Never Walked In High Heels

Back by Popular Demand

I have learned in recent years that there are many hazards of not having a diamond ring. However, this was one that I never expected.

I was in a coffee shop the other day when a young man asked if he could sit next to me. Instantly suspicious, I stupidly nodded even though my past judgment has told me that individuals who wish to sit next to me usually want to talk to me, and such individuals who want to talk to me usually prevent me at the very least from getting my work done. However, this particular man illustrated that not only would he hold me back from work, but I would proceed to a conversation which even my best etiquette teachers would be at an absolute loss to navigate. The young man proceeded to tell me his name and states that he has been abducted to the planet Zorbon, and what I am actually seeing is his hologram android.

At first I think, he must be joking in order to seem more bizarre than he actually is, and then he proceeds to tell me that he is serious, using his laptop to pull up star charts, databases, and other information regarding the great planet of Zorbon which, forgive me if I’m mistaken, seems as if no one on earth has ever heard of.

This of course is not the first time I have found myself in a conversation which made me question whether or not I had slipped into an alternate universe. I seem to attract weirdos from every tribe, nation, and planet. This is a gene I am convinced that I have inherited from my father. My father has the remarkable ability to attract cult leaders, religious fanatics and shall we say, oddities of all sorts. Evidently during their early dating lives, these convergent flocks would hound my mother and father; making it impossible for them to go on a simple date. So I seem to have inherited this gene and although it seems to be recessive in most people, I have a pheromone that somehow attracts very bizarre people.

On the whole, I think that I am pretty tolerant of different individuals’ world views. My own views are fierce in their own right, which may be as strange to some as hailing from Zorbon. Among my friends, there are many Jews, Catholics, Hindu’s, Muslims, basically an entire diversified population which would make the BBC diversity department howl with envy. However, there is only so much a woman can take and being introduced to a hologram android is pushing the limits. The only appropriate response I could garner was, “Buddy, you’re bloody insane.”

I’m not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe being from the planet Zorbon is supposed to be particularly sexy. Perhaps in the style of, I’ll let you see my hologram if you let me see yours. But in my book, this is not a particularly pleasant way to start a romance let alone a conversation.

I have often been told in my life to be kind and tolerant to everyone and to love them exactly as they are, giving every guy a chance before I reject him as a potential suitor. These days, coffee shops are the place to meet your soulmate; and so I do my best to smile and look inviting, even when I’m only there to get a little work done. I don’t know if these rules of dating extend to people who have been abducted and replaced by androids, but after about fifteen minutes of supposed conversation, I found it best to take my work and make an exit.

When I was in Prague a few years ago I saw a blind violinist on the street. He played his instrument so lovingly well that, without thinking I pulled out a bill (as to not make noise with cumbersome coins) and placed it into the tin cup in front of him. When I returned to my traveling companions  one of them was enraged.

“I thought you didn’t believe in charity,” she snapped. This was news to me. We had sat up many a night debating politics and the role of government. She, of course, had different views from my own (most people do). I wracked my brian trying to figure out when I had said that I didn’t believe in charity. I couldn’t find anything.

I’m a little bit older now and can recognize something which I couldn’t see before.  One of which is, of course my companion’s insecurity about her own views. Another is, I see what often passes for “charity” and I do not like it.

Charity does not equate paying your tax dollars. Period. End of Story. The next time someone tries to tell you that paying taxes is ‘charitable,’ remember that charity is by definition a voluntary action. Paying taxes is not voluntary. Here is where my companion’s assumption went wrong. I want to help people. A lot of folks want to help people who also want to keep taxes and the government in check. I just don’t want to fool myself into thinking that paying taxes is my moral deed done for the day.

I also don’t want to give charity because “it’s the right thing to do,” like earning some Girlscout badge or ticking something off my list. The word charity comes from the Latin ‘carus’ which means ‘dear.’ Charity is as much of a trade as anything commercial. One cannot be charitable until he values what he is giving to. I received something from you/ your cause, you gave me an idea, you made me think or, I am just glad to know you are in the world. Charity or aid should be about recognizing inherent value of the recipient, not the action.

I do believe in charity and gifts. What I don’t believe in is that you should give because you ought  or, worse still, because you are ‘privileged.’ We have come into a time (no thanks to the redefinition of taxes) where charity has become defined as giving a check rather than service. The more “the government takes care of it” the less we have to see the hunger, the less with have to heal the illnesses, and the less we have to fight the injustices ourselves. Thus, the less we have to feel the painful pull that makes us grit our teeth and do everything we can to make it better.

