Floor Exercise

I went to look at a house.  My friend—a realtor—loaned me the lock box key because I assured her that even the chair wouldn’t cause problems for me to simply look around.  It was a repo home that she was handling, and I was looking to buy a house. 

            I had just started driving with my hands and felt empowered.

            It was a contact sport to get my chair out of the car. This was my first time doing it all by myself, and I had my friend help me take the wheels off and set it in the passenger’s seat before leaving her office.  I hadn’t considered driving a van yet because it seems very orthopedic to me, and I was still less than an ace driver.

            I parked at the house and tried to lift the chair body over me and out of the car door.  I had to put it back down and recline my seat all the way to have sufficient space to get it past me.  I had to stop in-progress, with the chair somewhat in my lap, and slide my seat all the way back.  After setting the chair outside, I put the wheels out there and returned my seat to the upright position.  I’m pretty sure I “narrated” it that way.

            I put one wheel on the chair, but when I lifted the other side to put on the other wheel, it kept swiveling, which made it difficult to line up the wheel and put it in place.

            After finally getting the chair together, I realized that the car seat was quite a bit lower than the chair seat.  It took several tries to figure out a position, get the wheels locked (a waste of time because wheel-locks don’t), and lift myself into the wheelchair.  Once in the chair, I went into the house.  I felt empowered.

            I looked around, but my undoing was when I checked out the garage.  The lights weren’t on, but minimum light from the kitchen door letting in daylight from the windows was enough to see an empty garage.

As I rolled in, my front wheels dropped down the one step that was hidden by shadow.  After doing a belly-flop on the garage floor, I discussed the situation with myself.

“That didn’t feel good at all, but I don’t think anything is broken.  Actually, I can’t feel my legs, so I probably wouldn’t know.  What I do know is I’m laying on a garage floor of a former crack house, in semi-darkness.  Only God knows what vermin are lurking about, and I’m feeling just more than a bit vulnerable.”

Some would tell me something is very wrong that I often make a running commentary when no one is there, but I just figure it’s the product of having spent a lot of alone time.

I tried to sit up without the benefit of working legs, and finally found out that I could fold my legs in front of me and leaning forward to do so.  My chair had rolled across the garage after depositing me, so I did some complicated floor gymnastics to get over to the errant chair.  I decided that the step (the evil step that hid in the shadow) offered me the best chance of putting me high enough to transfer into the chair, and I repeated my choreography—now with chair in tow—back to the step.  The only way I could move the chair while using my hands to move myself was to hook my keys on the footrest of the chair and grip the end of the lanyard in my teeth. 

After I finished my exodus to the step, I reached to grab a stationary piece of machinery for the purpose of pulling myself up onto the step.  A firm grip on said machinery gave me the instant impression that the hot water heater it turned out to be was on.

Expletives.

Several tries to re-chair myself resulted in absolute failure.  I proceeded to do what I should have done to begin with:  I pulled out my cell phone.  I did not feel empowered.

“Hi, Penny.

Oh, the house is okay.  It’s not in the best shape, but I see possibilities.

Yeah. I did run into a little problem though.

No.  No.  The front door can be replaced, but at the moment it seems I find myself on the garage floor with third-degree burns on my right arm.

No.  No panic.  The problem was of my own making, but I might need a bit of help here.”

I recited the Preamble to the Constitution.  I sang through Bohemian Rhapsody.  I ran through the Vaudeville memory quiz of one hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, etc.  I sang all twelve days of Christmas, and starting with 99, got to negative 157 bottles of beer on the wall before Penny and her policeman brother-in-law arrived.  The sun had gone down and the house’s open plywood door, plus the fact that not every local junkie knew this supply had been closed had me slightly worried. (Did I mention the total darkness?)

I was annoyed—with myself—when they got there and helped me, but I was warm and winning and finally drove away thankful that it was too dark to see my red face or my bruised pride.

When I got there, I was actually glad no one was at home because I needed private down time.  It was still a clown act to reassemble my chair, but I closed the front door of my house with a sigh of relief.  I rolled into my bedroom, and in one motion, threw stuff from my lap to the bed and switched on the light.  It immediately burned out.

