I got on the bus, heading to my work’s annual holiday party, looking forward to the evening ahead. It’s nice to spend time with people without the pressures of day to day demands. The driver wasn’t chatty. At all. I asked him how many pickups and drop offs before we got to where I was going, he never acknowledged the question and simply kept driving. OK, I can live with mystery.
Eventually we stopped and picked up a young mother and two girls. The girls raced on the bus and raced to the seats they wanted. It seems it was a race. It was the first of many races and competitions they would have throughout the portion of the trip that I shared with them. If I closed my eyes and listened, they sounded just like Ruby and Sadie, so, therefore, I loved it. Mom was helped on to the bus by the driver. She was in a very cool looking manual chair, she nodded hello and before she could say anything else I said, “The sound of kids having fun never gets old does it?” She smiled and said, “Well, maybe sometimes.” I laughed and we were off to a good start.
We didn’t chat much, but somewhere in there I told her that her wheelchair was cool. The girls, both who had been listening to us talk, immediately spoke up, “Cool! Wheelchairs aren’t cool!!” Then a lively debate happening. Mom didn’t enter in, she just listened to me and to her kids. I explained about how much fun it was to go down hills and to quickly turn in a circle and to get your wheels wet and then draw on pavement. The conceded that some of that did sound found.
I got a little more serious, while keeping it light, and I told them that my wheelchair set me free and said, “If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is?” The freedom idea caught them and I knew they understood. Then we make an awkward turn into an awkward parking lot and the bus rocks. I wondered if they were home now but I didn’t think so because of their reaction to the rolling of the bus.
The driver gets out and an older gentleman, using a walker due to a life long disability, struggled up the ramp. He got on, grinned at all of us and made his was to the back to sit in one of the seats in the very back. It turns out he is a teacher and he entertains himself by chatting with the girls. He has a real ease with them and the fact that he’s probably 70 years older than the girls didn’t matter. They chatted with him about school and other stuff.
Then he said, “Which one of you takes care of your mother?” The woman beside me, the girls mom, turned and looked at me in shock. The girls said, almost at the same time, like they’ve said it before, “We don’t take care of her, she takes care of us.” He pushed a bit and they acknowledged that there were things the did to help out. Finally he said, “Well, if you’ve not taking care of her now you will be one day, so you have to practice.”
We’d gone from “wheelchairs are cool” to “people in wheelchairs are burdens,” in the matters of moments and both messages were given by disabled people to these children. Their mother, shushed them when they began discussing, ‘cool or burden’ in the back between themselves.’ “We’ll talk about this at home she said,” with an anger that I knew didn’t stem from anything the girls had done.
We pulled into the banquet hall and I said my goodbye’s. I rode down the ramp saying to the girls as I got off, “See, cool?”