When people say its ‘society’s duty to be charitable,’ I can’t help but squirm. What is this “society” you speak of? And how can duty ever be on the same plane as charity? Society never cured anything. People, individuals, took action to overcome. And they did. And they will again. Society has never changed en masse. It took individuals prodding them for things to get better. Call it Newton’s Social law if you’d like.

I still remember that violinist and can hear him play. I just wish I knew what he was to have given me over the years. I would have paid him more.

Walking into the church, I felt gorgeous. My green dress perfectly complimented my red hair as the fabric skimmed off of my shoulders and tightly hugged my waist flowing in a cascade down to my knees. The gold sandals I wore had rhinestones that hit the light with such intensity, you would swear they were diamonds. I hoped I was stunning as I walked into one of the back pews, greeted my neighbors, and sat down.

When we all rose for the first song, I noticed that I was having a good day on my feet, able to stand upright and straight (my mother had recently commented that she thought I had grown over the summer despite being 25 years old and far past growth spurts) I opened my mouth to sing noticing the reflection of the sunlight through the stain glass window. Suddenly and inexplicably I felt something cold at my back—I was nearly bowled over. “What the — ?” I started to wonder. Whipping around I noticed a little old lady who had her fingers down the back of my dress.

“Everything’s fine dear. It was just that your bra strap was showing and I decided to fix it.”

On what planet is it ever considered a reasonable action to stick your fingers down the back of someone else’s dress in order to make them appear more modest by covering their exposed bra strap?

I recognize of course that I have a rather different outlook on the showing of brassier straps than my elders. In my opinion, every woman wears one, so what’s the big deal if it shows every once and a while. I really do appreciate and admire this reverence with which older women treat this topic—that’s not my issue here. My issue is the invasion of privacy and the fact that this little old lady took it upon herself to become especially intimate with me without even asking my permission.

I don’t know what it is about me that says to perfect strangers that I have no boundaries of intimacy. As I’ve stated before, I’ve learned to very carefully seek out potential invaders of privacy. The man on the street who believes that I suddenly need a kiss, the women who take it upon themselves to fix my bra straps, the people who suddenly decided that they know exactly where I’m going and seek to push my wheelchair without ever saying a word to me. Living in London, I’ve come to realize that different cultures have different distances that they perceive as intimate. In the western world, when two people are in a elevator, chances are that they will stand on opposites sides. In more eastern countries, this distance option becomes much closer. What is invasive to one person is uninvasive to another, but I’m pretty sure that sticking your hand down the back of some perfectly strange young woman is considered inappropriate in a majority of cultures.

I believe that my lack of a right to privacy has something to do with my disability. Perfectly good natured people seem to take the stance that if someone in the village has a disability it is the responsibility of the entire community to bound together and help them, which on the one hand is perfectly true. But at the same time, the communal help is supposedly to offer the disabled person as normal a life as possible, and a normal life usually means keeping boundaries to some sane level. It does not mean letting everyone in to manipulate your life, your possessions, and your clothes to however they see fit. Help is only a blessing when it’s actually helpful. When it isn’t helpful, it quickly turns into a nuisance.

Yes, I know people mean well. And I probably should be more thankful than I am. As my mother would say, ‘its better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’ Well, so are a lot of things but that doesn’t make them OK. And for that matter, she knows I’d kill her if she ever tried to fiddle with my bra strap in public. I’m a twenty five year old woman. We live in a culture where a certain amount of privacy is required by each other in order to remain respectful. Maybe this woman would’ve acted the same way if I was able bodied, but I doubt it.

Either way, I knew my bra strap was showing when I bought the dress and I had consciously decided that wasn’t an issue. Which is to say, I suppose, I had chosen to take the consequences for my actions of exposing an eighth of an inch of a bra in public. I just never expected the consequence to be so invasive.

In the list of the few teachers I didn’t get along with, there has been one name that has come back to my mind in recent months. He was loud, obnoxious, and arrogant, always interrupting students the second we got off course. He used to strut, yes strut, in front of a classroom full of seventeen year-olds, waiting to write the next discussion point on the board. Looking back, he was the only teacher I remember from high school who dared to grade papers in red pen. I’m sure I had more teachers like him, but this Economics teacher was fiercely Capitalist, supremely self-righteous, and made Ayn Rand look like a soccer mom.

