Way 2 Age

My wife slept next to the bedroom window that looks out on the garden where I had left our Shasta daisies in a plastic pot. I dug up a part of the front yard where the new steps are going to be built. My wife had planted the daisies in a little garden space I reclaimed from the forest, but now they were in the way of the new stairs and had to be dug up and transplanted. The shovel cut into the roots so the flowers wilted outside of the window where she slept.

I sat on the bed watching her and waited for her to take the next breath. Her body was outlined under the blanket and she was still. Was she breathing at all, I wondered. What if she wasn't breathing? What if my wife never took the next breath? I would be left sitting in bed sipping my cold coffee next to her lifeless body and then what would happen to me? What would become of my life if she never took the next breath? What would happen to her daisies if they couldn't root in the pot I found for them? I waited and I can't say I waited with ease. Who would tend our garden? What would happen if she never took the next breath?

But she did. Her body moved under the blanket and I, too, took the next breath. "Hi, babe," she said in a voice that was still talking from her dreams.

"Hi, babe," she said from another world where time stands still and dream time is no time at all.

The veil is thin at these moments. The narrow edge between life and lifelessness is fine. Before we start to speak and between breaths there is a moment when life stands still and the blood stops its ceaseless exploration.

I watched her and she watched me from her pillow with her thick, waist-length hair still in a furious and silent scramble across her face. I wanted to touch her, just inches away from me, but I hesitated. I wanted to feel her warm flesh under my strong hands and it would soothe both of us, but I hesitated. If I brushed aside the moment with a word or a caress it would break the spell, and life would be taken for granted.

"You're up so early. You didn't get enough sleep," she said as she stretched to her full length under the blanket and clawed the hair away from her face.

"I'm going out to my office," I said.

"But you've been up for two hours. You worked so hard on the stairs yesterday and now you won't let yourself rest."

"I haven't been up that long. Its been less than an hour," I said. I had made the coffee and put on my glasses and shaved. I do my best work in the early mornings but I like to sip the coffee sitting next to her while she sleeps.

"Its alright," my wife said. "Go ahead."

I put on the clothes I had dropped on the bedroom floor the night before and walked barefoot through the backyard redwood forest to my office. Later in the day I will go to town and buy her an African violet for her desk window and a barrette for her hair.

My wife's birthday is on Sunday. We will have a birthday party on the deck. Our Shasta daisies outside the bedroom window will be there.

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We went to the hot springs this week but we didn't take our camper with its kitchen and bed and coffee grinder. Instead, we drove my little pickup truck with its tiny camper shell. No soft bed, no candle to set the mood for sipping wine with a baguette, no place to brush our teeth. It's just a truck that I use to haul trash and carry tools and lumber.

In years gone by, my life used to be so complete and perfect with everything in its proper place. The camper always had its own coffee grinder ready to go and its own bedding and pillows. It even came with its own library, that is if you count a dictionary and a couple of novels that were tossed aside a few decades ago. The camper had its own towels and a kettle for boiling water in the mornings for coffee, and that's how I lived my life when I was sure that the world was my oyster.

These days, having things perfect, and having a complete, pretty picture of life are becoming just more of the things that were lost with youth. Nothing is quite completed and perfection is out the window.

"Let's have something to eat," I said. "We have bagels and sliced turkey and we even have tomatoes and avocados."

"Are you going to bring all those fixings here?" my wife asked. We sat on the spacious, sunny deck at the resort where everything is hosed down clean in the mornings, and the people all around us chatted and glistened with oiled skin.

"I can get all the things we need into my backpack."

"Can you get everything? And then bring it all back? What about the yellow jackets around here?"

"I don't see any bees. But maybe they would find us when we open the food."

"We could go over to the car together and eat there," she said. It was about a ten minute walk to the truck.

"It's hot and dusty in that parking lot. Are we going to tailgate it right there?"

"Let's go look at the parking lot together," she said. My wife likes to do things together and maybe she doesn't care about dirty, unpaved parking lots like I do.

When we got to the scorching dirt lot with our dark gray truck baking alone in full sun, we decided we should move to a more shaded parking strip. That was easy if we just left our stuff strewn all over the car where it was and didn't put everything away. I drove while she walked.

