Excerpt From My Upcoming Memoir “Learning To Live”

By the time I was four, the paralysis had waned entirely, but the feeling of being whole was gone. Mentally my leg missed a mid-section, consisting only of a cap and foot that would tease complete sense with a twitch. This foot of mine was an avid fan of Debussy and Mozart and preferred to be in the en pointe position at all times, often ending with my face kissing the floor like a drunk sailor. This added that extra layer of difficulty in learning the small things, the most prominent being riding a bike. The tricycle, like many others, was my starting point, but that inability to feel would, without question, take over, and I would find myself alone on a cement island. I would call out to my parents, disguising my child-like pleas for help with anecdotes in an attempt to make them laugh or at least giggle. The most prominent being that I was “stuck in traffic.” After that magic push, I would be off to the races, my foot racing to get back to that dance position as many times as possible before the typical thirty-second energy would wind down, leaving me back on yet another stranded island slab. The idea of the bike soon became the forefront of my mind, and it too started out as typical and was anything but.