This topic comes up a lot. Wanting to lead the old life and go do things we did before. Unfortunately the range of options is not what it was. Ambulation is much slower and our survivors tire quickly. We therefore look for what we can do. Lately we have been to some museums. The Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport during the summer and the Museum for Contemporary Art Chicago over Thanksgiving. Both are places I really wanted to go. Both were handicap friendly. The Air and Space museum is so large she wouldn’t have been able to walk it. They had some marginal wheelchairs that did the trick. We “ooh’d and ah’d” quite a bit there and at the MCAC.
I bet there are lots of these now. Complete with loaner wheelchairs, elevators and plenty of ramps. Annie might not get to see the Meteor Crater or walk the Pat Tillman but we can be sure she gets onboard for the museum tours. Next stop Fort Worth and its renowned collections.
So we’ll not do the Grand Canyon again together and hikes are pretty much out. We’ll adapt. She got to go hunting with me and that didn’t slow her or us down. Today she mentioned fear of falling. The concern is breaking something and becoming too much of a burden. She doesn’t want to go into assisted living. I told her that wasn’t a bridge to contemplate right now. My mantra is find new challenges – and revel in what you can do!
Somebody wrote a whole book on why making adjustments for disabilities is silly, costs too much, enables too few. I used to see, from a courthouse window, clerks and ADAs with trolleys of boxes of documents using those curb cuts to ease their way. I saw a judge (now the respected TX A-G)wheeling his way through traffic, unassisted. What price freedom, ease and accessibility? Who knows which old pennypinching Tea Partier will need it next?
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