The new parking place was much cooler under the shade of wide oaks but it was still just a dirt strip at the side of a road and other parked cars and it wasn't level. But we got out the beach chairs, and ice chest that we used for a table, and paper plates and a watermelon.

Nothing was quite perfect here. We used an old chunk of a 2x4 under the ice chest to try to make it level so the watermelon wouldn't roll off but it had to be cut on the tailgate anyway. And I never got comfortable in the beach chair because it was on a slope and the view from here was mostly of the undersides of cars and abandoned piles of brush and a few decrepit camping decks.

The watermelon was good, if not very satisfying because I had my tummy set for the bagel and turkey. We didn't even have a trash bag or bucket so I just dropped the watermelon rinds onto the dirty slope.

"Shall we go back to the deck?" I asked after we finished off the melon. We had been chatting about the decaying forest at the side of the parking strip. There was a dead pine tree and a few lines of rocks that tried to outline a path through the trees and a small woodpecker hopping up and down the trunks like a mechanical toy.

"No, I don't want to go back yet," my wife said. "Its quiet and private and shady here and we can watch the birds."

And she was right about that, even though I was still falling out of my chair on the sloping dirt and the watermelon rind was dirty on the ground and there was no place to wash the sticky juice off my hands. The slippery knife and the drenched paper plate were threatening to slide off the precariously balanced ice chest and life on the paved street passed us by as we sat unnoticed on the ground behind our dusty pickup.

But the air was still and shady and the birds called and we were close - and it was perfect.

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I got a new cell phone this week. It was kind of a swap for the phone I've been using which worked fine for me but I could pass it on to someone who cares about all its features and in its place I got a $20 brand new phone that just talks and not much more. It doesn't have a camera or play music or surf the web or drive the car while I'm doing other things.

And no Bluetooth or movies or games or anything else I don't care about but it does have a built-in Senior Moment Button. It's actually two buttons ― the turn-up-the-volume button is right next to the hang-up button and all the buttons are really tiny. People over a certain age, perhaps six, have trouble hearing on these tiny phones so when I try to turn up the volume I end up hanging up on the call.

Needless to say, when I call back and give this explanation, my friends are all very gracious and say some 'poor old guy' kind of thing under their breath knowing I'm just trying to cover up for my creeping senility. It even gets worse than that if I say that I'm really happy to have a phone that doesn't promise to make me young and sexy and suave and sophisticated and give me an IV of Viagra by remote control.

"What's wrong with Roger?" they think to themselves. "He wants a phone he can just talk on? He used to be so sharp and hip. His wife must be appalled," and she is but she's used to me hanging up on her.

"Would you please pay attention to what we're doing," she said in exasperation and she was right. I got the message and actually it was a good exercise in not drifting off just because I didn't want to put the effort into paying attention. We were walking through a small community garden next to a small strip mall in a remote town we visit about once every 15 years. I was looking at the utility poles and the transformers on them, not at the flowers I was inadvertently trampling.

I like the way utility poles stand like the last of the guard in vacant yards. Maybe there were canneries in this town on the California North Coast but now there are just empty lots with brilliant spring grass and utility poles.

But, okay, I'll pay attention to the garden. I'm really no good at identifying plants and species so I said, "Is that a jade plant?" as I looked at something that was a succulent and had round leaves but really wasn't a jade plant. She stepped over me and the railroad tie I was sitting on to inspect the plant while I basked in the afternoon sun and scanned the horizon for utility poles.

My new phone rang but I didn't answer it because I didn't recognize the number that showed up on the screen and that's because I haven't entered all the numbers on the new phone that I got off the old phone on a spread sheet. The spread sheet is clever but I don't carry it around with me so I don't answer the phone and I don't call anyone either, not to mention the Senior Moment Button.

Then I lost my attention on the garden and sauntered across the parking lot into the yard with the utility pole. "Weren't you sitting in the garden?" my wife asks me on the cellphone. When the phone rang this time, her name showed up on the screen.

"I got bored and wandered over here to the power pole," I said. "Look over your right shoulder."

Fortunately, when I first got the phone I had my wits about me and put her number in immediately. But sadly, I didn't know her number. It used to be that the two of us just had a phone number. I don't know how I got sideswiped by that one but now my spouse has a different phone number and I have to look it up on a spreadsheet. It's overwhelming to think that a computer or two is needed for me to call the person I sleep next to.

