Walker on Wheels

Walker on Wheels

I have lived my life by the power of my feet.

I was a child who couldn't learn to ride a bike.  It was one of the endless ways that my body, and my command of my body, seemed so different than that of other children.  I didn't learn how to balance a bike until I was at the edge of my teens.   Out alone, on my seventh ride, I collided with a car on a high speed arterial and limped away with a broken tailbone that I hid from my family and a cold-sweat shaking case of bike-triggered PTSD that I couldn't hide.  Over the next twenty years I would manage to get on a bike maybe four times.

That whole combo of way-high anxiety plus way-low physical co-ordination?  I don't drive, either.  (You wouldn't like me driving.)

And bus fare hereabouts costs way too much to spend it on trips within five miles..  

So throughout my decades of adult life, when there was somewhere I needed to go, or somewhere I needed to get away from, I've walked.

This means, as a newcomer to bike use, I am not coming from the same place as someone whose normal transportation is a car.

While the rest of bicycling America is raving about the inherent serenity, the increased mindfulness, the greater sense of connection between self and environment that happens on a bike, I'm pretty much all WAAAA-OOOO HOUSTON DO WE HAVE LIFT-OFF LOOK OUT HERE I COME TEN MILES AN HOUR LET'S EASE OFF THE WORLD IT IS *FLYING* BY NOTHING'S GONNA STAND IN MY WAY BORN TO BE WIIIIIILD DOO DOODOO DOOOOO DOODOO-

I am intoxicated with the power of being my own vehicle.  I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and never for one second forget it.

Transcendence is mine.  The way in which I connect to the world, the possibility of my place in it, and my relationship to myself are all transformed.

And I never want to take that for granted.

Transformaintenance

I took a poll from a bike advocacy group looking for an evocative catchphrase to pitch the idea of cities repurposing cheap basic municipal maintenance materials to quickly transform how we move-- i.e. positioning cement planters to slow traffic on a school street with chronic speeding problems. 

All their suggestions sucked so I wrote in "transformational maintenance".  

Isn't it funny how we can produce for others what we can't get for ourselves?  As soon as I'd articulated it, I realized I've needed this concept for years.  Everyone knows you can't regain your balance and change directions at the same time.  First balance, then turn.  First stabilize, then stretch.  First sharpen the ax, then chop the wood.  Except that has never worked in my life.  It is an approach that can't work where crisis is chronic.  If your unmet needs lie in complicated layers, the "first, then" approach forces you to be your own saboteur, perpetually pitting your short-term self against your long-term self.

Like a city, I don't have to operate exclusively through major undertakings and dedicated budgets.  Like a city, I can look for new ways of using the resources I already have, so that small shifts in how I go about my immediate self-care produce big, fast results that move me in the directions of my goals.

And then an online friend condensed it to "transformaintenance".  

So now we just need neon green silicone bracelets.

Privilege & Hope

Child-Friendly Transit by Andres Salomon

That was incredibly well thought out and carefully written... so why am I so depressed by it?  And why do I get more depressed every time I read it?

The truth is, this is an idealistic, visionary list perfect for the BRT planning stage... 

and that's a vision so far from my daily reality that reading this is like scrounging garbage cans for food while listening to someone chatter about optimal nutrition.

This is the big picture, the long view, and the immediate challenges I and my toddler face SURVIVING north-end metro are so intense that I can't afford to think in terms of the long view.

*Right now* I need bus drivers who are trained to regard toddlers, babies, and pregnant women as vulnerable passengers like people who are elderly and people who have physical impairments.  Because when developing brains, or developing spines, or developing fetuses get slammed to the floor there are life-altering and life-threatening consequences.

I have sat with both arms around my own toddler praying madly with my eyes locked on the father forced to surf a full bus, with one arm holding his baby against his chest and his other hand holding his toddler's hand and nothing left to hold a strap or bar.  

This should never, ever happen, but I have seen it more than once, like it should never happen that the bus takes off while the heavily pregnant woman is still making her way back to her seat, and it should never happen that the baby should be shaken from side to side in the half-secured stroller because the fumbling parent could only figure out one of the wheelchair seatbelts.  It should never happen, and it happens all the time.

