Wheels and Doors
I burst out of the stuffiness of the college library and nearly knocked the man out of his wheelchair. I could imagine my blotched and reddened face, as I stooped and crawled to retrieve his papers splattered about the sidewalk. Mortified that I may have hurt the guy in the wheel chair, I never looked at him, not once. I was unhappy, angry, and not in the mood for making nice. But lately, I seemed never to be in the mood. I was depressed and lonely.
He laughed and asked if he could help. I wondered: Is that supposed to be funny? I just shook my head keeping my eyes on the fanned papers. He said that I looked like I could use a beer or a cigarette.
Do these people drink? Do they smoke? ?
I just shook my head and continued my chore just wanting to get the hell out of there. Keeping my head down trying not to look at him, and dreading the moment I would have to, I fished around for the last paper, then deliberately and carefully stacked them with all the edges perfectly in line. Then I desperately searched for something to say.
I began to get up and he said, 'Oh gee. I kinda liked the view.' These people actually think of sex?
As I handed him his papers, I saw those eyes. Eventually, I would see into them. They are an odd sort of green, as though looking into a deep crevice where some exotic moss grows. They are intelligent eyes with smiley-crinkles at the corners. He's balding and silver-gray at 42 and on his third Master's Degree. I am forty years old, and have never exchanged conversation with a person in a wheelchair. I didn't want to 'bother them.' Now an old locked door would open. The door had been shut and forgotten since 1958.
Even though I was six years old in 1958, I remember my mother pulling on my hand dragging me away from a man in the strange chair with huge wheels. We were in a grocery store. He was in a wheel chair. All I had wanted to do was to ask him why he was sitting in that chair-thing. Mom had whispered in fierce tones with her teeth gritted to 'leave that poor unfortunate man alone and don’t stare and don’t bother him.' So, I did leave him alone and I didn’t bother him. But I never forgot the man in the chair with wheels. Did he have to stay there for ever and ever? I wondered how he could reach the stuff on the top shelf if he was sitting down. I just pushed the memory back somewhere in the closet of my mind kept for such things.
By the third grade, I had learned from somewhere what a wheelchair was, and the incident with the man in the grocery store was safely stored in my mental closet until the day I wanted to play at Cathy's house. My mother had said, 'No honey. Cathy's sister is in a wheel chair, and two noisy little girls in the house might bother her.' I remember wanting to ask why Cathy's sister had to be in the wheel chair. But I didn't. Just like I didn't ask if the man in the wheel chair in the grocery store had to stay in his chair. Both incidents were stored in the mental closet.
When I was in sixth grade, I lost my dessert privileges, and the comfort of sitting down for a week, because I had asked a man in a wheelchair what happened, and why he was in a wheelchair. Open the closet door, then shut it.
In Junior High School, I would never look toward the 'special education' person in the wheel chair who sat at the back of the room in Algebra. I knew he was there. But the times I mentioned him and how cute he was, my friends just rolled their eyes, and called him 'weird.' We all steered clear of the wheel-chair guy. Closet open, closet closed.
My Freshman year in high school was marked by the loss of a good friend, who became a paraplegic after hitting her head in a shallow dive at the local swimming pool. I was not allowed to bother her, and she and her family eventually moved away. I stored the memory of a friendship gone in a nearly full closet.
As the memories of the school years faded away, a certain closet door remained closed. What were those wheel-chair students to me? I went to the graduation dance. I never stopped to wonder what the other students did that night.
But now? I had to face the man in the wheel chair, and think of some quick something to say before I went back into the library. But it wasn't the library door that was opening, it was the old closet door. The man in the chair said to just 'call me Sam.' The man in the wheel chair had a name. Not, “the man in the grocery store' not 'Cathy's sister' and not the 'weird' kid in Algebra.Sam .
Later that day, over a third cup of coffee, he would tell me that he recognized the feelings I had. When he was young, people pretended he didn't exist. He has had Polio since he was a small child, and they call it Post Polio Syndrome now. He'll always be in need of the wheel chair, and eventually the nerves in his upper body will be destroyed until someday he may have no nerve tissue and muscle at all. He's happy, except when he has woman troubles. He looked pointedly at me, and winked.
I would eventually tell him about my mother and the man I saw in the wheel chair when I was six. Sam smiled and said that the man in the wheel chair probably bought and ate whatever he could reach. For Sam, he just hollers at the bag-boy that he's in need of a meal-on-wheels, and they need to lower the shelves or he'll tell all his dwarf buddies to shop down the road.
Sam quietly reminded me that in the old days to be different was very frightening to people. The world seemed more separated, isolated and individual even then. And people seemed to perform as one large group where everyone was doing what was the rule instead of the exception. To them, a person who was different instilled a fear of the unknown. This was true especially to those who went through the World Wars.