I don't think I can wrap my brain cells around that one. It's just too much for me to take in. I'd rather sit next to my wife in a small garden at the side of a parking lot and watch the sea and the sun.

And drift.

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I have the "if only's" this morning. If only I had the quiet to listen to what's inside instead of rehashing my accomplishments and what I hope to get done today or soon. If only I had the guts to face what I should do today and not tomorrow. Seize the day, as they say. Make the best of every moment. No whining. People want to know about upbeat things.

Even Twitter is upbeat if nothing else. Can you imagine what social networking would look like if people were honest? The downtrodden and depressed and suffering in general are all relegated to the print media. That's where gloom and doom play out the best. The net, on the other hand, is for happy, happy, happy people.

Cellphones work that way. If someone is going to call me to say that his life is miserable and I hear that voice on something that looks like a glitzy energy bar wrapper, it's just not going to come off as serious enough for me to really get into the wallowing. But in the old days, when phones had more gravity, mostly because they were black and heavy and had thick wires, a conversation with someone who was wallowing in misery was much more important and serious.

So from that serious black phone that even had feet, to Twitter on a cellphone between red traffic lights, it's just impossible to get morose or believe anyone that says that they are.

"How's your day going Jon," I ask feeling relaxed because I know I'm stopped in a permanent traffic jam and don't have to worry about driving.

"Well, my reflux is acting up again, Rog," he says. "Now that I've waited for seven years for heirloom tomatoes grown right here in Berkeley, I get hit with my stomach," he says, launching into a fillibuster about how terrible he feels and how hopeless small town politics are. But how can I feel empathy for his pain and wailing while I'm looking around checking out a woman putting on her makeup in a Lexus and a guy be-bopping to the radio in a pickup.

"Oh, I feel your pain, Jon," I say, wondering if inching forward two feet counts as driving while phoning. "Have you tried looking up your condition on the web," I ask. Of course that's just a rhetorical question - about the same as asking how the weather is. Isn't everyone looking up everything on the web all the time anyway?

"Yeah, Rog, I did that. No one knows what I have. You just can't find it on the web because I'm so special."

No. Wait a minute. He didn't say that. He said that no one cares about what he has, and it's not that we are completely lacking compassion. It's because dread diseases aren't what we want to talk about on the interactive web. We want things to be fresh and sparkling and attractive and young and quippy. Acid reflux just doesn't cut it.

I, for one, am happy about that, too. I've got this nasty habit of reading The Wall Street Journal occasionally and that paper is filled with all the gloom and doom of the world. Especially these days, sometimes I have to just put down the paper and not get any more depressed than necessary. I even think that paper intentionally writes alarmist headlines, knowing that I'm a sucker every time for real life horror. The Pit and the Pendulum could be played in that paper as if it was news, not fiction. In fact, that's exactly what Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds broadcast was.

So I look to the papers and occasionally KPFA to get my fill of desperation. I sure don't want to see that on my cellphone, too. Meanwhile, Jon drones on about his misery at missing out on the heirloom tomatoes because of his stomach and the traffic is, as I say, permanently stopped. Hmm. I wonder if it's possible to put Jon on speaker phone and then start pecking out something to someone on the same phone, but what would I say? That Jon is miserable and I should take it seriously? No. That won't do it for the always up, always cheerful web.

I look around again, now that I've got my buttons set on the phone and Jon doesn't really seem to care that I'm not participating in his diatribe. We've been 'talking' on the phone this way for about 30 years anyway. But what to Tweet about?

The woman with the makeup is done. She doesn't see me, has checked her own phone and looks at herself in the rear view mirror. She blots her lipstick and then smears the fresh rouge left on the tissue onto the tops of her breasts as if to give a hint of the bulging heirlooms.

OMG! I'm telling.

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Changes keep happening in my life. First there was the voltmeter. Now there's the deck.

But let me explain. I was passionately interested in electronics when I was about six. My dad encouraged me with wires and switches and books and even a tutor. He was a manager at one of the big defense contractors back then and brought home everything including an engineer. So with that background at an early age, the voltmeter he brought home for me became my touch stone to knowing about what was going through the wires.

