Joe and I did something that we never thought we’d do yesterday. We went shopping for a basketball. There are hoops outside the front of our house that are there for community use and we thought that maybe the girls would like to use them, therefore, the ball. We went into a store that sold them and faced a wall, a mighty wall, of basketballs. The first ones we picked up cost a fortune, I didn’t know what to expect price wise but wow.
Finally we found a ball that was inside our price range and just as we picked it up a clerk came over to help. He spoke to Joe asking if he could help. Joe shook his head, we’d made the decision after all, and I spoke up. “We want this ball just to shoot hoops out the front of our place, is this the kind of ball that does that?” He looked at me oddly and I said, “Well there are so many balls here of so many prices, I wanted to know if this one had the ‘neighbourhood hoops’ feature.”
He nodded and said,”YOU want a basketball?”
I looked at him, he was young. I don’t expect that kind of stuff from someone so young. He looked like he was in high school. Don’t disabled kids go to high school, don’t they play ball?” I don’t know the answer to that question in his case. But even if they didn’t isn’t he aware, even slightly, of wheelchair sports. But maybe he didn’t mean the wheelchair, maybe he meant my weight. I don’t know but even if he did, why wouldn’t a fat person want to throw a ball, is he thinking that it would get in the way of eating a cake or something. Any fat person knows that there is virtually nothing that can’t be done while eating a snack. Shit.
“YOU want a basketball?”
It’s another instance where I became ‘alienized’ by someone. Made so different from humanity that any hint of humanity is shocking. But there I was being fully human in front of him and there he was looking like he would have a story to tell that no one would ever believe.
Yeah, I want a basketball, how freaking freaky is that?
