Saturday the 10th was my first day spent with a wheelchair. I tried to imagine the day beforehand, to anticipate the drawbacks and plan for every single troubleshooting scenario. I’m surprised I nailed most of them, but it was still a learning experience full of ups and downs. The day could have been much more painful and full of recriminations, had I not been blessed with a very patient, very grateful passenger.
One of the highlights each year for my wife’s grandmother is when the three of us spend a November Saturday together at the Indianapolis Christmas Gift and Hobby Show, a cavalcade of Christmas arts, Christmas crafts, Christmas edibles, and non-Christmas small businesses and hucksters held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in one of their cavernous pavilions. It usually takes us a few hours to traverse the length of the pavilion several times to see all the booths, marvel at the decorations, overspend on a few choice items, and — always number one on Mamaw’s to-do list — have her watch batteries replaced at a specific jeweler’s booth. No one in all Creation is allowed to change her watch batteries except that one jeweler. Everyone else ever born will do it wrong.
Last summer, this once-hyperkinetic eightysomething dynamo took a nasty spill that left her wounded for a good while and reset her normal energy levels at a much lower bar. She’s having much more trouble getting around than she used to, and takes a little longer to perform her chores the way she wants them. Though she weighs under one hundred pounds, she still doesn’t have quite the endurance for supporting that frame around extensive distances. Excessive walking now leaves her winded and ready to call it a day. As her beloved Christmas Gift and Hobby Show drew near, she seriously doubted she could manage the day-long stroll that would entail, and had resigned herself to skipping the show, despite how many she’s attended, despite how much she looks forward to it every year. She feared attempting such a feat now would be the death of her.
Enter: the wheelchair.
In that blessed golden age when my sister and I still had Dad in our lives, years before we would begin taking turns conducting periodic manhunts in vain, we never saw him happier or more vibrant than when Mom would let him dress us in our Sunday finest so we could walk with him door-to-door around the neighborhood, knocking on doors and extolling the virtues of the Great Pumpkin.
The moral of this week’s new episode of Revolution, “The Children’s Crusade”: nothing weighs more heavily on a conscience than watching others suffer for our sins. Nowhere is this more radically demonstrated than when our man Miles finally finds himself moved by something other than Charlie’s harping about Doing the Right Thing. He realizes that his duties as former evil assistant overlord of the Monroe Republic included unwitting orphan-making. When Our Heroes encounter ragtag Lord of the Flies refugees, something inside Miles’ head asks: won’t someone think of the children?
After being raised in a household free of overt political discussion, I never had any idea which political party was mine. A moment of clarity arrived in eleventh-grade Physics class when a fellow student named Jeff sought to offer me personal definition: he asked me my views on abortion. I gave him an answer. He told me which party was mine. To him, it was as simple as that. I decided then and there that the two-party monopoly left a lot to be desired. Thus was my head sent spinning into years of aimless political apathy, college-campus pluralism, irritatingly noncommittal neutrality, alternative-newspaper perusal, and Jello Biafra spoken-word albums. Truly it was a time of intellectual isolation for me, though the accompanying music could be cool at times.
Important things first: Wreck-It Ralph is the best non-Pixar Disney film in years, proof positive that both divisions are up to the task of delivering solid results when the right talents are lined up and the marketing department is kept in check. The end credits confirm Ralph was wrangled by four different writers, two of which are omitted by IMDB — Jim Reardon and director Rich Moore, both veterans of the glory days of The Simpsons. (Of the other two, one, Phil Johnston, was responsible for last year’s indie Midwest comedy Cedar Rapids.) From where I sat, I couldn’t see the seams.
Before settling in at WordPress last April, I kept an infrequent blog for several years as an adjunct creative outlet for my geek message-board experience. It was a fun tool with purposes uniquely assigned to it, but hardly connected to the traditions known throughout the world of blogging at large. (I suppose the term is “blogosphere”, but that still sounds odd to me. Is that used within the community itself, or just a catchy label that the mainstream media affixed to it?) A friendly Thursday alert from 
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 