John really misses riding his motorcycle. The weather was fantastic when we went to the MVD to get his new state ID, and having the windows down on the way made us long for the days when hitting the open road wasn’t a distant dream, but a plan for next weekend.
His accident did some damage but didn’t take him out. He still climbed cell phone towers for work until the nerve damage took his hips. Now, the chair is his chariot.
We met last weekend. He was in the median, I was in the crosswalk. I noticed his Raiders hat and offered my condolences. It’s a bad situation for pretty much everyone in the tunnel, and his qualifies as such. He’d been in a government-sponsored program that offered temporary shelter, but he made the mistake of flying a sign at the nearby intersection and they threw him out of the program. Another organization took him in. Most housing organizations will only take in people who do not require extra care. Still, he can use the bathroom by himself, so he qualified for their program, but they put him in a room where the bathroom door was of regular width—too narrow for him to get through with his wheelchair to the toilet and shower, so to remedy the situation, they DQ’d him and threw him out of the program.
They say time heals all wounds, but time hasn’t been good to John. He needs ongoing medical care, a decent wheelchair, a roof over his head that isn’t made out of concrete, and a standard ADA-width bathroom door. If all goes well, he’ll have all of these things in about four months. It all started with a ride to the MVD. Who knows, maybe in a year or so, we’ll be cruising around in my little buggy looking for someone who needs help.
