My father worked for Viking press when I was a kid, and I seem to remember every evening when he’d come home, he’d open his brief case, and hand my sister and I a new book or two. It probably wasn’t every night, but however often it was, it was my first real introduction to books.

I remember Robert McCloskey’s books especially – Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal, and One Morning in Maine. They were stories and illustrations that seemed to assume a certain sophistication in the young reader that was new and refreshing to me. It was a very special treat to give them to my children, and to tell them how they had come into my hands when I was their ages.

When I was in 8th grade, I took a photography class with a man named Paul Czaja (pronounced “chiya”). This was my first exposure (if you’ll pardon the expression) to photography, and it has remained an important foundation that I’ve built on over the years. He later published a small book with my father called Writing With Light. The book I’m sure is long out of print, but I am glad to say that I have a copy. So it wasn’t so much the book that changed my life, as it was the teachings of the man who wrote it.

Then came high school. There are several books that I think all fall into the same category: On The Road and Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, and The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. None of these were assigned reading and I have no idea what was assigned (I do remember Shakespeare, the best class I had in high school, but not, I don’t think, life-changing). These books in their own ways showed me possibilities. They showed me, through their fictionalized narratives of actual events, a wider world than I had ever imagined. These were stories about real people who had gotten ideas into their heads, and just gone and done them. Ideas that normal people (like my parents) would think were bad craziness. They also showed me, along with Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a whole new way of writing, of seeing the world. These authors knew the rules, but they bent them or disregarded them for the sake of the story they were telling. The story was more important than the rules set down in the venerable old Strunk and White.

Vonnegut also showed me though those and countless other books, that anything was possible, that I could write about anything and everything. “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” What an amazing first sentence. Anything can follow from that.

One of my friends in high school was a little wispy hippie girl, very pretty, with long hair and usually no shoes. Every now and then I’d see her with a book – a large softbound book with pages that looked like they were made from paper bag paper, and text that looked like it was made with rubber stamps. When I asked her about it, and asked to borrow it, she smiled in her hippie-mysterious way and said that when the time was right, I’d find it in my hands. Oohh – mysterious! But being at least a wanna-be hippie myself, I accepted her answer as perfectly reasonable, and let it go.

It was probably a year later, when I was seeing a therapist (my parent’s idea – I really had no clue why I was there.), sure enough, I found Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, in my hands. It was my introduction to Buddhism, zen, meditation and spirituality, and it profoundly altered the course of my life. So much so, that I told the therapist that I had found the key, and I would not need to visit him any more. He warned me against making so quick a decision, but I never went back, and never looked back. I think I still have the same copy that I had back then – just about the only thing from those years that I still have.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately (and I think I’ve written here about it) about how a gimp can reduce his carbon footprint – a term which is rapidly becoming annoyingly hip and buzz-wordy. I can hear Garth telling some square, “Hey, dude, like, reduce yer carbon footprint, man!” Pretty soon chicks won’t go out with guys if their carbon footprint is too big. It becomes a status symbol and a fashion accessory.

Anyway, I thought, well, maybe I can drive to the nearest metro bus stop, and ride at least part way to and from work. The nearest stop to my office is a block from the door, so I went out today at lunchtime to walk to the bus stop, to see how it felt. I decided to walk half way and back again as a measure of how it would feel to walk the whole way. At the half way point I saw a big cardboard box in the middle of the road. So, wanting to be a good citizen, I went out and poked it to the curb. I didn’t go so far as to properly dispose of it, but at least I got it off the road.

Then, as I tried to step over the curb back onto the grass, I had that very surreal moment when I knew I was going to fall down. I have fallen so few times that it is still a surreal moment, and a very odd experience – me, a grown (old?) man, falling down like a youngster just learning to walk, tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. So I fell, fortunately onto the grass, and though I don’t think anyone saw me fall, it was still a humbling and in some way a humiliating experience. It was, at the very least, a completely unnecessary reminder of my condition, that I am unstable on my feet, and I thought, irrationally and angrily, that perhaps I should not be walking at all. I stumbled back to my desk, and crashed on my chair, exhausted and more sore from the fall than I thought I’d be.

