Ever since I became partially handicapped in 1994, I have been faced with a new aspect of time, and the dilemma of what to do with it. “Free” time.
I have always been fascinated by giraffes, which is bizarrely relevant. I think my fascination with these graceful animals may stem from the fact that they are so tall, whereas I am rather short, and they thus symbolise access to a dimension I cannot reach — similar to the way my intense fascination with horses from a young age was probably based on an awareness that our cooperation with them throughout many ages had allowed human beings access to speed that our own bodies were too weak to provide. Ditto my fascination with birds, and flying.
Within just a few months in 1994, I went from being an avid runner, who had been able to consistently win, (in co-ed competitions, no less) the 800 meter dash in Jr high and had maintained a practice of jogging several miles nearly every day into my early twenties, to a person who needed a walking cane to get two blocks to the bus stop after a museum job in which I was on my feet most of the day. Within just a few months after that, I was unable to keep the job. In spite of the fact that I had purchased a collapsible cane that I kept concealed in my hand bag until the end of the day when my left leg became spastic; in spite of the fact that colleagues on my team were often willing to switch positions with me so that I could work sitting down at less strenuous tasks; in spite of the fact that it probably would have been found illegal if I could have afforded lawyer’s fees larger than my monthly, or perhaps annual, pay check; the management of the museum decided that I would likely become a burden on their health insurance and forced me out.
After that, I only had access to medicine through doctors and hospitals with rates similar to those that formed the gates of the legal system.
So, a few years later, with the help of my Austrian grandmother’s family, I left the country that so many people from other homes are now granted asylum in. Asylum status comes with automatic membership in the medicaid, food stamp, and unemployment/emergency assistance clubs that I could not “qualify” for in the 1990s. I know this because, ironically, the first job I was offered after I was granted a work permit in Austria was to provide information on how to access these financial resources to asylum seekers moving to the United States, whose claims were processed in Vienna by the State Department to avoid the cost of flying them back if their claims were denied (an occasion which, in the few months I worked at this immigration assistance fund, I never saw happen).
But I digress. The aspect of time so designated for many when they are not working as “free” opens up for me like a new dimension. I don’t really have a word to describe it, but it is a strange aspect that I feel is nearly a different dimension because it is time in which I am, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the day, immobilised.
Free time is usually filled with activities, particularly social ones, but immobilised time is different. Immobilised time stretches out, rather than flying by. Immobilised time comes with a sensation of heaviness, inertia, as if a clock has not quite stopped, but is ticking very, very, very slowly. Immobilised time usually cannot be spent with other people, because it seems they can not or will not “keep up” in moving through the thick, stultifying, suffocating air that acquires a new gravity in whatever place one happens to be when the clock slows to a near stop.
As soon as my strength is even somewhat renewed, I’ll go back to the zoo. I visit the giraffes. I sit on a wheeled walker that has a seat, and soon I may not need it to walk there because my training as a runner has provided me with optimal recovery skills.
Recovering from a physical breakdown is exactly like training for a marathon, but in segments of yards or meters instead of miles. I’ve successfully run that particular marathon more times than I’d like to count. And so, for 30 years most people around me never knew about the collapsible cane, the collapsible crutches, the hours of immobilised time spent reading or watching videos, the years in which my penchant for movie theatres and coffee houses with comfortable couches covered for the fact that I spend at least twice as much time as others my age simply not moving. But the wheeled walker doesn’t fit in my handbag, unfortunately.
My cover is blown.
It’s been exactly two years since the first Covid infection that set some part of my body back into self-destruct mode, and soon my wheeled walker will become an “art cart” and maybe no one will be the wiser. Maybe using wheeled walkers to carry art supplies will become a new trend to go with the Youtube/Patreon/Me Inc/Instagram business models that seem to have blossomed during the pandemic.
And if it happens, that will come with a whole different set of challenges. Like the challenges that now come with asking for wheelchair assistance at airports. I remember the days when suitcases did not have wheels. My father found some type of metal frame that had wheels on it and we strapped my suitcase onto that with bungee cords. If we had been savvy, we would have patented that.
Years later, he was the one who told me I could and should order wheelchair service when I flew. I think the travel agent who my parents booked with back in the days when there also was no internet booking might have suggested it, after I became so physically exhausted trying to make my connecting flight at Heathrow when a security official refused to let me get my cane out of my checked luggage after it had gone through the x-ray scanner that I passed out at the boarding gate and missed my flight. There were things I just didn’t know how to do. I boycotted British Airways for a decade after that. They never even bothered to answer my letter of complaint via email. Seriously.
The airport wheelchair assistance services were a tremendous help over the past decade, but they have morphed into something which I will probably never dare to use again, because of the incredible rudeness of about 50% of the people who provide those services, while complaining to our faces that “sometimes we have 20 people per flight who use this, they don’t even need it, they’re just too lazy to carry their Louis Vuitton bags.”
That is a verbatim quote, translated from German. And that was actually the nicest of the comments I received on my last flight. The other treatment that was doled out was too abusive and traumatic for me to write about, frankly (and I have never seen more than 2 people at the gate on a flight in a chair — usually I am the only one). This treatment is from people who should know better and who are handsomely paid and surely sit through training seminars on how to offer these “assistance” services to “handicapped people.” Since the pandemic this has gotten immeasurably worse, and I really can’t figure out why. Another reason I like the zoo. I don’t need to fly to get there.