"I like your sneakers," I told her.
How could I not comment? They were huge hot pink boats. And they were only inches away from my face.
I was doing push-ups on the gym floor. And Jennifer was just standing there flipping through the tv channels looking for any kind of sports.
"They're size eleven," she said. "They have to be so big because I have pins in my feet," she said.
Jennifer is a disabled gym member who has lived in Woodside for 35 years. I suspected she had MS because of her slow and slurred speech and the way she seemed to drag half her body around. She typically wore a brace and she moved so spasmodically I wondered how she got around at all.But somehow we got into a conversation about her condition. It was the first time we spoke. I guess you could say that it was the first time I slowed down enough to listen. Turns out she developed a "brain virus" while working in the city. She pointed to her head calmly telling me about the dozens of lesions that we formed on her brain. She told me how she slowly lost her speech, how her left side began drooping, how she couldn't remember things. Her boss thought she was on drugs. Her friends were really worried; her mom too.
"I've been through so many tests," she says. The doctor thought she had Lyme disease, MS...but it turns out it was ADHM (I can't find any information on this).
"'Were you travelling?' I asked. I needed some sort of excuse. I wanted to put the blame somewhere.
"My doctors say it's just luck," she told me.
Um. Luck? WTF? Who accepts that?
Jennifer did.
As we talked about the 80s, she became much more animated. What a great decade, she mused. I had a car, I was in high school, I had friends.
"Life was good. I had a full life," she explains to me. "That's why I'm not that upset that this happened now," she says.
Somewhere, in the back of my chest, something turned over.
You know, I meet people every day who make a good salary, are happily married, go on fantastic vacations and have a world of options laid out before them. And still, they're miserable. They want more. Or they want something else.
Even I want more--more experiences, more time, more stability, more things.
But how often do you meet someone who accepts a terrible fate and learns to be happy with what they have? I get upset if my Saturday night plans are ruined. I get pissy when I have to share my weekends with my parents. I get mad when it rains ad nauseum. But what if I was unable to speak? If I lost my memory? If a brain virus decided to pick me and erase the life I've built? That's problems.
That's real problems.
It's people like Jennifer who kick me out of my imposed world of pity. I may not get invited to the cocktail parties at work, or maybe I won't ever fit back into that size four dress. But aside from all the BS, I have it pretty good. In fact, I have it pretty awesomely.
