On a fine evening in May, Mother’s Day in fact, I sat on my porch reading a novel. The slight cool breeze was adorned with bird song. New green leaves made the trees lustrous in the rays of the setting sun. My dog sat at the bottom of the concrete stoop, gazing out across the still houses and empty sidewalks.
A friend rounded the corner on his bicycle and pulled up on the lawn in front of the porch. The man teaches history at the Community College. His bicycle is notable because of its very high, u-shaped handle bars.
My friend mentioned that his knee was still sore from joint replacement surgery and that he lacked normal range of motion. Nonetheless, he was able to pedal his bike. He said that if he had known the outcome of the surgery – it was mildly disappointing to him -- he might have put off the procedure for another couple years. The knee felt stiff and swollen to him, as if a balloon were inflated in the joint – this is how he described the situation. A couple years earlier, he had blockage in the arteries of his heart and required surgery for that condition.
“When I got to be 57,” he said, “my body just collapsed.”
Nonetheless, he seems vigorous to me, and, when I see him, he is riding his bicycle.
He was planning a road-trip West beginning at the end of the Spring term, classes that he has been teaching remotely by ZOOM due to the Covid virus. He told me his itinerary which seemed wonderful – first San Francisco, then, Napa Valley and return via Death Valley and the great National Parks in southern Utah.
My dog began to bark. Some people were passing on the sidewalk.
I saw a man dressed all in white walking a full fifteen paces ahead of a woman. The woman was shuffling along very slowly, pushing the steel cage of a walker ahead of her. I recognized the woman as a neighbor from the other side of the block. She is about 53 and suffers from ALS. The disease has been slowly murdering her for about a year. This woman, Sara, writes a column about her battle with ALS that is published in the local newspaper every couple weeks. Her essays are invariably upbeat and optimistic. My wife sends links to these essays to my mother. We are still grieving the death of my brother from this same disease. My mother has told my wife that she thinks the columns are valuable but that she cries every time she reads them: My brother Christopher was a pessimist and felt that he had been cheated by the disease and he succumbed to isolation and depression. “He lived as if he were dying from the disease,” my mother said. “Sara writes as if she were living with the disease.”
I came down from the porch to talk to Sara who teetered, a little unsteadily against the steel rail of her walker. Many years ago, when I taught Business Law at the college, Sara was one of my students – I think this was before she married the man, now standing in his white shirt and white slacks, ahead of her on the sidewalk. (Her husband is retired but was formerly the Director of Social Services for the County.) Sara’s father was a local haberdasher who used to stroll about the neighborhood wearing a natty, burgundy-colored beret. Her brother, who is gay, runs a coffee house downtown. When my children were little, they played with Sara’s kids. She was a doting and cautious mother. Once, when my son was playing with her little boy, she called me to come and escort my child home. I was a little irritated and said that she could just send my son, who was, then, about seven, home on his own – it’s just the distance of a long block with a corner but no streets to cross (in fact, the same block that she was now laboriously circumnavigating). “I’m just not comfortable with that,” she told me firmly as I stood on her front step. There is no point in arguing with young mothers. Her old two story house is for sale. She can’t climb the steps either to the basement or the bedrooms upstairs any longer,
I congratulated Sara on her newspaper column. I told her that I had encouraged myy brother to join a support group with other ALS patients but that he had refused. Sara said that my brother had probably made the right decision. “The support group is very negative,” she said. “I tried to quit myself a couple months ago, but the facilitator begged me to stay so that I could help the others. And, so, I still attend.”
She told me that she was doing everything in her power to extend her life. “I’ve just had a stem cell transplant. My own stem cells,” she said. Sara said that her grown children were established in the world and had their own homes.
Sara was very thin. She didn’t look exactly emaciated, but, instead, girlish, as if she were reverting to her face and figure when I taught her contracts and negotiable instruments when she was 20. Sara’s eyes were unnatural bright and glaring. I noticed that there were some strands of grey in her hair and that her front teeth were damaged – I wondered if she had fallen and injured herself.
Sara said that she and her husband were moving to a rambler all on one floor and told me the address.
Another neighbor, Colette C–, pulled up to curb-side in her big car. Colette is a widow. Her husband, a well-known local businessman and civic booster, died about five years ago. He was a heavy-set fellow who mowed his front lawn wearing scanty and tight-fitting bathing trunks with pink beach sandals on his feet. Colette said that she would be happy to go for a walk with Sara and said that if she ever needed company for one of strolls, she should call her. Then, she drove off. I introduced my friend who was standing under the tree next to his bicycle. Sara knew that the college teachers sometimes frequented the Coffee House on Main. She said that she was the sister of the proprietor of that place.
