacing stage phobia with a healthy level of stage fright.

A harpist performs a midafternoon concert on another stage.  She introduces us to the harp, pointing out its pedals and explaining their functions.  We roll through harp territory, Celtic regions of Spain, the Hebrides, Ireland.  Beneath us rolls the North Atlantic.  The latter makes its presence known with clicks and bumps, rising unexpectedly from the theater's metal floor.  Earlier, having fish and chips on Deck 2, a huge wave smashed sideways into the window.  It is rough out there.  The ocean is charcoal gray, only a hint of green, and darkening by the hour.  Aside from the occasional metallic clunk, transmitted from the ship's hull, the engine room, no one can say...the telltale stage curtains' sway says it all.  We are at sea.  It is all tenuous.  Time to be humble.  Roiling forces are at work, and if we get through all this watery turbulence, there is every reason to be grateful.  Marlou's presence or her ghost or some other emanation peeks through the parting curtains just briefly, just enough to remind me that she has come and gone.  Which the sea itself keeps telling us, all of us.  All the time, all the time we are crossing, whatever we are crossing.  Whether the street or the North Atlantic, that we should be crossing our fingers.
]]> All at Sea tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.797 2012-01-06T19:26:39Z 2012-01-06T19:28:06Z Paul Bendix Naturally, I cannot get through the experience without a certain amount of automatic, reflexive self denunciation...for slipping here, wavering there.  It is not fun being afraid.  Easy to blame oneself out of habit, and out of desperate belief that there may be more control over things than seems available.  Still, I manage to keep the self-criticism to a low background level and get through what one must get through.  Which is a readjustment.  A new life circumstance that has echoes of taking LSD during my college years.  The sense that things are wavering and unreliable and not what they seem.  Its very subtlety making it all the more elusive.  The ship's rocking, its incessant lolling to and fro, undermines what little inertial guidance remains in my neurologically diminished body.  But this subtle effect is almost worse than its more violent cousin, the seasickness-inducing version.  For it is hard to tell that anything is happening.  The Queen Mary 2's low-level shifting is hard to distinguish from my own physical disorientation.  On land, I cannot tell where I am space, nor can I tell where I am moving in space, and when I step out of my stateroom to begin a therapeutic schlep up and down the corridor, it's hard to say why the whole thing seems fraught and disturbing.  As though the ground is shifting beneath my very feet.  Which it is.

The ship's corridors are handily fitted with railings, a sort of physiotherapy gym masquerading as a hallway.  Up one direction and back, turning around to have another go.  Down the hall I hear an older Englishwoman hailing our steward, Ray.  He listens to her admonition to just go see if that American man needs his assistance.  I must cut quite a figure in the hallway.  Both slow and awkward of gait.  This essential fact, of whatever helpless or afflicted impression I convey, well it used to make me cringe.  I spent much of my younger years wanting to fit in, cut no figure at all, and proceed through life undetected.  Or, one might say, appreciated for something other than my neurological state.  These days I don't particularly care.  Though I do care enough to yell down the hallway to the woman with the news that I am alright.  She appears not to hear me.  Although later in the afternoon, rolling down the hallway from some afternoon tea, she stops me and explains herself.  She thought I needed help, she says, but her husband told her no, that bloke is getting on.  I know all this, or know it in outline, but never mind.  I give her a warmhearted minute or two, just because.  Perhaps I want to drive the point home that I am sufficient.  And I appreciate the concern.  And the fact is if one plays ones cards right, a disability provides abundant opportunities to meet people.  What the hell.

'It looks like the cover of your book,' says my brother over breakfast.  He is referring to the sky, the ocean, the whole mid-Atlantic effect, all of it rolling by our window in the ship's buffet.  The latter, by the way, is so vast that I have never quite grasped what is served where.  In any case, we have been to the breakfast cereal station, this morning's meal confined to some All-Bran.  Well, also some melon.  And just a bit of herring, the latter irresistible in its light curry sauce.  The food is so wonderful aboard the ship, and there is so much of it, and there is no end to its availability, that strict caloric discipline must be imposed.  Somehow.  On this particular morning we talked of getting the fish and chips on Deck 2 for lunch.  A fine idea for my slim brother, but ill-advised for me.  Instead, Richard actually gets my foot strapped onto the exercycle in the early afternoon, and I put in a very strenuous half-hour of cycling in the ship's gym.

