'Uncle Ed' Treacle's Cripple Stories
Living Today Every Day

 

Tragic but brave

Courageous young man travels alone,
buys newspaper

Johnny Bravado wasn't always this way. He can no doubt remember a far, far different past.

"I could walk," he says simply.

Looking at the smiling Johnny today, the heart tears up and a sob escapes from the lips. Not too loudly, though. You wouldn't want him to hear.

The 43-year-old young man has been confined to that steel imprisonment -- the wheelchair! -- nearly 3/4 of his life now. Although he must spend every day agonizing -- and weeping silently -- over his lost future, he does not say so. For he would not say so. He is that brave. Self-effacing.

"Yesterday I went to the newsstand and bought a newspaper," he told me when I asked what his life must be like now that he must live in a ravaged limp body. "A newspaper?" I could scarcely believe my ears. Yet when I pressed, he repeated his brave assertion: He had indeed bought a newspaper.

And finally I was convinced it was true. For there, lying on a table barely in reach of his useless hands, was a Wall Street Journal. I could see that the page was turned to an article about stock option availabilities and that the young man had bravely circled some figures. Yet I was too polite to ask what he might be entertaining in his mind with this inspiring endeavor.

I imagined, for a moment, what it could have been like had he been whole. Had he been an able-bodied adult, he could be considering purchasing stock -- shares in this very company which it appeared so interested him.

But young Johnny was crippled. And would be -- his entire life. He had no future in the stock option of life.

I engaged him in further conversation, trying to understand how it could be -- must be -- that he ventured into the world in his weakened frame to do such an amazing thing -- something the rest of us take for granted. He told me, and in great detail as I recall, trying bravely, I think, to impress upon me the fact that his action was, as he put it, "normal." (I was surprised he would use that word.) But I confess that in my awe and admiration I have forgotten what he said.

Nonetheless, there it sat. A newspaper. An average, ordinary Wall Street Journal. And he had read it and engaged his mind. I pondered this: it was, I realized with a start of embarrassment, that this, of course, was all that young Johnny was able to do anymore: engage his mind. Condemned to a life of engaging only his mind. What a waste, I thought.

Finally, when I had left, I wept that silent tear I had been holding back, for the tragedy of it all. Sometimes it's all a man can do.