It is the spirit behind the action that counts, I was thinking as Jane navigated Saturday night Bay Bridge traffic into San Francisco.  For we have had quite a marvelous, yet strange, afternoon at the Berkeley Repertory.  The Knee-High Theatre is visiting from Truro, Cornwall, with a production of a Grimm fairy tale, The Wild Bride.  They take on anything, these people.  And their secret, if there is one, is that they are operating on a different level.  This is my only conclusion.  Read more [...]

The wheelchair guys, you will remember them, have just repaired my Swedish model, and not only that, dramatically amped up the speed.  Pretty good, right?  Perhaps not, upon reflection, and reflection is what it is all about.  Where, after all, am I hurtling at such a rate?  Lunch?  Peet's?  Trader Joe's?  Please.  None of these locations demands the wheelchair equivalent of a TGV.  Though if there is such a thing, my Swedish model would be well on the Read more [...]

One guy was a plumber and the other a package delivery person, and damned if they weren't both sitting there, each in his van, each only about one street away from the other.  Okay, separated by one hour.  There is that.  But if one is looking for conspiracies, the sense of being watched, surveilled actually, trust me, there is abundant evidence.  Yes, yes, it was lunch hour, and it was cold, and it is not summer time and the livin' is not easy.  Such are conditions in this, Read more [...]

One is out there, on the primal edge, legs pounding away on the 8:30 morning exercycle to nowhere.  The bicycle may be stationary, but the blood supply isn't.  In the California December exertion is all that makes this possible for your typical quadriplegic...actually a quadriparetic, the distinction all the more critical when the afflicted person is working an exercise machine with his legs.  Yes, it is the blood flow that counteracts the cold flow, vis-à-vis night temperatures in Read more [...]

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

The 8:39 from Menlo Park pulls into the San Francisco Caltrain station amid a flurry of apologies from the conductor for the morning train's ten-minute tardiness.  I have barely noticed, delighting more in the sense of flying along, more or less nonstop up the Peninsula.  Leaving Burlingame speechless and San Carlos stunned as the northbound rush-hour passengers flash by on the way to more important places.  At San Francisco my personal bladder conditions are so favorable that I head Read more [...]