I am rolling through the Caltrain station at midday, the place surprisingly busy for 12 noon, which should be good news, but isn't, such is my preoccupation. Perhaps it is because I am in a rail terminal that something drifts back to me. Over brunch with my friend Phila. The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, has been reporting on the California Zephyr, the transcontinental train operated by Amtrak. The thing is falling apart, apparently. Dirty, old, broken. And now, weaving my wheelchair in between Read more [...]

What have I been going through? This bounces about my mind, particularly as my body bounces about the streets of Menlo Park, which it does a lot these days, sitting still being on my avoidance list. Sad, in a word. With no apparent cause. Which makes me think that something old is creeping to life. But in the course of the day, and it is a day full of fine things, most notably tinged with publication...my book...let us call it that...and its promotion. And even that this has come late in life, no Read more [...]

Today's question: how did people travel before they could travel? When the journey from Lark Rise to Candleford...in the historical memoir of rural Oxfordshire...seemed epic, that is to say, seven or eight miles, how was life? I think that people need to travel, at least some people. But that this really means advancing. Which to an American suggests progress and betterment, but I really mean movement. The latter being one of the scientific definitions of a life form. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta Read more [...]

I have had this idea, had it for quite a while, and now as I emerge from the Caltrain station in San Francisco, there it is staring me in the face. It is the bicycle shop. Well, more than that, a parking-cum-repair operation. The place is more or less out of bounds for me. I am hardly a bicyclist. And the fact that I once was makes it all the more difficult. After all, in between my able-bodied youth and the present there was this interim phase of disabled tricycle riding. Which came to an end 10 Read more [...]