Handicapped

I recently overheard my neighbor and his friends discussing their golf handicaps.  I've heard this term used re: horse racing and it always confused me.  When I was young, the phrase 'Hire the handicapped' was bantered around. There were also ranks of parking spaces designated exclusively for these so-called unfortunates with the wheelchair icon painted on pavement.  More recently the word has been designated insulting.  Even 'disabled' is used with great care. 

It's a weird word. I remember reading somewhere it came from 'cap in hand', a reference to street beggars in older times who often displayed (or faked) disabilities to collect alms in a hat.  Whatever. It's become distasteful.  It's used with a kind of irony among my friends who are suffering the indignities of illnesses and aging.  One friend not only copes daily with the devastation of a brain tumor, but has lost the use of her hand.  Another has not quite recovered from hip surgery... another wrist surgery; then there are musicians' hand issues, drummers' spinal woes, general anxiety and depression... cardiac problems. We are an aging generation... we have used and abused ourselves in various ways.  

I am sympathetic; I've been lucky to survive and recover.  Two weeks ago I had an accident-- not life-threatening but enough to limit my usual freedoms. I've become, in a temporary way, handicapped, as my friends joke... and it's jokable, not permanent, unworthy of a special parking space or license plate-- or hopefully not.  

But I've been watching a good deal more television.. football, taking in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce phenomenon which I'm sorry to say makes me less fond of the Chiefs.  I'd like to see an underdog in the Super Bowl, despite the political and social media feeding frenzy this celebrity serendipity has caused.  I mean, if she changes the election, like Oprah did in 2008, well and good.  But for me it's enough-- the money, the endless athlete's endorsements and influencing... the massive payments in addition to the fortune they are paid to play which makes the heroes of my era look like middle-class losers. 

And these endless boring game shows-- with second-rate celebrity hosts and guests and absurd criteria and rules... who is watching this stuff?  It just seems desperate and forgettable.  

I'm reading Septology-- the seven-part masterpiece of this year's Nobel-winning author, Jon Fosse.  He's quintessentially Norwegian and for the last decades I've considered Scandinavia my second home. I've left my heart there-- a couple of times, not to mention a beloved bass guitar waiting for me to tour again. Anyway, it's a wonderful winter read. The snow... the small towns of Norway-- the fjords, the boats, the childhood reminiscences. The narrator is a painter-- a loner who has suffered losses, but manages to find a kind of redemption in his work which I can almost see, somehow.  And his quiet obsession with religion, his daily coming to terms with what is God-- in his art, in his simple way of life.  It's sublime.

My temporary injury and this novel remind me of what has been lost-- and how we go on, we find our lives and our meaning day by day, reinventing our path to accommodate the normal indignities of age, the diminishing exterior 'light' of our presence as the years pass.  And still, we find some spirit-- some determination-- we befriend the present and reintroduce the past like an old boyfriend who was amazing but no longer serves.

For many of us, this reveals and highlights our so-called handicaps. Some of us become defined by this alone.  But for others, we begin to see the less inspiring narratives of our culture as the true handicapped-- the banal, silly, petty, appearance-obsessed, botox and Wegovy-dependent overpaid housewives, non-achieving but omnipresent celebrity image-makers whose contributions are well celebrated but are anything but world-changing. 

Today I pray for my distressed and disabled friends.  For me I have the blessing of choosing the option of rehabilitation-- of acceptance, of continuing to exist with some kind of muse pulling me along, coaxing and cajoling.. a deepened sense of what remains, of God in my small universe, whatever that means... of life... cap in hand not for pity but for reverence and awe. With grace I intend to recover from this small setback and shine as I can in this flawed and aging skin I've been so generously granted, God willing.