I told Sara that I admired her fortitude and courage. I mentioned that my wife sent her columns to my mother.
Twilight wrapped itself around the trees on the boulevard. Down the street, a lamp flickered on.
Sara said goodbye and continued her slow trek, step by step, down the block. Her husband walked ahead of her, a white apparition on the pale concrete path. They looked like some version of Orpheus and Eurydice in the gathering gloom pacing the tedious and winding path that leads up from Hades.
My friend on the bicycle said: “You know, I’ve never had any hardship. Everything’s just been given to me.”
I said: “This is true for me also.”
“It’s just all been given to me,” my friend said, shaking his head.
Later that night, I dreamed that I was auditing a small class at the College. A dozen students were gatherer in nondescript room. Each of them had created some kind of art: either a sonnet or a short musical composition or a water-color or glazed clay vessel. One of the students was my daughter, Melissa. (She has had chemical dependency problems and so I was glad to see that she was rehabilitated to the extent of participating in the class.) The teacher was an older woman. She said that, after a bathroom break, we would listen to the students as they each presented the work of art that they had made.
“But we need time to tinkle,” the teacher said. So, we went into the corridor outside the class-room and a line formed by the door to the toilet.
I knew the building well. It was as familiar to me as my own body. We were on the upper levels of a great auditorium building, an ornate structure on a high plinth with concrete columns supporting a mighty portico. The class rooms were in the attic of the auditorium building. There was a toilet on the floor below and, so, not wanting to wait in line to use the bathroom, I hustled to the stairwell.
On the floor below, some kind of fete was underway. Perhaps, it had something to do with the premiere of a movie. Happy people in bright clothing were gathered around the ornate marble stairs leading down from above. They were holding flutes of champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres. I ran into a man that I knew. I couldn’t recall his name but knew that he was jolly and faintly disreputable. He said that the toilet on the level where the party was underway was also crowded but that there was another facility a little lower in the building. We went in that direction.
On the level of the building beneath the festive gathering, my friend led me to a very large salon with high ceilings and great mirrors in gilded frames on the walls. Women were resting on overstuffed Victorian sofas and love-seats. “But this isn’t right,” I said. “This is the women’s lounge outside the ladies’ room.” “It’s okay,” he said. “No one will care.”
But I felt out of place and so we went down another flight of steps. By this time, I had been away from the classroom in the attic of the building for a half hour and I wondered if the teacher had brought the students back together to discuss the objets d’art that they had made. “I have to get back,” I said.
But, now, none of the staircases led upwards. Instead, every stairwell plunged down deeper and lower in the huge building. I felt the weight of many levels above me, pressing down as if on my shoulders. My friend glared at me and, then, laughed in a hideous way. We found an elevator. My friend said that there was no way to go up without first descending to the very bottom of the building.
We took the elevator to the lowest level. A short corridor led to a threshold that opened to the outside. We were standing beneath the mighty portico with its huge fluted columns and the marble steps leading up to immense entrance doors that seemed to me to be locked. Huge concrete piers like the paws of a sphinx thrust out along the side of the steps. Where I stood, at the base of the pedestal on which the auditorium soared upward, the edges of the building were curved, the wall not supported at a right angle to the paving stones, but, instead, gracefully arching into a hollow space at the bottom of the immense structure. I noticed that each of the bricks underfoot and comprising the curve from vertical to level were marked with a name and two dates, numbers that identified years and represented, I thought, the life-spans of the persons memorialized on the sloping wall and level moat around the building. It was gloomy and the trees were dark green shadows hanging over the pavement.
Now, there was no way to reach the classroom hidden in the attic of great auditorium building. The class was underway. My daughter was no doubt disappointed by my absence. She had created something very beautiful but her father was not present to admire it.
My friend handed me a manila folder. “This is your Red Folio Ticket,” he said. “It will open all doors for you.”
We feel that dreams are visions, even, perhaps prophecies. In fact, I suppose that they are mostly the product of intestinal gas or pressure on the bladder. I woke suffused in a sense of sorrow and disappointment.
After going to the toilet, I went back to bed. The white glimmer of dawn lightened the window a little. I dreamed some more, this time lucidly – in other words, I knew that I was dreaming and, even, presumed that I could control the mise-en-scene. Hollywood Boulevard ran along the base of the big auditorium building. I clutched the Red Folio Ticket to my chest. I thought that if I encountered my malicious friend, I would ask him why he had misled me. I would also demand that he explain the meaning of the Red Folio Ticket.
I found an narrow escalator leading up into the auditorium lobby. But my guide had now vanished and entrances to the stairwells were all locked. The Red Folio Ticket was written in a foreign language that I couldn’t read.
No comments:
Post a Comment