Pat Taub
GUEST POST by MICHAEL STEINMAN
I’ve never been a sprinter. And in the past decade, some friends have commented on my odd forward motion. “You walk funny. Are you OK?” You could say I limp, or perhaps hobble. A woman I was dating told me that she was “concerned” about “my mobility issues,” to which I replied gently that I had never been able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. That response did not convince her.
But even as I was making my imperfect way down the street, I looked with mild satire at people less mobile than myself — having a hard time climbing curbs, some holding on to brightly painted canes as if clutching a dear friend’s strong arm. “Poor devils,” I thought.
But I have joined that tribe, and this story has a happy ending. If it were a disco hit, it would be called STAYIN’ UPRIGHT. For the past six months, I have carried a cane, and in the words of the American Express commercial, ‘I don’t leave home without it.’
The change of heart was the result of several unplanned trips to the sidewalk, slow-motion descents. They ended quickly and painfully. I had trouble being reinstated to vertical life. “It’s not the falling, it’s the landing,” a friend says. True, but for me it was also the moments of helplessness during and after.
It was sweet that most times several people magically appeared to help me up. Very solicitous they were, “Are you all right, man?” Usually they hung around to see that I wouldn’t become a silent-film comedian a few feet away, stumbling over something invisible.
After several similar falls, the author consulted a doctor
Several doctors — that latest with the aptly-named specialty, “movement disorders,” convinced me that my unsteadiness was neurological rather than clumsiness or demonic possession. Reassuring as a concept but not helpful when I felt unsteady.
A long-time friend, a woman twenty years my junior, hearing my tales of flying-through-space, insisted, “You must get a cane,” which I didn’t. I was sure I could get along on my own. But enough instances of my looking for a wall to lean on, a banister, something to hold on to, made me acquiesce. What harm could it do?
I purchased a black collapsible aluminum cane. Fortunately, I was not so unstable that I needed to tap the ground with it at every step. I could hold it loosely, a visible insurance policy. Were those steps too high? Was that sidewalk uneven? I could use it without embarrassment. I know, of course, that if I felt myself falling, the cane might be a liability, and it is one more thing to carry, but it is reassuring to have it when I have to stand unsupported.
The author’s “new friend”
The larger battle was within, with my image of myself — what someone might call “vanity” or specifically “male vanity.” Had I become someone who couldn’t make it down the street without help? Had I become Old and Feeble? Perhaps, but I told myself, “Would you prefer falling?”
I now think of myself as a man who carries a cane. Hardly a stylish vaudevillian with top hat and dance routine, but someone who stays upright as long as he likes.
Oscar Wilde, sporting his cane
And if kind strangers offer me a seat on the subway, I can either take it or say something like “Thank you so much, I’m getting off in two stops,” which is sometimes true. I have told my vanity that I’d rather be Old Guy than Pancake Man, and it seems to have listened. Being an Upright Citizen is no small thing.
The author’s jazz idol, Louis Armstrong, celebrates cane owners:
Michael Steinman is a writer and retired English professor, who thinks his real work is his jazz blog (JAZZ LIVES), where, through videos of live performances worldwide, he “sends out love in a swinging 4/4.”
