Rural Adventures, Immature Elders, and that Midwestern Obsession with Normalcy
or, taking it back a bit because shit's actually all right in my day-to-day life currently
No one out in public has messed with me in a while! That’s good news, right? Of course it is. But I started this thing so that all of you who don’t have to deal with it get a sense of what “we” deal with, and also so that anyone with a visible disability can commiserate or be clever or fight you or cry or laugh or make art or whatever they feel like doing. (I recommend all these things as needed.)
I’m realizing as I write this, sipping strong coffee out of a startlingly white cup, that of course the minute I tell you all that everyone’s been oddly non-hypocritical out here in WEAR OUR PROGRESSIVE VALUES ON OUR SLEEVES LAND, some asshole is bound to throw it off by tossing another story in my direction that fits this theme all too well. But right now, the morning is peaceful. So let’s go back to the not-too-distant past.
I used to live in the mountain town of Placerville, CA, population 10,000. Don’t ask why Ian and I decided this would be a good idea, but do ask me questions if you start to become a wistful Cottage-Core person, because I can tell you, if you’re not someone the Nazis would’ve approved of, superficially speaking, then rural America suxxxxx. I could talk about why in a thousand different directions, but let’s zero in on the old dude I passed every morning that I didn’t work as a substitute teacher on the way to Totem, a coffeehouse so truly paradise-ical that it’s a wonder it was shining there in downtown Placerville, but there it was. And, to the absolute awe and borderline-dismay of every local who needed my address, Ian and I did not live in a house far away from everything Get Out-style, the Placerville dream, but rather in an elegant but tiny apartment on Main Street, in the middle of the action, such as it was, and Totem was the main action, as well as the entire reason I was able to finish the first draft of my novel-in-progress.
This old man, quintessentially elderly and quintessentially white, would ask me, every time he saw me, “When you gonna get new legs?”
I don’t remember how many times he asked me this before I finally had enough, and stopped to tell him that my legs are fine. That I don’t need new legs, these are perfect (it would be years before I actually believed in this from a confidence point of view, but the activist in me didn’t need to kick out my lifelong inferiority complex to be vocal, which is convenient. It’s gone now, and activist-me is in sync with whatever you call the rest.)
He stammered. He told me that in Korea, he saw a lot of his buddies’ legs get shot off, and these deeply moved me, and I told him from my heart that I was truly sorry he witnessed that, but we know that generation and Feelings, so he brushed me off without being mean about it. I didn’t pity anyone, but he clearly read it that way (or else it was too painful to talk about) and he brushed off the one topic on which we could genuinely connect as people and made me continue the original subject.
“That didn’t happen to me,” I said. “My legs are fine. I don’t need new ones and I don’t like when you ask me that. You ask me this every time you see me.”
This, he flat out denied. He told me he had never seen me before. I told him he had, that it was always him, at this patio table, right here, and he told me that wasn’t true, and if you’re not feeling charitable you can accuse him of many things but if you are, and it would be tremendously sad if this were the case, you could entertain the thought that maybe he legit doesn’t remember and that’s why this happens every two or three days?
No matter. There was another very old white guy who walked past me laughing, in Seattle, and said, “Faster, faster!”
This was so cruel I didn’t know what to do with it, but Ian had the perfect response: “Younger, younger!” He wasn’t there, however, so only in my fantasy do I counter with this. (Not that my fantasy life doesn’t have far more urgent matters to tend to than having had a comeback for that dude.)
When I first started going to the gym, a lot of old people openly took bigoted solace in perceiving me as more decrepit than they were, so that felt good. I remember one old lady’s words of wisdom, which were representative: “Wow, watching you get on that bike. I’m 75, so I get on these machines and think I have it hard, but YOU!” In that cursed 3-word pronoun, a whole ableist mindset: Imagine having to be you.
I’ve been a member of that gym for over a year now and it’s been a long time since I’ve been treated like I don’t belong there. The young glamorous receptionist who started with, “Are YOU a MEMBER?!” now says, “Hey, Sarah! Phone number?” (that’s how we check in) almost as soon as I walk through the door.
I joke with Ian that the reason so many old people resent and belittle me is because I get all the disability privileges of literally ordering people out of their seats on public transit while remaining youthful-looking and hot. I shouldn’t act like everyone over a certain age treats me the same way, though. I definitely respect my elders and on the whole, they respect me. A fellow sauna regular even flat out told me that she was shocked to find out my age because “you look really, really good!” a particularly meaningful assessment under the (nude, sweating) circumstances.
One of the weirdest non-compliments I’ve ever received came from someone who was around my age, back when I was in college. We were at a party, and I got there before she did. For some reason, a pair of crutches in the corner threw her as though she’d walked in and seen a bloody corpse. “Whose are THESE?!” she cried out in dismay to the group of us sitting on the floor. (At the kind of parties I went to in those days, there was a whole lot of sitting on the floor.)
“They’re mine,” I said. I probably didn’t sound too happy with her.
“Oh!” she answered, clearly trying to retract her primal fear. “Well, I would never have known. You look so! normal! from this position.”
The best response to that eloquent summation came from someone my roommate was dating at the time, who said: “Well she doesn’t know you at all.”
