Maintaining Perspective
“Where’s my driver? What the fuck. I don’t have time for this!”
That is the kind of thing that runs through my mind often when waiting on my paratransit ride. Unfortunately, it is the reality of this situation. Scheduled pick-up times are really just a window of approximation, a good ballpark idea of when you will actually be picked up. Initially, I used to think it had everything to do with the skills and abilities of the drivers to navigate their way efficiently through South Florida. I soon learned better. It is the nature of a system that has to be flexible enough to accommodate people with doctor’s appointments and therapy sessions.
So you learn to be flexible yourself. Some days, your driver may be early, sometimes they may run nearly an hour late. Once you start lowering your expectations, once you start to release even THAT measure of control, it becomes ok. Plus, for someone like me who is thankfully healthy, a few trips with someone coming back from chemotherapy or a dialysis session will ground you pretty quick.
Several weeks ago, I was picked up by a wheelchair van for the trip home from the shop. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, wheelchair vans are a mixed bag – it could mean a direct ride home or a long stop as they pick up someone ho is in a wheelchair, load them in, strap the chair in tight and all of that. After a long, hot day, it is easy to get impatient with such things and get lost in your own, relatively minor suffering. So when my driver, a Haitian man whose English is heavily accented by another lifetime of speaking Creole in forms me that we have to pick up someone else, I sigh inwardly and ponder my woes.
How stupid of me, really. Perspective man. Perspective.
We pull onto Oakland Park Boulevard as the South Florida skies, overcast and threatening, break open into a pour. Shit, I’m late already, now we have stop-and-go traffic to contend with. Man, this sucks. I always get nervous when I see a driver repeatedly looking down at his manifest, because I know that means he is trying to triangulate the address we are heading to. Even better. A late start, pouring rain, bad traffic and a driver who has no idea where we are going for the next pick-up.
There is this little hospital tucked away on Oakland Park Boulevard I had never heard of, Saint Something-Or-Other. Apparently, my driver had never heard of it either, so it took more than a few backtracking u-turns to make our way to it’s gated entrance. I’ll tell you this: You ever want to get into a gated community or medical center parking lot without hassles? Get a white van and a Haitian driver. they wave you through without asking for shit. After the gate lifts and the guard nods, We’re in. A short period passes as we amble around the parking lot a bit before the driver discovers the main entrance area where he is to go meet his pick-up.
And there, barely protected by the pouring rain was a woman all by herself in a wheelchair offering me all the perspective I ever needed. African-American, about my age (40-something) and at the mercy of the weather. Suddenly, all the supposed “inconveniences” I was dealing with that day seemed ridiculously selfish.
The driver pulled up his van as close as he could to the area under the awning where she was parked. The problem was that the awning was narrow and the rain was starting to come down real freakin’ hard at that point, nearly sideways. He diligently and without complaint walked out into this rain as he rounded the van’s front and proceeded to bring down the wheelchair lift and begin the whole process of securing her aboard.
Soon, the driver was out the back of the van and around to the front again, taking his place behind the wheel and we were off. I turned and offered a greeting, which she returned. Her accent was rooted in Georgia or South Carolina. I couldn’t tell much more as she was cocooned n a hooded sweatshirt. I noticed that her wheelchair wasn’t motorized and she didn’t have a great command of her arms. I was already trying to drill down and diagnose her malady when she solved the mystery just as the rain started to let up.
“Those therapies jus’ wipe me out,” she struggled to say between labored breaths. “I have MS, you know, and the doctors, they good but it hurts me.”
I want to say “that sucks”, but I can’t say something like that. I don’t know this person, and it could be insulting even if that isn’t my intent. She may even be offended by the use of the word “sucks” for all I know, coming from a hospital called Saint Something-Or-Other. So I give the innocuous if awkward “Oh wow” reply. I can be so useless sometimes.
I turn to the front, look at the traffic before us and start to think about myself again. I begin to wonder who will be dropped off first. It’s stunning how quickly that happens. Even face to face with someone who is obviously suffering a fate far worse than mine and I’m folding back into my petty concerns. Sad. I am brought out of my self by the annoying sound of coins repeatedly being clinked together behind me.
I slowly, nonchalantly turn around and discover that the noise is from the woman fumbling with her change purse. She is rummaging around in it with fingers that are all bent up and useless. She is trying to get her $2.50 out to pay the driver. She has it all in quarters apparently and can’t seem to get a grip on any of them. Couple that with the jostling nature of the ride, the stop-and-go traffic and the terrible fact that her wheelchair is strapped in directly over the back wheels of the van and her quest for quarters becomes incredibly frustrating.
The only thing standing in the way of my helping her is that it involves a woman and her purse. Sacred ground. She would be placing a lot of trust in a stranger, a blind stranger mind you, to go rummaging around looking for money in her purse. But I offer anyway, and she accepts.
I was only able to find $1.75 in the area where she kept the coins, all in quarters. She sighed.
“My husband was supposed to put all that money in there,” she said. “I guess he messed up or something.”
I told her not to worry and that I had some change and it would be ok. The driver chimed in and said it wasn’t a problem, that these things happen. The woman, somewhat embarrassed, thanked us and stared out the window.
Like I often find on these trips, I am left to ponder how we got to this. Here’s a woman, married with kids I find out, and coping with a devastating malady that will probably claim her life in a decade or so. Her ailment has rendered her family financially devastated and she only receives care thanks to the kindness of Saint Something-Or-Other. Paying for transportation in quarters. A husband suffering through his own torn hell, working two jobs and trying to keep the kids on track in school. It is life at it’s cruelest.
And all I can offer, all I can say, is “oh wow.”
The driver does nothing to alleviate my guilt as he is now heading west on Southgate Boulevard, a path which will certainly bring me home first. Damn it dude, why’d you do that to me? I ask him where she is going, hoping that perhaps she is between here and my home, but he disappoints me. She is heading to Coconut Creek way up near the county line. Man, that’s a trek. I am just left to shake my head.
As we pull into the green, tree-lined neighborhood that I live in, I feel almost shameful. I have so much to be grateful for. I may not be rich, but I have a lot of wealth. As I get out of the van, the sun is peaking through the clouds. I am later than usual, but whatever. I say goodbye to the woman and the driver and go inside my house, ready to immerse myself in the usual distractions of what’s for dinner, what’s on television and what do you have for homework.
Sadly, come tomorrow afternoon, the woman, her wheelchair and her MS will be a distant memory and I’ll be back to looking at the clock and wondering why my driver is so damn late.
RSS