But for now we are both concentrating on cereal and the view of the North Atlantic from Deck 7.  It does look like the cover of my book, an ominous ocean with a low sunny orb making it's wintry way across the sky.  I have decided that this trip is an opportunity to get to know my brother better.  Which is somewhat tricky, brothers being who we are.  Each day I broach a little more of family origin topics.  On this particular day, how each of us came to live with our father, postdivorce.  What was he thinking?  More about being close to his friends, Richard tells me.  The parents were secondary.  This astonishes me, but it explains a lot.  He was more independent from an early age and, as I tell him, had more of a life.  My own was given over for years to the guilty illusion that I was somehow very involved in my parents' divorce and decline.  It took years for this large section of my brain to get cleared out.  Richard seems to have avoided taking on this particular burden.  For which I instinctively envied him as a child.  It is as though we were on stage with the same cast of characters, but in different plays.

Following a pattern long established, I follow breakfast tea with a macchiato in the ship's coffee bar.  Wunderbar.  What a place, high ceiling, light wood paneling and more magnificent wide picture windows of the streaming Atlantic.  In talking about the shipboard experience, I have always complained that there was no place to be alone aboard the Queen Mary 2.  That all spaces were public spaces.  I don't know what I was thinking.  This elegant coffee bar with its magnificent views, lush mahogany furnishings and indescribable coffees is remarkably little trafficked.  There is never more than a scattering of people here.  One is as alone as one wants to be.  A marvelous place to read.  Endlessly.

I wonder what it was about, this feeling of being intruded upon, nothing private, nothing offering peace or sanctuary aboard ship.  Perhaps it was not really being alone that I wanted.  But feeling too alone, one transatlantic crossing with a dying partner, one crossing with memories of a dying partner.  Perhaps I could never get enough space because I had too much.  Perhaps this is why one travels - to see how far one has gone.
]]> Last Exit from Brooklyn tag:www.paulbendix.com,2012:/range-of-motion//1.796 2012-01-05T21:21:22Z 2012-01-05T21:24:52Z Paul Bendix Things groan, others click, some sway and all move, however subtly.  In short, I am back aboard the Queen Mary 2.  A situation that has perplexed me every step of the way.  Why am I doing this, I asked as recently as a day ago, waking up in the middle of the night in a New York hotel room.  After all, it doesn't happen by accident, this sort of thing.  The logistics were staggering.  Packing for a week of disabled life at sea.  To be followed by a week of disabled life on land.  I must have slept all of 90 minutes during the night of my departure.  The unspeakable arising at 3 AM for a 4:30 AM airport van.  Me rolling dazed up the surprisingly crowded 5:30 AM halls of Delta Airlines, heartened by the knowledge that somehow, incredibly Jane had sleuthed the location of my British mobilephone, and yes, I even had that.  What really could go wrong when everything was going so right?  The flight accomplishing the sea-to-shining-sea feat in under five hours.  

But still it was nagging at me, why?  Or expressed in practical terms, what would possess a sane person to spend seven days on the North Atlantic en route to an eight-day stop in the UK?  All of this complicated by the other question, how would my brother and I get on in a shared state room for a nautical week?

None of them really quite the right question.  Even before leaving the dock in Brooklyn, braving the icy January wind from the top deck, things were beginning to fall into place.  Was the New York skyline so stark, so close, so unimaginably beautiful the two previous times I took this trip?  On this 3 January, the winter wind was so bitter that I could only last five minutes outside as the gargantuan ship slid sideways into the East River.  Enough exposure to say I had been there.  With a reminder of the day's earlier exposure, a short half-mile wheelchair ride through Midtown to pick up a couple of books for the voyage.  

Fortunately, I was in the hands of my New York friend Eric, for under no other circumstances would I have had the courage.  Being in my own hands clearly perilous, the cold having so badly chilled my five moving fingers that the wheelchair control was proving something of a challenge.  Visions of frostbite already forming in my mind as we briefly, very briefly, watched the skaters in Rockefeller Center.  But cold and all, this departure was the most thrilling, Statue of Liberty included.  Was it always so close to the Brooklyn terminal?  Had I missed the full effect the other times?

And once at sea, had I ever had a more enjoyable table full of dining companions?  They were quite diverting...UK and American perspectives on health care bandied back and forth across the tablecloth for a pleasant hour or so.  The woman next to me even asking about my injury, mildly taken back by my response, but not horrified into silence.  Shootings still a bit foreign to the British experience, thank God.  And afterwards, having assured my brother that the Queen Mary stage shows were bound to disappoint, damned if we weren't sitting in the ship's theater laughing, both of us, at a BBC television comic doing a transatlantic standup routine.  Had I ever enjoyed a single evening of shipboard pop entertainment?