I Did It

I promised myself that I’d write the next time I heard that moronic TV commercial.

             I did.

              The California Department of Public Health has a program called Champions for Change.  It promotes feeding you children healthy food here in America, Land of the Obese.

The commercial says, “Asking your local store to carry more fruits and vegetables is hard, but your children having Type 2 Diabetes would be harder” and so forth.

What local stores in California is this referring to?  Convenience stores?  Some have limited produce, but they are there for a whole different purpose.  Grocery stores?  They have a whole produce section.  The whole idea of the way this sounds insults my intelligence.  Wouldn’t any one of sound mind who wants to get produce just go to the right store?

Unless you’re thinking about some of our ingrown immigrant communities that pile more kids than should be legal for those unable to afford them into their Escalades (How do they afford that on their anchor babies’ welfare money?) and go to the Mexi-markets that smell of goat meat.  Wait, they already have produce too.  What idiot scripts these commercials? 

I looked at the web site for this program—what a piece of liberal propaganda.  Only a mental midget could take it seriously.

If you want healthy kids, feed them healthy food.  It’s not hard to figure out.  You’d have to have been born on another planet, if you didn’t know that soda pop and candy bars aren’t healthy.  I almost forgot that the people this is aimed at are the ones who permissibly give their kids anything they want.

What you’ve just read is basically what I wrote to the CDPH. I have now been labeled both a racist and a hate-monger.  I am neither, though that’s hard to see in my rhetoric.

At the end of my rant, I suggested that they not waste any more money on commercials aimed at the vegetative population, but that they read a classic novel instead.

Whew.

What Has Happened?

Okay, I don’t want to actually hurt anyone. I don’t want to put out a contract on an ex-lover.  I don’t want to hire a thug to break the knees of a rival.  I don’t want to seek assistance from a withered hag to curse my former friend.  I don’t even want to assassinate the president. I just want to stop people from speaking in such a way that it appears they’ve been raised by larger primates.

              I teach high school English, and I realize that most people don’t speak perfectly.  I even make grammatical errors in my daily conversation.  I’m not unaware of the fact that my job puts me in a position to recognize other people’s speech deficiencies, but I try to be realistic and look for the meaning behind what people say.  No one is any more annoyed with people who verbally correct other people’s speech in public conversation than I.  I think it’s rude, and somewhat demeaning, and people can be embarrassed unnecessarily. 

              If you correct people like this, they start to avoid you, and you become a social pariah.

              That said, I want to scream when I hear phrases like, “I seen,” “My fiend house,” “Had went,” and “We conversate.”  These aren’t just verbal mistakes, but they are roughly the equivalent of baby talk.  This kind of verbal illiteracy crosses racial lines and weaves through all layers of socio-economic status.  I worry that common speech is descending into a morass of lazy thinking and lack of concern that the rest of intelligent humanity is laughing at us.

              Other languages have rules and people who speak that tongue look at you befuddled if you use incorrect tenses or even idiotic pronunciation, but English—being the most wide-spread language of  communication—often accommodates errors.  But accommodation can only go so far before we become the linguistic joke of the planet. If this was a problem only heard in sub-cultures or ethnic communities, it wouldn’t bother me any more than any accent, slang, creole or pidgin, but it isn’t. 

              This may be the harbinger to the end of civilization as we know it.

             

My Romantic Life

So Tammy was cute and fairly quiet.  She sat in the back row of church.  One Sunday, I struck up a conversation with her, and though she didn’t say much to make me think she might like to be around me, I asked her out to a picnic to see the Forth of July fireworks show on Mt. Rubidoux. 

Half the city goes to the base of Mt. Rubidoux and watches the fireworks from the Redwood Cemetery.  It’s a tradition. 

I went and picked up Tammy, drove to the cemetery and pulled down onto a little access road.  I got out of my van the raised the wheelchair lift into the up position.  Then I threw a tablecloth over the lift, set it like a table with the picnic basket and got a folding chair out of the back for her to use.  It was almost a bit romantic—if you can forget this is in the middle of a graveyard. 

