We were driving home in the strangest of situations, an actual rainstorm with clouds lowered over the bay, and we got to the Golden Gate Bridge, and somehow the world seemed right. It had been wrong. My personal world has shrunk enormously. The very absence of a wheelchair that can perform more maneuvers than a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, well that was a big thing. Oh for almost 4 days I had not been able to tilt, rise, extend, or lower, various body parts. And my response was startlingly grim. It will go on forever, I half believed. Just look at the art deco bridge, the rain beading and rolling and wiping along the windshield glass.
And it is a wonderful thing that at this stage of life the psycho-spiritual basics have been laid bare. I am dealing with trauma, like many people, and my distortions are constant and predictable. Like fearing that life’s horrors, major and minor, will go on forever. But aside from that, there was an essential truth. I am increasingly reliant upon mechanical means to get my body into a reasonably comfortable state. And when this isn’t possible, why not kick and scream? Metaphorically, of course.
Want to get your Swedish wheelchair repaired? Head for Industrial Road, Santa Rosa. Where else? The name of the street says it all. A slightly savage land of warehouses, fitness gyms, plumbers, shippers, all the outposts of the real work of the northern California suburban world. Thing is, by the time I got to the repair place, my bandwidth for anything was extremely narrow. Too many aches and too many pains. One of the former materialized in the guise of a wheelchair repair man. No, he couldn’t loan me a chair while mine was being text. You did it last time I was here, I told him. He flounced off with great annoyance and returned moments later with a loaner. Fortunately, there is a coffee roaster down the street. The front of the operation includes a cappuccino bar and sandwich joint. We rolled there, heading down an eroding sidewalk where no one has walked for at least 35 years, Enormous trucks dominating the traffic in this neck of Sonoma County.
An old friend, someone I have known from high school, happens to live in Santa Rosa. Danni, onetime partner of Tom, another legendary friend from the same era. Anyway, she joined us for lunch and coffee. Which brightened my mood considerably. Caffeine and conviviality. I should patent the name just in case I ever want to open my own espresso joint.
Even the rain was wonderful that day. In drought-stricken California, the appearance of rain feels like a port in a storm. An oasis in the desert. A parachute in a plane crash. And so on. Maybe it wasn’t all going to end. At least not immediately. And once I got home, I immediately repaired to the conservatory. That is to say, the greenhouse. Where I used the restored electronics to tilt my wheelchair back down, thereby stretching my spine with a resounding pop. Things were possible. Still. And there I was surrounded by potato plants, parsley, and, yes, sage, rosemary, thyme. The latter is on my side, yes it is.