Saturday was spent with some friends and their kids enjoying some Chinese New Year festivities at Fairview Mall in Toronto (see my earlier rant about bathrooms) and then a great meal out dining to our heart’s content on really good fajita’s. We hit Lone Star in Pickering and I have to give them credit for some of the best service and most congenial hosts when they noticed me wheel in. Honestly, most sit down restaurants are REALLY good about assisting in finding just the right table that is accessible and also not going to be in the way of other patrons, but I have to point out how good the staff at this Lone Star was. We were seated quickly on a Saturday night and given a few choices of where to sit. While we were waiting, our friend Connie brought up a question about the reactions that Shan and I get while I am wheeling around in the new chair, and it was quite interesting to discuss some of the experiences.
It is a weird thing when you begin to see the world from that lower level, and the reactions that you get from complete strangers. First off, there is the club I have now seemed to join without even knowing it. Matt referred to it as being similar to owning a Jeep, where passing another always elicited a wave, and that is true when passing others in wheelchairs, powered or manual. There is often a nod or a quick wave of fingers as you pass, perhaps even a shared sympathetic eye roll at the crowds. While we were at Fairview mall, a girl left the Lego store in a powered chain and came right over and took her hand in mind, asking how long I’d been in the chair. I explained it was only this year after some bad spinal surgery and she shook her head sympathetically and told me things would get better. She was in a powered chair and was much worse on mobility than me, while also I think quite younger. She shared that she had been in a chair since she was four years old and it was quite nice to share that short talk before she wheeled away at a pace I couldn’t hope to keep up with (damn those powered chairs!!)
This has happened several times and I admit most times it quite uplifting and inspiring to meet others whose disabilities are much more severe than mine, and to hear their stories and advice. Last March Break was our first trip where we took a wheelchair. It was just a terrible folding rented chair, with a leather seat and heavy as hell, but it helped to let me move about the ship more easily and we learned that travelling with a chair RULES when passing through customs. That was my first experience in meeting others in chairs and the camaraderie that forms from that shared experience. A gentleman in his 50’s, from somewhere in the southern states, I met several times around the ship and we waved a few times. One day out of running track of one of the upper decks, Shan and I were taking a walk and we met up with him as he was in the process of doing a workout. We had a good long chat with him as he explained his chair, which was infinitely superior to what I had at the time and will be similar to my final chair. He shared his story and what all he still did, despite the chair…more like because the chair let him do it. He chopped down trees on his property, navigated down stairways with it and showed just what was possible. He gave some great advice for what we should look for and I am quite grateful to met this man and seen what can be done.
Our next trip, was of course in August, three months after the last surgery was to Disney in Florida. We figured it would be easiest first trip and I have to say we enjoyed every moment of it. I had a lot of waved hands moments at others on that trip, but there was one moment that really stood out. When we arrived in Orlando’s airport, we got totally lost trying to find the Disney busses. We ended up hitting the wrong side of the airport and just got totally turned around. In the process of this, we met a woman pushing a kid in a chair, a simple rental chair like the one I’d had on my first trip. They had got lost too and they wheeled up beside me as Shan was racing ahead trying to figure out where we were. In that short jaunt through the airport, I learned the kid, no more than 12 or 13 years old, was doing the Disney Cruise as part of the Children’s Wish Foundation. We shared the short forms of our stories and I remember telling the kid to enjoy every moment of it and don’t let anything get in his way. What I remember most was the look on this kid’s face. Seeing an adult, far older then he, in a wheelchair that to him, must have seemed SO cool, compared to what he was in. I showed him a bit of it and said if he stuck with it he might get one too. We parted ways after that, as he headed down one lane to the cruise and we to the resort. The look on that kid’s face is something that stuck with me though, a combination of awe (at the chair not me) and seeing that life does go on. And hell even Adults go to Disney on their own dammit!
How to “regular” people react? (honestly I’m not going to bother trying to use PC terms for all this, that just sanitizes it and makes it way too generic). That I’ll discuss next time…come on I have to keep you all coming back.