These days, I wish he taught kindergarden.

Why do we insist on not teaching our children the basics of Economics? In between the Maths, Sciences, and Phonics, all the building blocks which are supposed lead to a full functioning member of society, there is no time to learn about the basic bedrock of what holds society together: money. The word problems in arithmetic class aren’t enough. “Sally sells seashells at seventy cents” only serves to teach young people the value of numbers, not the value of money. We give them no concept about how taxes work or how money stabilizes a society until they a practically full fledged members themselves, and even then the value of money is rarely discussed. In the affluent public schools we teach that charity is done by giving money away, not by acting on the problem. We teach to give to the poor without question, rather than teaching that even alms can be an investment. And in doing all this we teach that the best way to solve a problem is by throwing more money at it, rather than seeing where the money is already going.

This form of financial education only serves to create a bigger schism between classes. We divide the world into haves and have nots, keeping the latter dependent on the former. Resentment naturally becomes a two way street.

There is a common thought, I suppose, that often leads young people astray in the first place: “Let kids be kids,” we say, rightfully protecting the innocence of youth.  But there comes a point where a chick has to battle with his own strength against the reality of the shell protecting him. If you break the egg for him, the chick never develops his own strength and dies in a relatively short  time. To intentionally keep a child ignorant about the basics of life represents a grave failure as a parent.

If you think I’m overreacting, I’ll make it concrete. I recently spoke with a young woman who is currently getting her masters. She graduated from one of the top liberal arts colleges a few years ago at the top of her class. And she was horrified to learn that when she makes a deposit in the bank, the actual cash doesn’t just sit there until she is ready to take it out. She didn’t understand what it meant to be FDIC insured and had never heard of some stocks going up in a recession.

How is it this student went to some of the best schools in the world and managed to miss this information not only in Economics class but also in History, Math, Government, Art History…

We should be teaching the basic principals of saving, credit, and interest from the day children are able to understand that money exists. We should be teaching teenagers how to follow investments in a mock stock exchange competition. And nobody should be allowed to graduate high school without knowing how to do taxes, set up a long term savings account, and handle APR. Failure to do so creates a system that combines two of the most crippling elements in the world: fear and guilt. Fear, from not knowing how to handle money, and guilt from having it in the first place.

My teacher was a man who, sadly, didn’t have many of the qualities a good teacher has. I’m sure he drove the school administration nuts. (More power to him for that!) But he understood the fact that if people didn’t appreciate and even respect the value of money from a young age, economic chaos was certain.

As I remember this teacher’s behavior whenever a student finally conceded that he was right, I hope we don’t give him a chance to strut during this modern economic period.

I used to spend my mornings with a man I called Mordichai. Much like the character he is named after, he was a long-time outcast in his family and would, no doubt, be considered one by my own relations if they had ever bothered to meet him. I would sneak into his room before classes began and try to warm my hands, wounded from a combination of the harsh Chicago cold, and the reality of living in a wheelchair. Looking to him for a combination of wisdom and simple sanity, I would sit at Mordichai’s desk to write, to read, or simply trying to sort through the inner workings of an eighteen year old’s brain.  Each year I grew a year older but it seemed as if he did not. Rather, with each passing year we became closer in age and a learned more of his reality and he learned more of my secrets.

Becoming a woman alongside Mordichai and his partner provided me with grace and an added level of support to the already strong scaffolding that my parents gave me. They were a couple with whom I would disagree fiercely and still know that I was loved… perhaps loved even more because I had the strength to disagree.  As time went on, our conversations revolved more around big topics, which were out of my grasp when we first met and I was fifteen. Questions of freedom and liberty, morality and common good haunted us some nights as our meeting venue changed from his classroom to the fireplace in his own home. I was now living independently, working part time, and continuing with my education at the university level.

And as questions became easier to grasp, the answers grew increasingly slippery. Until one day it occurred to us both that our America is not limitless, and the entitled freedoms that we were promised in the Constitution have yet to be delivered in full. My world had to stop at the first unpaved road I came upon so long as any wheelchair could not cross it. And for him and Tom, what was everyone else’s private business was still held in court, waiting for a decision that seemed obvious to me.

