What are we supposed to do with Halloween?

I do not ask this question in anything but the most sincere terms. And, just in case you want to provide a history lesson e.g., All Hallows Eve, forget it. The human attraction to spookiness is always there. Death. Mystery of the Grim Reaper, etc. Cyrus McCormick came up with a much cheerier version of the reaper, but look what happened to him. 

Where was I?

The answer is Los Angeles. Downey, to be exact. The name used to sound richly ironic. But I am beyond that. And I no longer ask what is imperial about East Imperial Highway. And there is not an ounce of irony attached to the expansion, or elevation, of Rancho Los Amigos to the exalted title of National Rehabilitation Center. Why not? I need National. And above all, I need Centering. I have this very slight touch of autonomic dysreflexia, something tied to my aging bladder, which promises to tie me to an early grave, if something isn’t done. Or maybe if something is done. And at age 76, one should hardly complain. I mean, most of my life, I haven’t particularly worried about my underlying condition. But everything has its day. And on this particular day my spinal cord injury is demanding attention. It is a bit of a hostage situation. Pay attention, or we’ll shoot you. Something like that.

Meanwhile Messers Kaiser promise to conduct my very first urodynamic test next week. Whereas, the people in Los Angeles are already warning that such tests should be routinely given on an annual basis to the likes of me. And, Gentle Reader, I prefer to be generous at this point. I would like to believe that I have reached the end of the capabilities of Kaiser, and that up until this point, they have conducted themselves well, adequately. And sometimes adequate will do. 

And now that I have the luxury of returning to Rancho on an outpatient basis, rather than inpatient, I can appreciate the more enjoyable times. Such as the frequent habit of wandering outside after dinner with certain guys on the ward to enjoy more than the fresh air…Downey being notoriously short on the latter. No, a patient with the perspicacity to note my inclinations, lured me out there to smoke dope. The healing properties of which no one had seriously intimated in 1968, but all of us in the hospital parking lot quite understood. And Pedro somehow knew that I would enjoy some dope…well, I’ve written about that several times. “Paul, I knew you was a loco.”

As for Pedro, I wonder if he is still around. Dope had figured prominently in his life. He was in the import/export business, on the slightly illegal side. His partner had stabbed him in the neck, that is, the cervical spinal cord, moving their cargo over the border from Mexico to California. And Pedro was determined to kill him. Which he observed rather lightly, smiling through the haze of cannabis smoke and beneath the petrochemical haze that was Los Angeles autumn, 1968. And I hope he’s around. Maybe even reading this. And it is something to note that I am somehow here writing it.