Sam didn't go to Vietnam or Korea. He was fighting his own war learning to be independent and learning how to fit into a world which had suddenly become more mobile. He said it wasn't much different than a game where one child sits in the middle of a ring of children while they turn in movement around him. Unlike the children's game, Sam never ran off to play with the other children. We were both reminded of a 'weird' guy sitting at the back of the room in Algebra when I told him about my weird guy memory. I told him about my school friends. My dearest new friend eyes would cry with me when I would finally cry over the loss of the close friend from childhood. No, the friend didn't die back there in high school. But what was lost was the chance to see that people in wheelchairs don't call it being “bothered;” they call it friendly, concerned, and interested: normal.
As a child I was never taught, that the way one talks to a person in a two-wheeled vehicle is no different than the way one talks to any person in the world: with respect, understanding, and caring kindness. I was conditioned to look away. Don't stare. I stare now. I stare to catch the attention of a person in a wheel chair so they can see in my smile and eyes that I understand that for them to wheel into a room has the same effect as a person with green and purple hair, walking buck naked into a crowd of bankers. That's Sam's metaphor. Sam reached in and opened my old closet door, and the light has shone on distorted ideas which are still straightening. I forgave myself, and silently asked forgiveness of those whose friendships I never gained. I had another chance.
Later, I was comfortable enough to begin to ask questions and receive honest and insightful answers. Those people do indeed think about sex. Sam says, probably more. In fact, they even enjoy it just like us. He patted his thin legs and made his gray, bushy eyebrows jerk up and down. I didn't ask further. I think I managed to blush. They drink just like us. They sleep, they dream, they learn, they do everything like us, except they sit when they walk, and they get the good parking spaces.
We laugh when I push him up an incline and I tease and say I have to sneeze-and of course I'll have to let go. He dared me to do that… He offered to carry my 25-pound back-pack one day and when I asked if it was too heavy, he said with a wry look on his face, 'My legs may look skinny and frail, but they feel like any other person’s who carries the weight of the world.' He grabbed my backpack and it was huge on his legs. He said in his best John Wayne voice, 'Giddyup, pilgrim.'
The first time I crookedly pushed his wheelchair we call 'Charlie Chair,' he threatened to put roll bars on the chair. And one day out of the blue he announced he was going to teach me to waltz. That was going too far. These people dance? He left me standing there with some pretty strange thoughts in my head, and rolled over to his old truck. When I recovered, that was the first time I saw how he maneuvered from the chair to the driver's seat.
I tried not to look and kept jabbering some inane nonsense and looking at my hair in the truck windows and pulling up my socks and straightening my shirt and patting my pockets as though I were looking for something. When I lit a cigarette and realized I had one in the other hand, I felt totally stupid. The memories of all the times I wondered and didn't ask came to mind. So, I looked. He wears a brace on his left leg so he can stand up with something solid to support his atrophied leg muscles, the left being weaker than the right. Standing with left hand on the end of the truck, and reaching with his right hand, he deftly hoisted the chair and set it in the back of the truck. All in one quick motion, he locked the wheels, and put the tailgate up. A quick graceful pirouette and with his right hand on the edge of the truck-bed, he reached in his left jeans-pocket for the keys. We were in. He's an excellent driver, even though he has all kinds of metal levers and self-made brake molds to hold his feet in place. Sam is a man with many other talents. He is a master welder, designs and makes custom rifle cases from leather, and he modified a stationary bicycle so he can exercise his upper body. He even taught me to waltz.
In his immaculate apartment, he sat in his chair, and started counting 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Instead of his feet, he used his hand to slide across his lap patting out the rhythmic foot movements, then held out his hands. He warned, with a very serious look on his face, that if I was not completely graceful, that it could pull him out of his chair. I told him that wasn't funny. But we laughed. The music was 'The Vienna Waltz' and we renamed it the 'Wheel Chair Waltz.' He closed his eyes and said his arms would only move from the shoulder joints if I was doing it right. I nearly pulled him out of his chair. When I asked him why his eyes were closed, he said, 'I'm listening to see if you sound like a cow or a girl. I'll know when you have it right.' It took 30-minutes and I finally got the dance steps right.
Together we've argued over Mythology. We've discussed the Odyssey more times than Homer recounted it. My musty old closet has been aired, refreshed and brightened. When we encounter a child on many of our wanderings, we both say 'Hiya' first. But there's always a mother to drag the child away--to say in a whisper, Don't stare. Don't bother him. Together, we're working on that.
{END}
By CeeCee
© 2007 CeeCee
(All rights reserved)
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