And, eventually, that voltmeter became one of those things like a power animal in Shamanism or a favorite phrase in writing. I couldn't do without it even though sometimes years would go by without me even seeing it. Just to know that it was there, somewhere buried in my mother's garage or hidden in a box in a storage room across town was reassuring to me. It was not only a way of knowing what is hidden in wires, it became a symbol for what is hidden in my life.

These days, my decrepit deck has finally caught my attention and I don't need a voltmeter to know that it needs some restoring, or remodeling, or flat out replacing.

What's worse is that it isn't even my choice whether it gets repaired or remodeled. It's up to the local building code officials. But there is a kind of sadistic pleasure in knowing that people far and wide might read this story and some of them may just be building officials. I imagine them wondering if I live in their town and if they'll get a chance to pounce on me.

But trifling offices aside, my real question is if I should just repair the deck as it is, or maybe move it a bit this way or that so it actually fits in the right place next to the living room. It will either end up being a nice piece of carpentry with a new purpose and a new position in life, or some new wood in a really stupid place with the rail abruptly ending a couple of inches away from the front window like it does now.

It's hard to describe what that looks like or how it happened in the first place but if you saw it and you weren't the person swinging the hammer and doing the work, you wouldn't have the slightest doubt about just where the new deck is going and it certainly is not where it is right now.

Our living room is the sweet spot of the house and the deck right outside of the windows is an ugly and old thing with rotting wood and sagging boards. From the living room, it's something like a grand view of a dead carcass. Even the turkey vultures don't want it. If that wasn't bad enough, just beyond the reviled rail is a wide open view of a pretty little group of redwood circles of substantial trees.

"We could have a nice little wrought iron round table with two stools and a vase of flowers," my wife said, imagining the new deck. I could just see the deck and it's new rails (and the new French doors in the living room) sparkling in her eyes.

And I'll have to admit that I've been quietly planning a modest extension to the existing deck. The problem is that one corner will have to be clipped off at a diagonal. "It would look like a piece of a crow's nest," I said.

"What would the deck floor look like in that corner," she asked, but she already knew the answer. "Could it be laid on a diagonal to match the rail?" She was excited, painting the scene with her hands. "Then the little table and stools would fit perfectly against the rail and have it's own little floor space."

I know she likes small spaces that have their own meanings. The flowers on the table would always be fresh and this corner doesn't get the blasting noontime sun. Now even I can imagine that scene with her sitting at the table with glasses of lemonade and wearing a wide brimmed hat. But the whole scene is new and I have to stop to consider all the ramifications.

I have to stop to think about the stresses and forces in the new under-structures of the deck and then I have to think about all the carpentry details down to exactly how many of what size nails to use. I have to think about all the hidden stuff and what it will do through the years and decades to come.

I know about how I plan these things. It usually ends up with several months or years of chin pulling and half completed, mumbled sentences, and reaching back into my old experiences. And I'm not really a carpenter.

I know myself and then after all that deliberation, I'll end up building the new deck and the crows nest in about three days. But until that happens, I can somehow feel that old voltmeter my father got for me when I was six. I can feel a need between my shoulders and at the back of my head to want to know something that I can't quite put my fingers on, just like wanting to know what is going on inside the wires I was playing with.

I can't go on with the deck project without that knowing and without my old voltmeter that was given away when my mother's garage was finally cleaned out.

"Didn't you find a new voltmeter that you really like?" my wife asked.

"Yes and they were $4.00 so I bought two of them," I admitted to what I think is just buying toys to try to fill the hole in my soul that was left when I wasn't a kid playing with wires anymore. "And they are so much better than my original voltmeter, too," I said. "But they're not satisfying," I added.

Voltmeters are not satisfying anymore because I no longer wonder about what is happening in wires. My life has moved on and my wondering about what can't be seen and and can't be understood has moved on with age. There is no more satisfaction in knowing about voltage anymore than there is in knowing about 2x4's and nails. As time moves past, the intriguing satisfaction is in the not knowing, in the unknowable, and in the very fact of life, not just my life.

As my wife watches me, I catch a deep, quiet look into her sparkling blue eyes. It's as if it is a glimpse into a dark pool and the very surface of her eyes both reflect the light and recess deeply into the past, into the history of our lives together and into the lives of all lovers.

In that moment I see that if my choice is to sit next to her at that adorable round table on the crows nest corner or to spend another few decades with a stupid close-up view of a deck rail, my choice is as obvious today as it was the day we married.

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