After we ate, the sun was going down, and we watched the fireworks show.  People noticed the picnic, and gave us strange looks, but they were there—in the same cemetery—to see the show, so who were they to call anyone strange?

That pretty much covers our first date, and though Tammy was wearing feathers in her hair, I thought she was maybe endearingly quirky.  It was worth a second date to find out more, so I asked her to dinner and a movie.

When I went to pick her up, I don’t remember exactly what she wore, but there were, in fact, other feathers.  I wonder now if this should have been a warning sign, but subtlety often escapes me.

We headed toward the part of town where the theatre was, and I asked if she had any preferences for where to eat.  Emphatically, she told me that she wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat a bite.  This caught me off guard because I had asked her to dinner and a movie.  I drove to the center where the theatre was and figured we’d waist the time I had planned for eating at a local coffee house.

When we got to the front of the line at the coffee house, I made my order and asked Tammy what she would like to drink. 

At this coffee house, their menu had every type of coffee and tea drink imaginable.  There were even several items not containing the title fare, but Tammy asked for Juice.  Of all the items that were on that menu, juice was not one of them.  I’m now becoming a little weirded out.

I reasoned with her a bit, but Tammy held true to her convictions and insisted on juice.  We left the coffee house without buying anything.  We then went to the fast food restaurant two doors down, and I bought her a peel-top cup of orange juice that they had on their breakfast menu.  We sat outside in silence while she drank it. 

When we finally went into the theatre lobby, the smell of freshly made popcorn wrapped around us like a blanket, and Tammy said, “Oooh, can we get some popcorn?”

I was thinking, Aren’t you the girl who couldn’t eat a bite?, but I said, “If you want some.”

First, we went into the theatre, where I got her situated in a seat somewhat close to the front (at her request), then I went to get her some popcorn.  I doubt that it comes as much of a surprise, that when I went back into the theatre, Tammy was in the back row.  I didn’t ask.

I did tell her that I had the popcorn, and she informed me that she hated even the smell of popcorn and would need to sit a seat farther away if I would be eating popcorn.  At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I’m possibly being punked or something.  Deciding that I’ve just won the What’s-going-on-here Lotto, I ate the popcorn as the movie began.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, Tammy leans over to me and whispers, “Is it okay if I go sit in the car?”

I wasn’t ready for that one and queried, “You want to leave?” Incredulously.  Tammy brightened and said, “If you do.”

On the ride back to drop her off at her apartment, there was silence.  This silence was finally broken by Tammy looking over at me and asking, “Can I touch you?”

This night of adventure in Oz no longer had the potential to shock me, and I responded with as much nonchalance as I could muster, “Sure. Live it up.”

Tammy reached over timidly and gently squeezed my right elbow twice, then folded her hand back in her lap.  The rest of the trip to her apartment was uneventful and so was my dropping her off.  No conversation, no goodnight kiss, no more that a thankful “Goodnight.”

I’ve since learned that Tammy actually suffers from a mild form of schizophrenia, and what I saw as quirky was the La La Land she lives in. My mistake.

That date has taken its place in my memory as a high water mark of strangeness in my romantic life.  It’s not a wonder I’ve never married.

I've been teaching high school English forever.
The Students were given the assignment to write an essay about childhood obesity.  They needed to decide if it was the fault of the parents, the food companies or the children themselves and defend their position.
This is probably my favorite paper that I've ever collected.
Go ahead and try to read.  It took me a long time to figure it out.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Last summer, my family sent me to Hawaii. I worried that their expectation was for me to swim back to California, but it turned out to be a round-trip flight.  I was going to see some old friends and a few of the sights.  Not only that, but the mild climate and stress-free lifestyle of the Islands would be good for my MS.

When I left, I gate-checked my wheelchair and was assured that it would meet me at the end of the flight (You see this coming, don’t you?).  Arriving in Honolulu, the isle chair took me to an airport wheelchair waiting for me in the loading area. 

I tried to stay somewhat evolved, but insisted that they find my chair.  They did finally bring me another passenger’s wheelchair (who was looking for it in Baggage Claim), but my chair was nowhere to be found. To make a long story short, my chair was on the tarmac in Los Angeles. 

