As I write this, I’m sitting under the Ravenel Bridge in the Mount Pleasant Memorial Waterfront Park on a bench. I’ve just finished a 2 mile run up on the bridge. It was exhilarating. The sound of cars flying by is flying over my head and kids are laughing and yelling on the playground behind me. Just a minute ago, the DJ at the venue on the other end of the park asked the wedding party to join the new bride and groom on the dance floor as the opening notes of “I’m A Believer” came through the loudspeakers set up on the lawn.
Looking up from my laptop screen, I see a father trying to get “the perfect picture for Mommy” of his two little girls. The oldest, maybe five years old, has just told him that Mommy would love to see the sunset in the background. The youngest just wants Daddy to pick her up. I wonder where Mommy is.
As I walked over to this bench, I passed a man with a prosthetic leg. Our eyes briefly met. He looked to be in his 70s. His wife was slowly pushing his wheelchair along behind him as he gripped the safety rail lining the pier. He was shuffling as best he could, no doubt trying to regain a sense of independence he felt that he had lost at some point. I wonder how it happened. I wonder one day if it’ll happen to me. I hope I have a wife who loves me enough to push the wheelchair.
I know a widow who pushed the wheelchair for her husband. She’s one of the sweetest and strongest people I’ve ever met. In her husband’s final days, as his health spiraled and his strength left him, with the help of their two young sons, she pushed his wheelchair around their home. It would have been much harder to do, were it not for the additions he’d built onto the house in the years before. He’d built her a new master bedroom and closed in their garage to create an open floor plan den. What a stark realization it must have been for him! He was 47 years old when he became too feeble to walk around in the castle he’d once built with his own two hands.
I came to this park to write. I also hoped to see a sunset. As I’ve been typing, the sun has been sinking. Alas, the clouds are gone, so the sky is becoming a smooth gradient of color. A smoky, burned orange is giving way to a grayish, dim blue. It’s beautiful, although its beauty is much different than that of a clouded sunset. I much prefer a clouded sunset. The kind where the sun throws its final rays of light through white cotton which then splits and refracts them into the sky. The kind where there is a myriad of pinkish-orange hues and you wish you’d have remembered to bring your guitar so you could just strum and hum and look up at all of it.
That said, the gradient sunset seems to be enough for the couple behind me. I’ve just learned that it’s their 30th anniversary. They’re locked in an embrace, making a memory that they’ll hopefully carry with them for another 30 years. I wonder which will push the wheelchair.
My papa pushed the wheelchair for my grandma. He had quadruple bypass surgery, then she broke her foot a few short days later. As soon as he got enough strength to help her move around, he did. I’ll never forget the day we brought them home from the hospital though. Papa was crying. He was too weak to help himself, and he was too weak to help her. We used a gait belt for both of them until they regained their strength. He regained his first. Then he helped her.
Not even two years went by until he died. Quadruple bypasses don’t pair well with driver-side airbags in a car wreck. She was still in the hospital recovering when we had his funeral. That time, we brought Grandma home from the hospital alone. I wonder if she ever thinks about him pushing the wheelchair.
The people just keep passing in front of me. Couples. College kids, little kids. Some look at me, some don’t. Each one of us is living our lives in our own bubbles, doing our own thing. I wonder how many people are thinking about pushing the wheelchair. Probably not many. It’s not something that we like to focus on. In a sense, wheelchairs remind us of dependence on another person. They remind us of loss of mobility. They remind us of a loss of freedom. A person who knows the feeling of walking never wants to know the feeling of confinement to a chair. A person who has the ability to go and see and do rarely wants to live the negation of those.
I think a lesson lies therein. When you look for a mate, you need to think about the wheelchair. You need to really consider what it means to care for someone you love. So many men enter relationships with one goal in mind: get her out of those clothes. They don’t look at her as someone to love, provide for, and nurture. They don’t see the late-night runs to Walmart to get pistachio ice cream and Fanta for her pregnancy craving. They don’t see the sag of child-rearing, the hot flashes of menopause, or the thinning hair over the years. They don’t look at her as a potential mother to their children or a potential sister to their siblings. They don’t see themselves pushing her around in a wheelchair and they most certainly don’t consider her doing that for them.
How different would our relationships look if we thought about the wheelchair? I don’t think we’d spend as much time infatuated with loose women who just want a good night. I don’t think we’d find the radical feminist or the pretentious socialite so appealing. I don’t think we’d have to worry as much about what she was posting on social media or what she was saying to her friends. I think “girl bosses” would fall a lot lower on our list of potential dates. One-dimensional flings would be a thing of the past.
I’ve gotten into the exercise of, whenever I’m beginning to see a girl I find attractive, I immediately age her 60 years in my mind. Then I decide if she’s still attractive. Don’t get me wrong fellas, physicality plays a role, but it shouldn’t be the the predominant role. Raw passion has its place, but you should never let that be the first place. Most of my first glances have been based on physical attraction. But, if the relationship deepens, the focus quickly morphs. I’ve learned to realize that the physical fades. The inside is what stays the same. The wit, humor, and thoughtfulness stay the same. The desire to serve, love, support, uphold, and respect stay the same. Often, sadly, the lack thereof stays the same as well.
If all you smell of her is her perfume, then you’ll never know the real her. If you can’t see her red-faced, teary-eyed crying and her red-faced, teary-eyed laughing, then maybe you don’t really see her. If you don’t know about her biggest disappointments and her biggest dreams, then maybe you don’t really know her. If you can’t see her old, gray, and wrinkly and love her just the same, then maybe you don’t really love her at all. If you can’t picture the wheelchair, then you need to stop wasting your time and hers.
Alright… it’s officially dark out here. I need to pack all this stuff up and head back to the apartment. No point in droning on and belaboring the point. So I’ll stop while I’m ahead. Now… I just have to remember where exactly I parked my car…