In many ways, I am jealous of the media’s attention to Mordichai’s issues over my own. And who can blame them, the image of an angered drag queen will no doubt get more viewers then a group of paraplegics crawling up the steps of the Capitol building at an abrasively slow rate.  What’s worse is that as a disabled person, my rights are constantly pitted up against other causes, such as the new environmentally-friendly taxi cabs which, in order to save on fuel,  have been made so small that no wheelchair will ever be able to fit inside. It’s an either  / or society. Where Mordichai’s right to have his partner visit him in the hospital gets debated on national television, and in the same week the American with Disabilities Act gets stripped by the Supreme Court and nobody notices.

“This is why you’re a writer. That’s why you need to always have your pen, and hands that are at the ready” Mordichai’s voice echoes in my ear. To give a voice to a community that it still voiceless sometimes feels like trying to remove barnacles with one’s bare hands. To find my own voice on top of that challenge can prove to be as effective as a screen door on a submarine some days. Sometimes I think we all wish we could finish growing up before the troubles come.

I went back to visit Mordichai a few weeks ago. He is getting older, even though it’s not always obvious. The winter wind is nowhere near leaving Chicago in April and I can feel a film of salt covering my hands as I come inside. He asks me how I am, and I don’t know where to begin. When did life scatter to a thousand different directions? I start with the most obvious, “My hands hurt from this horrible weather. How do you stand it?”

“I’m not in a wheelchair,” he begins. We all have that one thorn in our side, which we wished to have removed. And yet it painfully stays there to shape our world.

Without speaking he gets up and leaves, only to return will a bottle of lotion that smells of sandalwood. He puts some on my hands and rubs it in. He starts muttering about how I should be taking better care of myself, about how I only have so many units of energy per day to spend and I should be more selective in the battles I fight. Sometimes having him around is like having a second father. I argue with him, if for no other reason then it’s my role to do so. It doesn’t matter because we’re both convinced we are right. I need my hands so I can go places and be just like everyone else. He stops me there.

My hands, he reminds me, should be used in a way nobody has ever  used them.

Living with a disability is the equivalent of being trapped inside the riddle about a dog, a duck, and a bag of grain. Which all need to cross the river? You can’t leave the duck alone with the grain because the duck will eat the grain. You can’t leave the dog with the duck because the dog will eat the duck. Yet somehow you have to manage to take a rowboat and get all three across.

It was on a day when my life was turning out to be the epitome of this riddle when my mother exploded at me “You need to learn to avoid problems at all possible costs! Why can’t you keep things as simple as humanly possible?” The irony of it was I actually do my best to accomplish just that, but I am somehow extremely unsuccessful at it. When you are trying to navigate through a world which is built for people on two functioning legs and with two functioning hands, the idea of avoiding problems leads you little further than coming out your front door. If you want to avoid the challenges of the world, that is staying inside where it’s safe. If you want to live life to the fullest, you better be prepared for some sort of “choose your own adventure” story with lots of opportunities to see the “Game Over” screen.

I used to think that life was actually about avoiding problems at all possible costs, making the right decisions that would lead to the path of least resistance and easy sailing. But you can’t avoid problems. There is no fairy godmother that can swoop in and make everything OK. Living was only in the confines of a highly accessible house and being certain that all the problems in the world will not come to get you will lead to a highly boring life. It’s the old dilemma of Siddartha, the Buddhist prince who had everything he wanted and yet lacked fulfillment in the world. I’m not sure when my mother said I needed to avoid problems, she meant it to its fullest extent possible. Because avoiding problems means on some level that there are real solutions to every dilemma we face, which can be attained. Some issues are so complicated that they are, on a certain level, unsolvable. The best thing we can do is simply work our way through them.

Life only works when its constantly expanding in every direction. This doesn’t simply mean finding creative solutions to the problems that we encounter, or incorporating some sort of community spirit through living. t means that the problems, the sorrows, the bruises, these too are a part of life and worth working through and worth living for. Even this sorrow, which none of us want to encounter, must be faced fully in order for a life to even begin to have the depth possible and necessary to be rich and full of vibrancy. In return, these problems we encounter and sorrows we must mourn present us with a new challenge. We can either close our hearts and become callous, refusing to go anywhere that hasn’t been protected by some emotional health and safety policy. Or we can take it, all of us that is, for what it ,d recognize that to love it all and to live it all is to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, risking failure heartbreak and the entire boat tipping over losing the entire dock and the bag of grain. But in the end, we live in a world where trading vulnerability and safety inevitably stops not only problems, but living, dead in it’s tracks.