"The Parking Placard (Black n') Blues: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the ADA, Which Just Turned 35" a short memoir written by John Mohler
It’s an epiphany when you realize for the first time that the white stick-figure on the blue parking sign is you. That's you. Now you can park in that fat sirloin of a spot. Now you are “the disabled.”
For me, this leap to disabilityhood was as every bit as much a mental process as a physical one. And I fought the knowledge, down the line, tooth and nail. I always did, with every new adaptation or assistive device, fight, fight, fight. To some that sounds courageous, but really it’s ridiculous. But I was young, I was always healthy, and I was a guy. I didn't need no parking placard: that's for other people. I didn't need nothing.
I had a thick head.
So what changed my mind? I can’t remember the moment I decided to pick up a disability parking application. It must have been some watershed event, perhaps my 1,000th fall, the one that rattles your very teeth. Falling itself was no big deal by then, and I might do it a half dozen times in a day. After a while, my body looked like Keith Richards’ after a bender, but cry-cry, I dusted myself off and got back in the game – because you've got to, nobody's going to pay your rent. But maybe that 1,000th time was the one to slosh my brain in its comfy bath of cerebrospinal fluid: Wake up, you green-gray piece of fat!
I used a walker then. An aluminum walker, to go along with the studs of my biker jacket. I would drag the thing to the grocery store for a few items, forgetting half of them by the time I reached the aisles. No browsing, no price-shopping, just throwing things in the cart, and teetering back to the checkout while I fished for cash. Then I dragged my Frankenstein feet out to the parking lot again, cars politely navigating around me - the occasional Einstein would honk, not that I could turn around to see him, not that I could reach around to flick him off.
Image Description: A blue and white parking placard with an icon of a wheelchair user is staked at the edge of a parking lot. The backdrop is a knoll covered in yellowing grass with a simple fence made of dark brown wood. The clear blue sky is so deep that it matches the blue of the placard.
Credit: Robert So / Pexels
As my legs exhausted themselves, my steps grew smaller, smaller, until my energy exhausted itself and my limbs locked into jointless boards due to muscle tone. In the middle of the parking lot, I stood stock still, like performance art, like the Tin Woodsman before Dorothy Gale came along.
The walker had wheels on the front legs so I could push it along instead of lifting and planting it with every step. But once fatigued, I lost the power to hold the walker in place, and the wheels took on a more insidious role, creeping forward slowly. As they gained momentum, I thought, 'No, no, not again.' Unable to lift my feet, my upright posture deteriorated into a letter A, opening wider and wider as the walker rolled away. I couldn’t let go - my hands were locked - so at the fateful moment I'd take a deep breath and bail, thinking: Don't land on the Chef Boyardee!
This happened once on a cold winter's night, after my friend and I attended a wake and, on the way home, stopped for a nightcap. The tavern parking lot was a thin, solid sheet of ice. I straggled back to my car, up a slight incline of drainage built into the black asphalt. Along the way I stopped to rest, talking to my patiently shivering friend while we waited for my legs to unlock.
I detected motion. Yep, I was sliding backward over the ice, in the direction of the drain. I was unable to move or resist; like a Gemini astronaut, I was only along for the ride. At the time I had no idea where I was going: I wasn't even facing where I was headed.
My buddy circled around nervously. “Hey, Fred Astaire, what do I do?”
I was picking up speed. So, I had to be honest with the guy. “I got nothing."
Jim dug in behind to brace me, but honestly, in our leather-soled dress shoes, we might as well have been wearing ice skates. At this point he's pushing back simply to save his own hide. But there was nothing he could do; there was nothing anyone could do. We were a runaway train, and I was taking him down with me. Sometimes you're the slowly rolling bowling ball, and sometimes you're the pin. He was the pin.
Sometimes I imagine what it was like for someone in the warmth of their car to watch us gliiiide across that parking lot. Floating, gracefully rotating in space. Maybe the Blue Danube Waltz was playing on their radio, while we skated from one side of their windshield, all the way to the other. … Faster and faster… Have you watched curling in the winter Olympics?… On and on and on…
What would become of our intrepid lads?
That’s when I started laughing. When things are out of your control, you do well to laugh. In Chicago when freezing your body parts off we often laugh it off with friends. Because it's better to freeze body parts off together and be laughing, than it is to freeze body parts off and not be laughing. And that's the science behind that.
Also, convulsive laughter is helpful in defeating spasticity. In an instant, we were a giggling heap of metal and man sprawled across the dark ice. In our slick shoes, we'd be stranded on that parking lot for a long time. For the life of me, I can't figure out how we ever got up again.
Lucky were the times when there was a friend around and frictionless ice to fall on. More often, it was a sidewalk or a bathroom or a busy street crosswalk, hopefully with one or more gallant onlookers there to drag me out of danger and stuff me into my car. After rebuffing their offers for medical assistance, I would fall asleep on the front seat, sometimes more than an hour, sometimes with the engine running.
Somewhere in there happened magic No. 1000, the one to knock some sense in my noggin, the one to make my broken capillaries scream, “Get the blue placard, already!”
Before then, I clung to a strange, outmoded notion of what independence was. But once I crossed into that thin blue sign, what I found waiting for me was a Technicolor world of fuller independence, of accessible services, jobs, housing, education and protected rights, accessible medicines and tech and yes, even decent curb cutouts and parking spaces - a whole societal push to involve everyone, including me, and bring everybody to the decision-making table, even hardheaded fools who happened to fall upon the right decision one day, after he fell absolutely every other place first.
Viva the ADA.
About the Author
John Mohler (he/him) is a writer with multiple sclerosis, who publishes at Wheelie Out There: WheelieOutThere.blogspot.com.
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