I have a good friend who called his wife a few nights ago, to tell her that he was riding his bike home from work. She got another call about 20 minutes later from a man who had found my friend lying on the side of the road, the wheels of his bike still spinning. The man making the call was, by pure chance, a cardiologist, who knew enough to stabilize my friend’s neck while he waited for the ambulance. (Note to all of you: add “ICE” to your cell phone directory – immediate emergency contact, with the phone number of the person emergency responders should contact. These people are trained to look for this entry in the cell phones of people they rescue.) The end result is that my friend is in the ICU, in a coma. His prognosis is up in the air. He might wake up tomorrow, or next week, or two years from now, or never.

As I massaged my shoulder and my ego, I thought of this friend, and realized that however bad things might feel at any moment, when looked at in a larger context, they are never really all that bad. Still, I am not one of those people – at least not yet – who can fall down in the street and get back up laughing about it. It pretty much soured the rest of my day. Even though earlier in the day I’d had a short but delightful chat with a woman in Miami about the weather down there, there was still a very dark cloud over my head. MS sucks.

I spend all day answering phones, taking orders and solving problems for a mail-order company. There are, mixed in with the banal and the exasperating, some very nice exchanges to be had on these phones. This morning a woman called and said she was moving, though she didn’t know where to, and she wanted to stop her catalog subscription. I said something like, “Oh, dear, that sounds a little scary!” She agreed, and said I was the first person who had said anything like that. (I gathered that she had been placing similar phone calls to other catalogs and magazines.) We exchanged all the pertinent information to stop the catalog coming, and before we hung up, I said that I hoped that when she got back on her feet, we’d hear from her, and wished her good luck.

I have no idea what her circumstances or situation are, but from that brief exchange it sounded like a very uncertain change in life for her - escaping a bad relationship or a lost job and dire financial situation requiring a sudden move. She did say that she would not be ending up on the street, which was nice to hear. But only getting that tiny slice of this young woman’s life is a tiny bit unsettling - to think that she is out there, facing an uncertain immediate future, hopefully not too uncertain and hopefully not long-term. And being able to offer a tiny slice of kindness into her perhaps uncertain life was a nice opportunity for me.

I guess life is filled with those tiny moments where two lives intersect for seemingly random reasons. I was out on the street in Portland the other day, and had just crossed the street in my unsteady, wobbly gait, doing my best imitation of hurrying across, and was leaning up against a mailbox resting when a car pulled to the curb. The window slid down, and the woman driver asked if I needed a ride somewhere, obviously in response to my barely making it across the street. As the situation would have it, my car was about 20 feet away, so I thanked her profusely, and said I thought she was very kind, but that, no, I did not need a ride.

As she drove away, and as I thought more about it, I wondered what would have happened if I had said yes, had climbed into her car and, in essence, taken her for a ride - figuring out along the way how I would explain when we ended up exactly where she had picked me up. I wondered if this was a person I would like to get to know, a rare selfless and openly kind individual in a world that, lately, has seemed to me filled with people who do not automatically step aside when another person - handicapped or
not - comes toward them in the same travel lane, who do not automatically go out of their way to acknowledge the presence of other people. It seems that, as I navigate sidewalks with a cane, I notice that many people don’t step aside when I come toward them, leaving me to take an uncertain step around them. I don’t expect that my walking with a cane should entitle me to special treatment. But I step out of the way when someone approaches in the same lane, or heading into a narrow space. I hold the door for anyone coming behind me - man, woman, child, handicapped or Jack LaLaine.

Walking with a cane, finding it difficult to navigate certain parts of the sidewalk, unable to hurry across the street, wobbling and weaving, and needing to stop and hopefully sit frequently, I find myself much more aware of how few people behave toward others in that way. It seems like basic human civility to me. I’ve never been knocked down, not even close to it, but I have come close to falling a few times when I had to step out of another person’s way, having to step off a curb or onto an uneven sidewalk. I hope that, back when I walked like a “normal,” before I was a gimp, I was as aware of other people as I expect them to be of me. I hope that, if I had seen me stumble across the street and lean gasping on a mailbox, I would have had the basic human civility to stop and offer a ride.

