How I Became a Poodle
Old age has many compensations, but many disadvantages too. Added to the relaxation of saying exactly what you want to whom you want, it has some physical limitations that are irritating, if not life impeding.
Mine is arthritis of the knee. I was only sixty-six. By my calculations, there are people in their eighties climbing Machu Picchu, while I couldn’t walk the ten steps from my kitchen to my dining table.
I won’t go into all the treatments that didn’t help those first three months. The inept physio, the orthopedic surgeons chorusing “you’re too old, we can’t do anything,” and the General Practitioner, whose anti-inflammatories decreased my function even further. I was not a happy person.
But you’ll want to know where the poodle comes in. Well, the good news is that through a maze of internet research, and trial and error, I found my way. I eventually started the exercises, vitamins, diet, the Chiropractic treatment, and herbal salve which relieved my pain. But standing in long lines, à la low cost airlines, waiting, waiting, waiting, sometimes in the rain, was too much. And therefore (yes, we’re coming to it) I decided to get a wheelchair for my holiday flight from the Netherlands to Spain. A trip booked with my partner long before the arthritis had reared its ugly head.
I am blond, female, normal. If you ran your eye over the scene, it wouldn’t stop at me. But as soon as I sat down in that wheelchair, I instantly became a poodle.
I don’t mean my hair started curling, or that I began to bark. But just as some people feel the barriers are down when they meet a complete stranger walking a dog, the other passengers began to smile at me kindly. They didn’t exactly pat my head, but they looked as though they wanted to. And nothing had changed, except that I had gone from standing in line on my own two legs to sitting in a moveable chair.
A tall, skinny man in his early thirties leaned towards me. “How long have you been like this?” He smelled of marijuana. I considered asking how long he had been smoking weed, and had the feeling neither of us wanted to discuss these questions. Too bad I couldn’t bite at him or growl.
“How long have I been like what?” I asked.
“Confined to a wheelchair.”
“Confined?” I was puzzled.
“Yes. Has it been since you were a child?”
I ground my teeth. Or should I say, I bared them, and took a deep breath. “I’m not confined. I’m enabled.” His smile dropped. He no longer looked at me kindly. Then the queue advanced and he was out of my sight and smell line.
My partner pushed me forward in the queue. We stopped yet again. I could see the first busload of passengers for our plane slowly shaking away. Meanwhile, those of us still inside the terminal waited.
This time it was the lady behind me that spoke. Cocking her head, she said in a low sympathetic murmur, “What happened to you?”
I was wishing I had taken advantage of my invalid status and jumped the queue, but instead decided on an honest answer. “I got old,” I said.
The lady looked puzzled. She wore a pink designer tracksuit which fitted her perfect body. She was trying to look seventeen in spite of being forty. Her hair was smooth-sculpted with the precision I had seen previously only on comic book pages. Although she waited with a group of similarly groomed women, I had seen her talking to the marijuana man, and a young male couple in front of me for the ten minutes we’d been waiting in line. Now it was my turn.
I continued my transparent answers. “And I inherited my father’s genes.”
“Genes?” She was completely in outer space. She looked at me narrowly and stepped back into the queue. In a low voice she said to her travel companion, “Humph, I think someone forgot their medication this morning.” They both sniggered.
The line still stalled. The male couple in front of me both shifted from one foot to the other. The taller, bald one in the perfectly coordinated shirt and trousers looked at me. He said to my partner, “Do you guys have ‘priority boarding’?”
“No, this is the ordinary boarding line,” my partner replied.
A friendly, complaining conversation, demonizing the airline, ensued. My partner and the older man played verbal ping-pong over the top of me.
“Hellooo!” I called out. “Helloo! I’m here too!” No one answered. The line moved forward again.
We were through the boarding gate, out of the terminal and into the outdoor, cattle-like holding pen. A little girl on a small tiger suitcase rode into view. She and her mother were in the parallel queue, moving the opposite way.
I heard the girl say, |”Mummy, why is that woman sitting down?”
“Maybe she has trouble with her legs. She might find it difficult to stand or walk for a protracted period.”
“You mean maybe she can walk but not for very long?”
“Yes, that’s exactly it.”
The little girl nodded. “Like when Mary Trotter broke her leg and had to use a crutch?”
“Yes, something like that, only maybe this lasts longer.”
“Oh,” the girl nodded again, this time sagely, apparently having pigeonholed my strange behavior into something approaching familiarity. She continued in the opposite direction on her wheeled tiger.
When we finally got to the plane, I stood up. The marijuana man, track-suited lady, male couple and mother and child had all rushed ahead to clamber onto the plane as quickly as possible. Perhaps to snaffle the limited overhead bin space.
I climbed the stairs, pulling my body little by little into the aircraft. Both hands gripped the railings, both arms heaved, hoisting me up the stairway. Hey, to go on holiday, I’ll do almost anything.
My partner, to deal with his claustrophobia, sat in the window seat. My seat was the middle one. As I stood in the aisle to place my jacket in the overhead locker, the smell enveloped me again. Marijuana. I turned to look. Yes, it was my first conversational partner from the boarding queue. He threw a water bottle onto the aisle seat beside mine, and stuffed a suitcase into the overhead compartment. His elbow bumped my arm and he turned.
“I thought you were in a wheelchair,” he said, mouth set, eyes narrowing.
“I was.”
“But… but now you’re standing. You must have walked down this aisle, you must have walked up the steps. You didn’t get airlifted,” he said in an accusing manner.
I leaned forward, so only he could hear me in the noisy, crowded cabin. I saw the woman in the track-suit, the male couple, and the woman and her daughter. They were all installing their possessions in overhead bins. Each of them turned backwards and stared. They looked at me as though Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had become a reality, and the world had turned upside down. I was standing up.
I leaned confidentially forward and spoke in an undertone to the man with the marijuana smell. “I hate standing in those long queues that go on forever. I get tired, bored, and want to sit down and read or game.” I paused looking at him. “Using a wheelchair means I can do all of these things. It’s a wheeze that works really well.” I stopped, and said speculatively, “You might consider it yourself sometime.”
The man gulped, and shrank back within the small space. He looked around wildly, but there were no spare seats. My other conversational partners were getting into their places, several shaking their heads.
I strapped on my seatbelt. The man buckled himself in and put on earbuds. He kept darting glances at me as the steward went through the emergency routine. I just smiled. He and the rest were lucky I hadn’t bitten them.
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About the Author
Valerie Nichols’s poetry has appeared in “A Year of Mondays–24 Mayo Writers.” Her short stories have been published in The Sandy River Review and Commuterlit.com. She wrote and performed the script “The Adventures of Soldier Juan Álvaro Rodriguez” at the Kelder van Gent Theatre in Utrecht, Netherlands in May 2024. She is co-organizer of the Eindhoven Creative Writing Group. For more information, please visit: https://arboles321.wixsite.com/arlenescholvi.