It should never happen that the bus stop *at the library*-- I understand that we're not at the point where we can have perfect sidewalks on all streets everywhere but seriously, *the library*!?!-- should open its doors on to a cratered cavern of broken-up tarmac that becomes a lake with hidden reefs every rain storm, but that is exactly what the 65 bus stop at the Lake City Library opens its doors to.  And that is why nobody ever buses to the Lake City Library with a stroller or a wheelchair or walker or shoes other than hiking boots.  And nobody buses the 45 to the Lake City Library at this time of year because, people don't want to die.  There's no marked crosswalk, the cars coming off Lake City in one direction and down the steep hill in the other are both speeding through the wet winter dark, and you'd die.  But, hey! that's the official announced "Lake City Library" stop.

We need people like Andres Salomon who have the vigor and hope to envision a better future.  Those of us who have lost our hope and vigor need visions such as these most of all.  

But, I've got to tell you, with what I experience as a disabled low income north end mother, I am not aiming this high.  I am not looking for amenities.  I'm not looking for a positive and fulfilling relationship with Metro.  

I just don't want our bus system killing my baby.

Westlake Monorail

Westlake, Sunday morning. Too early for the mall to be open and the monorail has just started running when we buy the ticket for our once-a-year ride. Hardly anyone else is waiting and I am SO stoked to be in position to get my train-crazy Boy of Joy on and forward fast to that one narrow front seat where he can watch the train coast on its single rail. We have been so lucky to have everything line up to give us a chance at the front this one time that he might be just old enough to remember... and I'll remember for sure.
And the train pulls in and everybody gets off except one mother and one small boy, who have bought round trip tickets from the other end for the sole purpose of waiting for that moment when everyone else was off the train and before anyone else could get on to run to the narrow front seat so that small boy could watch the train coast on its single rail.
Then the doors open and that mother turns and sees me and my boy.
And she gets up.
She squeezes her small son's shoulder and whispers something in his ear and he stays sitting and she gets up.
And she moves to the seat behind him, and smiles at me.
And I seat my even smaller son on the narrow bench beside her small son and I sit beside her.
My boy is too little. He pops up like a jack-in-the-box and runs for my lap. She meets my eyes. "You sit there." Her words are few, clear, her accent rich.
I hold my child on my lap and perch on the narrow bench next to another mother's son, who looks at me uncertainly, looks back to his mother, and then look forward.
And together our children watch the train coast on its own rail.
At the Center I try to explain what this has meant to us-- "We only get to ride once a year..."
But there's no way to explain, and no need. She smiles, I smile, her son is in her arms, mine is in mine. I will remember, for sure.

Happy Humanity, everybody.

Truth is Funny.

Truth is funny.

---

Parent 1: Would you like grape juice?  We also have V8.

Guest: I'd love some V8.

Teen Child: You know, maybe I should try that.  What's it like?

Parent 1: It 's a juice blend, but of all different kind of vegetable juices instead of fruit.

Parent 2: It's a sort of health drink, like they'd make you at a juice bar.

Guest: it's like drinking cold spaghetti sauce, only thinner.

[Silence.]

Teen Child: ...seriously?

Parents 1 & 2: Yes.

Lightening Rod

Let me explain what we really know about autoimmune disorders.

Our language has this goofy magic-mystic separation between "mental" and "physical".  Reality doesn't.  The chemistry and electricity and neurology of you is every bit as physical as your blood and bones and it's all intertwined and all of you from the neck down participates in what's happening from the neck up just like everything from the neck up participates all the way down to your toes.

An autoimmune disease means your body has tried to kill you.

And autoimmune disorders are most crazy-common in people who are survivors of trauma currently living under conditions of stress.  

Y'know, the same people at highest risk of their brains trying to kill them.  (Which isn't actually that surprising if one understands that everything is physical and intertwined and that the leading current evidence is that depression itself is just another trauma-catalyzed immune disorder.)

And what we're pretty consistently seeing--

which, again, makes perfect sense when one thinks about it--

is, if you survive that particular disease, and keep on trucking with your trauma and your stress...

...sooner or later your body is going to try to kill you again.

By middle age, I had survived two life-threatening autoimmune conditions... so far.  Three if they are right about depression.  

This isn't freakish, or bad luck, or even unlikely.  

What is unlikely is that I will get through the next ten years without it happening again.

Heard in My Hiome

"Thank you for understanding.  And, there's a chicken puppet behind you."