in addition to the fifty words the site wanted...
Nowadays, maybe I’d like to make it seem like I figured out
there was a real problem from the people getting excited about equipment at
swap meets. If people believed that, I
could out-Lisa Simpson Lisa Simpson in the eyes of my comrades in the health care
fight(and considering where I was in the mid-eighties, and that Lisa might well
have been nothing but a doodle in Groening’s sketch pad in those days, I could
almost pull it off) Except I don’t like myself enough to give myself a halo,
and because the real reason I felt deflated by “How much for the wheelchair?”
is as revealing as it is shallow.(But, honestly, seeing it so often made the “real
problem” thing not hard to figure out either…only as a grown person, I hope I
would figure out a better response than my grandma, who saw in others’ crisis, something
of a score.)
I used to think that when I sat in a chair like other people sat in—what I
might have called a “normal chair” in those days—from about the time I was
about ten till about thirteen, normal preoccupied me just as hard as I ignored
it all those years before that and thought it seemed like a drag. But I did think my disability didn’t show on
the couch, or on a raft at the pool, or anywhere where the chair wasn’t
directly in evidence. Like once someone fought me into shotgun in the pickup
truck(another thing I sort of liked to pretend didn’t happen, and maybe a big
reason why “Bewitched” was an early-morning rerun favorite.
And, sometimes, people didn’t seem to notice.
Or maybe they found it kinder to make a big deal over my little-girl’s
long blonde locks instead. If you know what to look for(my posture’s never been
good, and decades of sitting and tight muscles have somewhat conspired to fit
my body for a chair more than anything else) it always showed, but where did I
get the idea it’d be better if it didn’t? I don’t think anyone really told me
that, though I guess I did hear “Such a pretty face,” a lot
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