I was sent home from the rehabilitation center with three cardinal rules: (1) Bear no weight with that busted leg! (2) Don’t bend the knee, or remove the leg brace so that it’s even possible to bend it! (3) Don’t fall!

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you think so, try either one, or both of the first two rules for an hour or so, and you’ll soon discover how simple it isn’t. We’ve all seen three-legged dogs doing all right; but you won’t see too many one-legged men looking at all nimble. (an aside. For an absolutely wonderful riff on monopodry, Google “Beyond the Fringe” and check out the sketch of the theatrical agent interviewing Mr. Spiggott, a one-legged man, for the role of Tarzan.)

The average home, it turns out, seems spacious until you try to maneuver a wheelchair around a tight corner into a bedroom or bathroom. So there have to be alternative modes of locomotion located in, say, a central hall. There you exchange the wheelchair for a walker or a pair of crutches to reach your destination. Returning, switch again to the chair for another bout at the desk. The operation may get easier after a while, but there’s no hint of that here yet.

None of this is to be construed as a complaint. It’s my own fault, after all; I’m the one who didn’t wear his Yaktrax to go get the newspaper. Rather, it’s to describe a consciousness-raising experience that has me feeling great sympathy for people who have to spend their entire lives using these contraptions in order to achieve any mobility at all.

The cane and the crutch, descendants of the walking stick, were obviously the earliest aids to Stone-Age folks with injuries or arthritis. Millennia haven’t improved the cane much, except for Space-Age materials; it’s still very handy on slippery surfaces, long walks, and during attacks by territorial suburban dogs. (A very cranky, Vicodin-popping, and eponymous physician named House, of the television show of the same name, is taking the art of using a cane back into the Stone Age by perversely employing his on the same side as his injured leg. Just watching him is enough to make you wince.) The crutch was invented by a forever nameless genius who wanted support at the same time he wanted both hands free. A second crutch sped up his travel, and formed a tripod when at rest, still leaving both hands free. The trick, I suppose, was to find saplings with forks broad enough not to pinch off circulation in the brachial arteries.

The wheelchair, which has been in a constant state of development since its invention, has been with us about 400 years. The first, apparently, was built around 1590 for King Philip II of Spain, whose declining years were made almost insufferable by gout, dropsy, and fever. Since then, they’ve been made variously of wood, wicker, steel, and more recently, aluminum or carbon fiber. The one I’m sitting in as I write is a beauty – foldable, smooth-running. quiet, and non-marring (a great feature, considering the doors in most of the house ought to be two inches wider). In the past few years, electric wheelchairs have become common, and there are even some now that can actually climb and descend stairs. They’re all still a pain to wheel through packed snow, but somebody’s bound to think of something for that soon. Some chairbound people who can stand, and who can afford them, have taken to Segways; a monopedal retired surgeon at the Hitchcock Clinic whizzes around on one looking like nothing else so much as the ghost of King Hamlet.

But little of all this speaks to the situation of people who for one reason or another are bound permanently to various ambulatory devices. It’s virtually impossible for us, accustomed as we are to moving more or less easily from place to place to do whatever we need to do, to appreciate how difficult it can be, and how long it can take, to perform the simplest tasks in a sitting position. Cooking, washing dishes, bathing or showering, using the toilet, even trying to catch the telephone before it switches to the answering machine – all take longer, are more complicated, and entail some risk. If I fall in the shower, for example, in my present condition, I’ll be stuck there till help arrives. Luckily, I can reach the control, if necessary, while sitting on the floor,.

Public and commercial buildings have come a long way in providing handicapped-accessible ramps and bathroom facilities. Out in the sticks things have necessarily moved a little slower. A friend of mine, the late Lee Dawley of South Ryegate, who suffered from multiple sclerosis but remained articulate and outspoken to the end, often railed in print and on call-in radio shows about the difficulty of attending town meetings or local entertainments. People who weren’t themselves physically handicapped often thought him a malcontent; to others of us, he was a lonely, heroic voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the physically disadvantaged!”

Consider, when a chairbound person shows up for church or a meeting late or perhaps a bit disheveled, that everything he does takes longer by far than it takes you; that just getting his pants on when he can’t raise his bum off the seat of his chair is a bit challenging; that maybe brushing his teeth is just one thing too many that morning. Try sitting in a wheelchair in public waiting to be asked if you’d like some help, and you’ll get some idea what he goes through every day, and looks forward to going through for the rest of his life, even as his strength eventually fades. I sure don’t wish you the necessity of a wheelchair, but it does do wonders for your perspective.