ROPEIK: Stop and stare

When we were little, we loved to stare &- at funny-colored cars, things in weird languages, people who look like their dogs. We stared at things that couldn't stare back and at things that could. We learned, of course, that the latter was rude and mean, and as we grew up we grew out of it, so that now, we avert our eyes, try for tact, fix our gazes straight ahead until the person &- maybe they're on crutches or have a big glaring scar &- has gone past.

But then we turn around and look when they can't see. And why shouldn't we? Kids stare at things they're seeing for the first time, or strange, shocking things, ones they don't yet understand, and as adults we're no different. 

I should note that I'm currently on the receiving end of these stares, and it's so bizarre it made me, well, want to write a column about it. I just got home from a five-week hospital stay following a spinal cord injury that left me neurologically one-legged and often in a wheelchair until I can hobble and stretch and will my muscles back into action. For now, I'm stuck away from school, so instead of on Commonwealth Avenue or in the halls of the College of Arts and Sciences, a recent day found me wheeling with my parents into the Target in my Maryland hometown. 

This was only my second "outing," as they call them, since I entered the hospital, and it was a surreal experience. I navigated my wheelchair delicately among racks of clothes, shoes, small kitchen appliances, feeling a few feet shorter and a few strides slower than normal. The best thing that can be said about the wheelchair is that I'm better at parallel parking in it than I am in my car.

So, the outings are tough. The hospital tended to suck and home can be boring, but the outings are a whole new ballgame. There's a lot to take in for someone who's been sensory-deprived for weeks, someone who, the last time they were in this particular Target, could walk. But more than sighing at three-inch heels I don't know when I'll be able to wear again, more than wishing I had a truck's beep-beep to signal reversing so I didn't have to scatter pedestrian-shoppers with every move, it was the kids. The kids looking once, looking twice as they were tugged along by chiding mothers, looking a third time when they knew those mothers had stopped paying attention again. Looking at my leg brace, my too-big shoes, the chair.

It probably sounds as though the kids made me feel sorry for myself, but that wasn't it at all. Sure, there are elements of this "new normal," in the rehabilitation parlance, that lean in that direction. But with the kids it's mostly that it takes me into a different mindset, one that says, "This is something completely new." That's what they think when they see those things that make them stare, that it's so weird, that it's not like anything they've ever seen. That they want to know about it. Why did it happen? What must it be like? How would I feel if it were me?

But unless you're one of the several gaping kids I encountered in Target that afternoon, these aren't questions that occur to you &- not until you're forced to think them, anyway. I can't be mad at the staring kids, because I know I stared when I was little. But over the years, for the most part, I did not consider on a regular basis what my life would be like if I became &- it feels almost like a dirty word, but I have to say it &- disabled. And now I have to consider it, just like those kids have to, except way more intensely &- as though it's been shoved in my face now, snuck up on me and my eyes are held open and I'm told, "you have to look at this now, because it isn't going anywhere."

Though the kids' stares sort of make me want to stagger up out of my wheelchair and throw it across the parking lot, I get where they're coming from. This is a whole new world for me, and I'm spending a lot of my extensive free time these days looking around and trying to take it all in, trying to assimilate it. It's the same world, only it's full of new things. So I can't fault the kids for staring. In a way, I'm staring too.