My wheelchair is rolling me up Center Street, elevator portal to the downtown Berkeley BART station on this, a late Friday afternoon. And it is not summertime and the livin’ isn’t easy. It is March, often described poetically as a blustery month. And for once the lyrical is scientifically accurate. The winds are blowing. It is cold. 

I have had lunch with my cousin Gregg, a quick roll through Trader Joe’s. And now I am homeward bound. The unease I have felt ever since emerging from BART into the cold light of day somehow intensifies now. Often this feeling is with me. The essential fragility of my life situation, everything, which could be described as a range from the morning trip from bed to bathroom or this afternoon’s trip from home to the improbably named Berkeley Social Club (a Korean restaurant) depends on the electronic/mechanical integrity of this wheelchair. I hang, or my independence hangs, by this electromechanical thread. Never mind the neuromuscular thread, ever fraying.

And, yes, there is more than a small sense of relief when I make it onto the platform and see that my train to San Francisco is not only arriving in two minutes, but bringing with it the relative quiet of new cars. The finest in the BART subway system fleet. I am glad to be out of Berkeley. Even gladder to be quietly reading literary news in relative mechanical quiet. 

But the real story is, well you know, the real story. I was shot in Berkeley. There is no escaping that. And my wheelchair does break down. The prospect of being immobile on a Berkeley street is particularly unattractive. But when I probe the reality, it does seem survivable. Jane is home. I have a phone. She would drive across the Bay, pick up me and the wheelchair. And the rest would only be inconvenient.

And then there is the even realer story. That dread and menace are never far from my consciousness. Life experience reverberating as it does. And there’s no running from this emotional memory, but there is time. And there is that other thing, experience. I have enjoyed lunch with my cousin. He is a consultant to the California Public Utilities Commission and keeps close tabs on the vagaries of energy regulation. Solar panels being the current focus of regulatory attack. But Gregg helps me cool out. It’s not so simple, he explains, as I complement the waiter on my Korean brussels sprout hash.

My trip around downtown Berkeley encompasses only a few blocks. But I recognize very little. Oh, the buildings are there. Like the UC Theater, now some sort of cinema nonprofit. But COVID-19 has taken its toll. Restaurants are shuttered all over. UC Berkeley is open for business, of course, but not without particular restrictions. The natives are restless. And this time it’s not the campus natives, but the off-campus homeowners. They have successfully sued the campus and blocked admission of, depending on varying news reports, 3000 or 5000 students in the autumn term. The good people of Berkeley say there is not enough housing. The good people of Berkeley are right. But they are wrong to not admit new students to the campus. Find a solution. Make it work. We need all the education we can get.

At Trader Joe’s, my search for Chia seeds proves futile. A young woman, striking and energetic, goes out of her way to help me. I go out of my way not to stare at her too much. And, no, the seeds, an integral part of one of Jane’s best bread baking exercises, are not to be had. How is my day, the young woman asks. Much more wonderful since I met her, though I manage to utter something more generically positive. Hers? Oh, she got a lot of homework done and talked to an old friend from first grade. I ask if she is a Berkeley student. No, she is studying something online. And doing the mental math, having not seen her first-grade friend in 25 years, she is approximately 30. A bit long in the tooth for Berkeley, even graduate school. I grow old.