"Nor does my burgeoning delight in the least of the world's gifts confine itself to comfort and aesthetic pleasure. I embrace the strange and even the downright ugly. A couple of weeks ago, on a trip to Brooklyn, I had an encounter with a walrus in the New York Aquarium. As I sat close to the underwater viewing window, a walrus swam up to the glass, head down, gazing at me with large dark eyes while rumbles and squeaks issued from beneath a dense moustache. Rapt, I spent several minutes listening and replying; when I moved to another window, the walrus followed me and continued our conversation. This was empty of content, at least for me, but seemed to represent contact for us both. I have never felt happier.

"A couple of days later, George and I meandered from our not-many-starred hotel down to the river, through a particularly unlovely area of largely derelict warehouses, my wheelchair jouncing over broken sidewalks and potholed streets. 'Oh, George,' I said in the tremorous voice such rough terrain elicits, 'is there anything I don't find interesting?' No. In my immobility, I have become absorbed by my surroundings, so that I hardly know anymore where I leave off and they begin. I am perhaps a walrus. The older I grow, the closer to shedding my human form and consciousness for some unknown otherwise, the more I cherish the moments left to me and the sadder and more mystified I feel that the world's wonders will continue to unfold without me.

"Since they will do so regardless of my willingness to let them go, the best I can do is ready myself for my leave-taking. A couple of years ago, visiting my daughter and her family when they lived on the Zuni reservation, where Eric practiced medicine, we took the children to a large playground, where at a distance I watched them play on the swings and slides. I have become the world's witness. As a large thunderstorm boiled up over the mesas and headed our way, it occurred to me that, sitting in the middle of an empty field, I could be struck by lightning. 'If I am,' I asked, 'will I die happy?' I needn't have asked, so quick and firm was my response. Since that epiphanic moment, watching the signs of my immortality romp and sway, preparing to leave them, I have tried to live in such a way that, if the question ripples through my mind, as it often does, I can always answer, 'Yes!'

"Several years ago, one of George's students fashioned for me a large lizard of black wrought iron, which looked splendid in the play of light against my creamy studio wall. 'It will be stolen,' my daughter declared, knowing that the university area where we then lived attracted thieves, and she was right. In my outrage, I wished I could put a curse on it so that it would poison the life of the thief and of whomever he sold it to for drug money. But I had loved the lizard that graced my wall. How could I imagine its bearing evil to anyone? So I put a blessing on it instead, that wherever it fetched up, it bestow on its new owner as much pleasure as it had brought me. In its place, a muralist painted an enormous, vibrant image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, who remained there until the many-tentacled University of Arizona bought the aging little structure and tore it down.

"Bless what you have, she taught me. Bless what has gone. Bless whatever may come next."