Patricia Farrell

Courtesy Never Dies

No one told me I would be using a walker, hunched over those curved aluminum handles and hoping the brakes on the wheels would hold, but that’s life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you and you’ve got to be ready to catch it with both hands and draw it toward your chest so it doesn’t fall to the floor. But today, the bus jostled, slamming me into a pole. A man sneered at me, “They shouldn’t let people like you on the bus!” Yeah, people like me, with walkers.

A slow slog from the bus stop sends stabs of pain to my ankle, but I push on. Good thing my folding friend has wheels. I don’t think I could pick it up. Each slab of the sidewalk is daring me forward. The beast is waiting, and I’ve got to gather my strength, so I take it slow to save my breath and prepare. 

I see it up ahead of me. The carpet of cement stretches out like a raceway that will never see a race. Seven stone demons wait to test me again, as they do each time I approach. A slender handrail is my only hope, and then the door that becomes heavier each day awaits to laugh in my face, daring me to open it. So much malevolence, so much evil. 

Stopping at the first step, I pin an imaginary medal on myself for making it this far. The staircase is empty. Not a person around who might wring out some small bit of kindness to help me. The walker waits like a babe to be pulled up behind me. I hate it and what it signifies about me and what I’ve lost. But the aluminum babe and I make it this time.

I look up in tired expectation, and an apparition stands before me. Dressed in clothing that long ago lost its style, a jacket that is more robe than a suit jacket, he is a caricature out of a Dickens tale.

Wiry thin white hairs give him the look of a fuzzy halo. His large nose almost disappears into the pudgy face, now marked with a smile. The slight twinkle in his cloudy eyes is reassuring. 

Wrinkled, rumpled and over 90, he stands holding on to his cane as he utters, “Here, let me hold the door for you,” and pushes his entire back, not his hand, against it to supply the strength he needs. I see how he digs his heels in to provide a hold on the door that demands to be shut in my face. Evil door. I hate it and the stairs and the walker. I hate all of them.

But courtesy and human kindness haven’t died, at least not in one frail, elderly man and I will accept.