chair lift

this entry is under construction and will contain quite a few more images of my mom suffering at some point, but i couldn't make folks wait while i tried to capture the ridiculousness of this story.

my mother subscribes to a logic that is completely indecipherable to normal humans. this is not entirely her fault. moms move within a world defined by selflessness and the protection of helpless small things. i think that for some, when the helpless small things grow up, this motivation warps in on itself and makes many moms into completely baffling creatures whose every move is subject to a new scrutiny that includes hysterical laughter and howls of "i can't even begin to understand what you were thinking!" from the children. this is, obviously, when mothers are at their weakest and dutiful children wouldn't dare capitalize on that weakness. sorry mom. you raised me to seize an opportunity...

a while ago my mom fought a pitched battle against two cruel foes, sheet ice and her calcium-poor bones. perhaps if she hadn't been wearing clogs on the ice in the middle of winter, but that's another story altogether. my dear, sweet mother is legendary for her ability to go from vertical to on her butt (or shoulder or probably even her head) in under a second and for her inability to wear shoes appropriate to the outdoor weather (or any shoes, half the time). this combination of skill and decision-making left her less than victorious against the ice. she ended up with a broken femur and a new appreciation for my dad’s personal assistant skills. although she is mending, she still needs a little help from a wheelchair when she’s out.

just so you know, my parents raised three daughters whose careers center around working with people who have disabilities. we see things like crutches and wheelchairs and even some dogs as tools to help folks do the things they want to do when their bodies have had difficulty. so our mom’s strange attitude about her own wheelchair is not something she learned from us.

we raised her better and are beginning to question those coffee and danish consuming thugs she spends time with at the food court of the mall.

back to the present. a few days ago, the parents were out driving around and had a flat tire. now, you should probably know about the times they’ve run out of gas and all, but I don’t have time for the whole story, so for now we’re at the flat tire. they got their sassy van towed to goodyear and several attempts to patch the tire were failures. they had to buy a new one. no problem. dad picked out a tire, paid and drove the van onto the lift. he got out. mom didn’t get out.

now, to be fair, she claims dad told her they’d only be waiting five minutes and she figured it would take more than that to get her out of the car and into the chair. however, this is not likely. she had to insist. she had to go way beyond insisting. the guys at garages do not allow people to be in the cars when the cars are on lifts. try it. see what you get.

when her children were in school mom kept herself out of trouble by being a substitute teacher. for reasons none of us can figure, she tended to be beloved by evil little boys, the kind who grow up to be written about in the police blotter on a regular but boring basis. we’ve considered that maybe she used some sort of hypnosis on them, but we know for sure she has power over a certain part of the population nobody else seems to have power over. for instance, people who work at toll booths or the returns desk at sears, or even guys operating the lifts at garages.

no one will ever know how mom controls the world, but it doesn't really matter. what does matter is that she spent an entire thursday afternoon on a lift in the goodyear shop, gazing out above the heads of all the grease smeared goodyear guys while my dad sipped coffee and read the paper in the climate controlled waiting room.