A hundred musicians appear from nowhere every night aboard the Queen Mary 2, and after the stage show, my brother and I went in search of jazz.  The best turned out to be in the main bar, an exquisite trio.  In contrast to the big band emanating from the ballroom.  And it was here that the painful, seemingly obvious truth hit home.  It was in this room, on the hardwood dance floor that I made it a point to rise and waltz about, after a quadriplegic fashion, with Marlou.  The poignancy of this moment, the bittersweet, even tragic sense of it all very fresh.  Such that I had to turn away, and yet could not pull myself away from acknowledging what this had been.  The last dance.  A real dance without steps.  

The title of a book, my book, out in May.  And so much as happened with my wife's death.  And since her death.  Life returning in every aspect.  The surest sign as we pulled away from the dock in New York, and I effused in a mobile phone message to Jane about the city lights, how much I missed her and wanted her to join me in this shipboard adventure.  The past not at all forgotten, but past.  The joy of travel, conversation, even pop entertainment, all coming back to me.

Perhaps it is meant to be, that the death of a loved one brings a sort of death to the one who loves.  And when life returns, it is certainly altered.  But it is back.  Which feels like a miracle, and must always have done so.  Enough to make a person grateful.  Enough to make a primal person want to do something.  A ritual, perhaps.  Whatever that is.  And which this may be, the entire transatlantic crossing.

Crossing the ship's hallway is another matter, of course.  On the morning of the first mid-Atlantic day, the ship is tilting this way and listing that as it barrels through the waves.  Which are not, we are told, waves, but swells.  Only masquerading as waves.  While tonight I shall masquerade as a swell, donning my black suit in a gesture in the general direction of evening attire.  My brother sporting an actual American tuxedo.  It is a pain in the butt, all this dressing up, yet my brother will be there to help, so why not?  We have a good table, after all, Richard and I being the oldest, which is a pleasant twist.  As for the dizzying round of activities, I have refused to let myself get dizzy.  When Marlou and I made this trip, for whatever reason, perhaps the newness, we felt obliged to do everything that looks vaguely interesting.  And some things were only vaguely interesting, unfortunately.  The sense of a day misspent always slightly in the background.  Though who knows?  There was so much foreboding in the background.  So I let go of the lecture on modern-day Saudi Arabia, which my brother attended and found standing room only.  I probably missed a good talk, but not really.  I can watch the thing on the ship's TV later in the afternoon.  For now there's a chance to write and then to read.  And then?  With 3000 miles to go there is still a lot of 'then.'
]]> Winter's Tales tag:www.paulbendix.com,2011:/range-of-motion//1.795 2011-12-28T05:30:25Z 2011-12-28T05:30:51Z It is a cold wind that does not blow at all, I always say, and so it is with this one. The Menlo Park air is downright stationary. Nothing is moving, including the thermometer, somewhere around 55° Fahrenheit, enough to... Paul Bendix
It is the day after Christmas. A day for survivors, if there ever was one, me included. Yesterday's celebration having been delayed, a festive Boxing Day awaits. While I wait for my café mocha. Then for a brown, dioxin-free paper napkin. And in the end, Godot. He is on his way, no doubt about it. While waiting for him, I read The Nation. In my mind I have a private moment of Occupy Peet's. We shall take over the means of production, the baristas and I, and then...what? If I knew, I would not be reading The Nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, I looked back as the conductor prepared the wheelchair lift. There was the guy, the athetoid guy from 20 years ago, hair longer, perhaps a bit weathered, but still quite ambulatory and making his way back to his vehicle. Sobering and horrifying to see this person homeless and living this way. The nights have been cold. And yet, certainly part of the story, he had found a way. Turning a wheelchair into a sort of small electric coach. Apparently it was all there, enough to live, stay warm, and keep going. I had to hand it to him. Yet I admit I didn't want to hand him anything else. Such as money. My fear...that he would recognize me, perhaps aboard another Caltrain and whatever followed...would never end. ]]> Amazing Grace tag:www.paulbendix.com,2011:/range-of-motion//1.794 2011-12-25T01:32:23Z 2011-12-25T01:33:07Z Deck the halls and hit the decks, lots of shopping, not much sex.Just thought I would share that.And what would Christmas be without Grace Paley? Her The Loudest Voice the current feature of one of the public radio short story... Paul Bendix
Just thought I would share that.

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

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

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

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

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