It is a panicky moment in the greenhouse when I realize that, yes, the left rear wheel has snagged the hose. To unpack this, my wheelchair’s rear caster has somehow looped itself around the expandable garden hose that sustains my baby lettuce, tomato seedlings and so on. And if this does not seem like an explanation, and the essence is somehow still packed inside the verbiage, what can one do? This is my life. Tiny perils abound. And I believe that a greenhouse should not be perilous. After all, this is a place of light endeavor. Recreation mostly. And in my case, since I routinely refer to the place as “the conservatory,” the scene of glassy, sun-lit reflection. I repair to this spot often. For the tiny transparent building has everything going for it. First, there is the sun. In California, one might imagine that there is plenty of the latter. But not this year. And for the chronically melancholy, whatever sun there is, well, it’s never enough.

So, it is a further insult to get wrapped up in a garden hose. I mean, I had gone down there (yes, down our San Francisco hill to the garden) for a brief respite. And a respite from what? My annoying internal battle with age. And loss. Which is to say, the next level of worsening of my spinal cord injury. Actually, I do not give the hose wrapping its due. When this occurred yesterday, Jane happened to be home. I had my phone. She had hers, and it was turned on. So nothing happened. She wandered out of the house, down the redwood ramp to her husband stranded in the garden. And the whole thing was trivial. 

No. Not really. Because it is both directly indicative and, somehow symbolic, of my age and increasing immobility, this business with the hose. I’m not sure how I could have extricated myself, in the worst instance. Remember, the offending hose is behind me, where I really can’t see it, let alone reach it. And all this is heightened at the moment, due to my current state of trip recovery. And let me state categorically that this is a first-world problem, this thing with the jetlag, and that whatever world it comes from, the thing is entirely of my own doing.

Let’s go back a month or two. Despite the rain, the gloomy clouds, the strange global warming excesses of weather that comprise this winter in California, there are moments when the sun appears, the overcast lifts, and so does a very heavy aircraft out San Francisco International Airport. I keep looking from our upper deck toward the ocean, toward a spot where the occasional plane rises behind distant hills. So, anyway, a couple of months ago, I kept looking westward to catch a glimpse of United Airlines flight #1 as it rose over the Pacific. 

There must be a reason for this particular use of airline nomenclature. I suspect that it is the airline’s longest route. It certainly is the longest I have ever been on. And I just wanted to see it, see the aircraft laden with enough fuel to fly for almost 18 hours nonstop to Singapore. Where is Singapore? Why is Singapore? I mean, really, can’t the place just stay where it is in the realm of history, romance and distance? No. It’s a real enough place. It has an airport. It’s got a lot of things. And Jane and I for reasons that are not very clear even to this day, decided to go there.

No, there is more, we actually decided to fly there, get on the Queen Mary 2 and spend the next month moving in and out of various southeast Asian countries. The idea was to see these places (I had never been to Asia) and minimize the effort involved. The ship would function like a floating mobile home. No packing bags after a few days, to move from here to there. No going to airports to journey from this place to that place or, less fraught, to go to and from train stations. We would unpack our bags once. Whatever happened, happened. In concept, it sounded clear and pretty damn simple.

Of course, nothing with a 76-year-old partial quadriplegic aging in his wheelchair, is exactly simple. I was prepared for all sorts of contingencies. Anything could go wrong, it seemed. And whatever went wrong, I was going to be ready. For example, let’s say that United Airlines badly mangled my wheelchair. And I want you to know that my wheelchair has been mangled by some of the world’s great airlines. And the problem with getting mangled that far from home, well, it makes me swoon to even consider the possibility. But I had a simple remedy. Have a spare wheelchair waiting in California. If the airline screwed up the wheelchair I flew with, I would demand that they quickly transport my backup chair to Singapore from San Francisco. Demand. An interesting word when one considers what it is like to be that far from home. But there you have it. I was ready for something to go wrong, I thought I was. But that’s the thing about travel. No one knows what’s going to go wrong.

And when things go wrong, they sometimes go right. That’s the other thing about travel. In fact, that may be the best thing. Because travel is really just a metaphor for, well, I don’t know, and maybe it isn’t a metaphor. Maybe it just encapsulates life in a certain way. Because there were things that went very wrong on this trip, that I will never forget. Because they were somehow right. And there were things that seem inexcusable. But these I didn’t have to face alone. Which was another lesson.

And what were they? Stay tuned. Watch these pages. Keep watching, because jetlag keeps getting the better of me, and I dole out verbiage with a teaspoon, then with tweezers, an eyedropper and so on. But I’ll be back and soon over the 19-hour time difference between San Francisco and Sydney, Australia. And if not, check the obituaries.