One of the comments that was tossed at me was, “Well, sometimes baggage does get lost.”  Think about that.

I’m not militant, and I don’t like to make a bad name for my misabled brothers and sisters, but suddenly I had become unclaimed baggage.  I was traveling alone and had suddenly had my “legs” removed.  My mouth was still intact, and several people heard it.  The biggest problem was that no matter how much or to whom I complained, I was still sitting in an airport and not enjoying Hawaii.

The best that they could do was to bring my chair to the hotel when it arrived in eight hours and let me use one of the airport chairs in the interim.  I chose the lesser of evils (the chair that was the closest to fitting a human body), loaded into my friend’s car and went forth.

By that evening, my chair had arrived, and normal order in my abnormal world was restored, but I write this to say something else.  Though the world doesn’t always accommodate me, I have learned to live in it regardless.

I don’t blame anyone for my difficulties, and I’m not mad at anyone (except the jerk who forgot to load my chair).  If I am to thrive in my world and my situation, I have to make a conscious decision to do so and to enjoy the journey.  I have more being-thrown-out-of-my-chair stories than I can count, and I often encounter the insensitive and the stupid, but I usually find humor in trips down Memory Lane to revisit them.

This is my mission in life:  I will see the incongruities and absurdities around (and sometimes in) me in a way that makes me a better person with a better (and more humorous) story to tell.     

What Else Is in a Name?

The only thing that bothers me about what I’m called is the total lack of anything remotely accurate in the terminology.  I’m not an activist, and I don’t go in for militant activities, but I want to saay that some thought needs to be put into the words that describe the misabled.

            Look, I get the annoyance with the term handicapped, but some carry it too far.  I’m told it derives from times-gone-by in Great Britain.  The person with physical limitations would sit in a public place, with his cap in his hand, asking financial assistance of passers-by.  I’m told we don’t like that now because it fosters a certain level of pity.  This is not my problem with the term. 

            The problem I see is the natural protraction of the word handicapped into handicapped parking, handicapped rest rooms, and various other terms.  Though easily understood, something in my literal mind pictures a handicapped parking space as maybe having only one line or dangerous ground cover that potentially damages tires, thus rendering it handicapped.  The same goes for a handicapped rest room with even more embarrassment potential.

            Once again, I’m told (who starts these things that people get “told”?) that invalid is from the French and simply means that which is implied by the term: A lack of validity.  I may have my moments that have caused the rest of the human race to not want me used as an example, but occasionally I consider myself quite valid.  There’s this little trick I do with an earlobe and a few foot-massaging techniques that have elicited very valid responses. 

            Some have sought to soften the affect of unsavory terms by abstraction.  We’ve seen this done by quasi-socialist liberals teaching undergraduate level classes with titles like Her-story.  These same would-be wordsmiths invented handi-capable.  This might defer unnecessary guilt, but it’s downright silly.  Handi-capable sounds like something spouted by rosy-cheeked cherubs on the Good Ship Lollipop.

            The term that puts an edge on my teeth to rival an overdose of citric acid is physically challenged.  This is perfect when associated with athletes who have physical disabilities because their handicap imposes an extra challenge.  To the average person, physical challenge describes a track meet. To the misabled person, pushing a wheelchair or communicating in sign language is bridging a gap, and the gap itself is simply a pain in the arse.

            I don’t need to say much about the word disabled because my problem with it should be clear.  Don’t try to clean it up by saying differently-abled; you already know my position on handi-capable.  My ability has not been necessarily canceled.  Where my limitations say no, I must discover a way to say yes.  It’s all a matter of rerouting focus.

            There are problems with any of the nom de jour used to describe the misabled.  I’m obviously not in camp with any of them.  Those who consider themselves my friends most often call me Cripple, but that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the uninitiated ear (How was that for strangely overlapping metaphors?).  For some time we shortened it to the familiar Crip, but one of my inner-city students told me that could get me killed in some places.

            I guess, when all is said and done, I’m left with my name.