In any case, it brightened my day, and whoever that woman was, I am very appreciative of her kindness.

cat and girl is one of my favorite daily stops on the interwebs, and this one is particularly relevant. enjoy.

and, trying not to gush, i think kevin kelly is one cool dude. i would love to have his job. i would love to have the energy and the intelligence to have his job. remember the whole earth catalogs? he was a big part of those. anyway the link to his web site links to all the stuff he writes about. what a great job.

yeah, i’m one of THOSE people, always blocking the sidewalk, moving slowly, in a world that seems to prefer the destination to the journey. just for fun, i googled “slow walkers,” and didn’t find much, but one site in particular, where people can post their experiences in various places around the country. there were three posts having to do with one city, ranting about slow walkers, with comments like, “why don’t you get in your car and drive away?” is that really what people think when they come up behind a person walking slowly - for whatever reason - down the sidewalk? am i really a “moving roadblock?” i’d prefer to think that these three commenters were just coincidentally being rude in the same place. i walk with a cane, and i stumble a little, and weave a little, and need to stop and rest against a lamp-post a little, and i do notice that about half the people i encounter do not seem to notice that i am less mobile than they are, and rather than taking a step to one side or the other, come right at me, not seeming to notice me, and force me to either stop and move out of the way, or take what is for me a precarious step out of their way.

now, i do my best to keep to one side of the sidewalk. i don’t walk right down the middle, i try not to impose my slow waking on other people. and maybe i shouldn’t be, but i am always surprised how many people don’t seem to notice my slow, labored gait. i guess it’s just something to get used to.

being a slow walker has it’s advantages. i have always preferred the journey to the destination, and my “disability” (i still can’t say it without the quote marks) pretty much forces me to slow down and be a lot more aware of my immediate surroundings. sometimes that just means watching for big cracks in the sidewalk, or loose bricks, or curbs without those little built-in ramps, things i need to be careful of or prepare to step over, or avoid. any time is see a bench or sit-able wall, i take advantage of it, and take a few moments to observe the passing scene in a way most people never do. i am a photographer, and any of you who have seen my work might have noticed that a lot of my images are close-ups of walls and such. i find my slow walking helps me to see the small details of the places i walk in more than i used to. i find that to be an advantage.

and if i’m in a hurry, i’ll drive or get driven. i just try not to be in a hurry as often as i used to. i’m a slow walker, and as long as i keep walking, i will always be a slow walker. there’s nothing i can do about it. naturally, i’d rather be a “normal walker,” like i used to be. but i’d rather be a slow walker than a no-walker. and when i become a no-walker (a roller) i’ll be glad to be a roller.

(now playing: frank’s wild years, by tom waits)

days with my father is a remarkable journal of a young man’s time spent with his aging father. take some time and read his words and images. i am so glad he shared this with me.

The exhaustion is hard to name. I don’t know what to call it. “Tired” is far too ordinary, “exhausted” is less so, but still not full enough. “Fatigue”, what the doctors call it, to name it as a symptom, is closer. But “weariness” is the closest I’ve come. It sits somewhere in my head, usually right at the top of my neck, like a weight. Like a stone. Like two hands pressing down, sometimes less than other times, but never letting up altogether. The weight and pressure of the weariness is always there, never letting me forget. And if I just let it, it can take me over and swamp me, those hands can push my head all the way under.

changing the present is one of the most important web sites i’ve ever found. i’m sure (i hope) there are others like it, and i hope it’s not a scam. but even if it is, it will serve as an inspiration.  i know any time in the future i need to give a gift, this is the first place i will turn.

perhaps it shouldn’t have, but this stunned me. here’s this nice show (tho we all know it’s really just a shill for sears) helping to lift people out of squalor, when they are, in the end, leaving them worse off than before.  Two More Extreme Makeover Home Edition Homes in Trouble

i never liked the show anyway. it always seemed so exploitive. like the song says, “get the widow on the set, people love dirty laundry.”

thank you to all who posted comments. i hope my last post didn’t come off as a fishing expedition; i wasn’t asking people to send me flowers, just voicing the feeling that with so many blogs floating around out there, do any of them ever really get read? apparently so. and apparently i’m the one not reading other people’s blogs.