Do you have a place where you can go a place where everything seems to feel right even if you know it's all but an illusion of the moment? I did that today. I had to go have my powerchair, once again, looked at and have work done on it. I still had a couple of hour of over- time i have to use or loose. I had to have the chair worked on and today was perfect for using the time, besides if ai did not get the chair worked on it would literally fall apar with me it. So, back to Magic Rest. The maintenance only took a couple of minutes. I figured as much but I was down down in South town area half a block from the housing authority and the independent living center. So, I figured why get off the clock the? I could really do some honest out reach calls.
I felt good getting out in the community. I came into the housing authority un announced. The director there is an old friend of mine from back in my housing days. It was great seeing Kerry. It had been too long. We had lunch last winter. His shop actually sends calls to our information line so we mixed business and pleasure. Cool. But Kerry IS the director and I came in unannounced, so I hung round long to justify the call and took off. Another block to the north is the Independent Living Center(IL). I have a history with the IL I worked at the IL for nearly 15 years Thats a long time for me.
My experience at the IL was full filling, tragic and to say the least bizarre. It's family. I felt at once at home a strange way. The grown quite a bit since I was there. More staff, younger staff perhaps staff that can not know the history of the facility. The core staff are still there, most of them anyway. Deb, Kim, Julie and Charlotte. We were all there more or less from the beginning or at least the most early days. Deb and I talked a long while, out back in the hot October sun. We are both quads—we thirst after heat. We both use power chairs for mobility. We are both aging quads. We have beat the odds; many of the other spinal cord injuries we have know are dead dying or facing the calamities of advanced aging brought about by living with spinal cord injury. But we talked know deeply what each other ws about.
Kim joined us after a bit. Kim is my vocational brother. Kim watched out for me much more then I him. We must have been linked in a prior life. We are just strange comfortably so. Kim understands and pretty much knows everything. Kim is an enigma , Kim loves being an enigma he work at being a enigma. He loves being an enigma. Kim is the holy grail. Our conversation turned to my trials and tribulations of my power chair. Well it seems that the IL is where many power chairs go to die, more to the point the IL place where many survivors of power chair users send their chairs when the power chair user dies. Kim had to do a little searching but found the exact charger I needed to keep in my office for my downtown charges.
Julie joined us after a bit. Julie is another crip chick another quad. She sat in the office next to mine for years. Julie is quiet, reassuring and always supportive. We Deb is the heat of the sun Julie is the warmth of a thousand summers winking into night.
I left the IL with more then a chair charger, I left restored.
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