September 1, 2005 – What It’s Like to Regain One’s Mobility

September 1, 2005 – What It’s Like to Regain One’s Mobility

I called my Dad today during lunch hour to see how he was doing. He’s been recuperating from a broken leg after taking a fall in the parking lot of William Beaumont General Hospital which is at the top of Pierce Avenue in El Paso, Texas, where Pierce dead ends into Alabama Street. That was in mid May. This many months later he is finally up on his feet walking with a cane inside the house and with a walker outside. I’m making the call on my cell phone during a walk along the bike path that runs along Highway 101 between San Antonio Road and Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto, California, where I work. My father is hard of hearing and I end up yelling at the top of my voice into the mouthpiece of my cell phone to be heard. I don’t often say much as my father is fond of talking and I set him off by yelling a short question and then turn on the speakerphone feature of my cell phone and listen to my dad’s lengthy response. I don’t mind, as I like the sound of his voice, which still has clear signs of his Mississippi accent. My wife IM has as much of a time trying to understand him as I had trying to comprehend her father’s Glasgow accent. We often wondered what it would have been like for the two of them hold a conversation. Both speaking English but neither one with any idea of what the other was saying.

My father gets his gift of the gab from his being born and raised in Mississippi, which has a rich tradition of story telling, especially among the women folk. Dad was raised by his grandmother and mother with little male supervision—though he had plenty of maternal supervision—until he left home in his mid teens. I asked if he was able to drive and he regaled me with his experience driving the small red Pontiac Grand Am he had bought a couple of years back. The smaller car was to provide a more reliable means of transportation when he had his first hip replacement surgery and save gas. His other ride is an early 1970s Ford pickup truck that has no smog control and burns regular gas and plenty of it. His other ride is a 1970s Ford Econoline Van, which doesn’t work, and he’s in no condition to fix it. The ride he really wants is his VW bus with a tacky 1970s carpet covering the center of the van floor, which the sliding side door exposes when opened. At the back of the van is one rear bench seat over the engine compartment that seats two people. In the front are two bucket seats, both high off the ground providing both a good view of the road ahead and you have to step up to get into the driver’s seat, something that would have eased the whole driving process for my dad after his hip replacement. With his good left leg, he would lift his less flexible healing right leg into the driver’s compartment, without all the bending and butt-first entry the Grand Am requires.


The van has good memories for me. Before my wife IM and I were married, we would pile into the van with my three sisters one or more with date in tow and have a night out usually in Juarez. The first time we made the trip across the border, sometime in the spring of 1967, IM had just come over from Australia and we had gone to Juarez without her passport. Back then Americans regularly went back and forth without the formality of papers. On the return trip you would report that you had nothing to declare and then state your nationality “American” pronounced “Ah Mir eh Kin” or worse if you had been drinking. As we neared the border, my sisters were attempting to get IM to say the word the way the border guard expected it to said not with the Scottish accent she was pronouncing it with. IM is a proper Brit in that she believes in obeying all the rules especially where the authorities are concerned.) You have to picture a van full of dark skinned people; my sisters and I have a brown complexion with facial features that could be mistaken for those of an Hispanic. The one lone exception is my lovely wife IM with the blond hair and light complexion of a Scot—the one person in the van that looks American, can’t pronounce the word and a van full of others who look Hispanic and can. We made it through, though the border guard could have held us all up if he had been in the mood.

The van that my father pined for was at my brother’s place and had been there for months. My father had told my brother he planned to install power steering in the van but my brother said he knew where he could put his hands on a power steering unit that would fit the van and he would have it installed in no time. The van is still sitting in my brother’s lot—he owns a short haul trucking company and a hydraulics repair business, waiting for my brother or one of the mechanics working for him to get to it. To be fair, my brother works easily 12 hours a day and at least one day on the weekend if not both. His wife sees him because she helps him run the trucking company. My brother inherited my father’s mechanical aptitude and both love working with their hands. One day I’ll be visiting him and the van will be back home with my dad in its parking place power steering enabled.

Hence, my dad is driving the Pontiac Grand AM. Every trip is an adventure especially when my mom is in tow. Dad described the process of getting him and my mother to church last Saturday evening. They attend Mass at Our Lady of the Assumption the evening before to escape the crowd and as their night out together. Once mom is safely buckled in to her seat, dad in his walker makes the journey to the end of the driveway to open the gate. Their dog Sasha has long learned not to leave the yard even when the gates are opened and has never violated the rule. Once the gates are opened dad returns to the car, folds his walker which he slides into the back seat, then opens the driver side door, sits in the driver’s seat, pulls his right leg in (the good leg with the knee and hip replacement now healed). Then, with the driver’s seat back in the full recline position, leans back and drags his left leg into the car. Readjusting the seat back to its upright position, he settles himself in, starts the engine and backs out of the driveway. He parks on the street, exits the car reversing the procedure he used getting himself in, retrieves his walker, walks to the two haves of the inwardly opening gate and brings them to center where he latches them shut. Back into the car for the five or six blocks drive to the church and in the parking lot where the process of exiting the car is repeated.

After his story of his trip to and from church, he mentioned that he had begun to make other trips most without my mother, to the grocery store and to run errands. I got the impression he was getting his mobility back and that was ridding him of the frustration he had experienced being unable to move about at will. He turns 85 this year and he wants to spend as much time as he has left enjoying the world around him.