Todd Balf is the author of several books, including the memoir “Complications.”
I haven’t always dreaded change. I used to like going with the flow.
But last winter, my first full time in a wheelchair, I craved sameness. My wife, Patty, moved our bed to the first floor and installed a sliding transfer bench in our shower. Every two weeks we drove to a Boston hospital for a chemo infusion for my metastatic cancer, carrying prepaid parking garage tickets. We knew exactly how everything would work to get through a day and a night.
Then last fall we moved 200 miles away to a Flatbush apartment in Brooklyn for three months to be nearer to our first grandchild. Of course, I’d never inhabited a big city from the seat of wheelchair.
All I had read on the topic were posts about experiencing destination cities in a wheelchair. If there were manifestos about successfully adapting to living in New York City, I didn’t see them. Maybe I didn’t want to.
I have a revelation to report: It wasn’t just survivable, it was wonderful. It was actually — and I know how over the top this is going to sound — life-changing.
But not at first. In the beginning it was bewildering. I lived in Manhattan on the Upper Upper West Side in the mid-’80s, getting to work at midtown with a secondhand bike bought in a Village mainstay, Bikes by George. Those days I thrilled to moving through the city on “alternative” transportation, alive to the city’s sights and sounds.
This time my ambitions were a good deal less ambitious. We quickly learned that some things never change. Apartment bathroom entrances are still absurdly narrow, narrower than the width of a wheelchair. My first mission? Finding out what combination of walking poles, moving chairs (wheelchair and an interior cart), transfers, door removal, and temporary suction grab bars might independently get me to the toilet seat. And then off again.
Oddly, that frustrating exercise began to bring me out the other side: As in, if I could pull that trick off, what else could I do?
In quick succession I brought my recumbent hand-powered trike to Brooklyn, parking it in the garage of my daughter’s friend, and riding several times each week in Prospect Park. In time I would share the path with protest marches, marathons, Halloween parades, and the regular lakeside sounds like the primate roars from the zoo, and, more sonorously, a shofar blowing at dusk. A soft warm autumn rolled out day after glorious day. And so, the living, not just existing, in the city began.
I knew I’d feel the family pull of seeing my daughter, son-in-law, and their infant son almost every day. Most days she came to us, sensitive that I couldn’t access her apartment, a third-floor walkup. Celia and her younger brother have been attuned to my evolving needs, taking the lead from my wife.
But here’s the thing: Everybody I met in the city seemed attuned. Offering to help, generous with sincere encouragement as I increasingly used my wheelchair for mile-long grocery runs or a Manhattan subway commute.
There were dozens of instances of kindness and empathy, and maybe most surprising was the cumulative feeling of me not feeling like I was getting in anyone’s way. There’s 2.7 million people in Brooklyn, most racing somewhere. How could that be?
Is any of this life-changing? That our preemie-born grandson doubled his weight by the time we left in December and was melting our hearts with cheek-to-cheek smiles? That we went to museums and Saturday markets and met new and old friends, even hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for nine? That I reached my cargo-hauling peak when I brought home on my wheelchair a towering bag of groceries and a bag of bargain-basement clothes from Bobby’s Department Store? Maybe, maybe not.
But what happens when a couple who have been with each other since their 1980s undergraduate days discover another chapter? New powers, new admiration, new love. Patty has had health and anxiety issues in the past five years. She isn’t a city person. She didn’t know what she had to give.
Starting slowly like myself, she soon thrived. She gave, as I knew she would, but she also received. She had rarely driven a car in New York but was commandeering the streets by December. She drove the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, and she jostled seemingly shoulder to shoulder on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. One night she raced out of the door at 2 a.m. to respond to what we thought was a baby emergency at our daughter’s apartment.
When the time came to leave the city, she ached. We both did.
“You are going to be so bored when you get home,” our daughter warned on the eve of our departure.
As we drove back from New York with an intermediary stop in Boston for my regular chemo infusion, we hatched a new plan. Patty continued homeward to get a jump on unpacking. When she told Celia I was going to wheel the half mile from the hospital to North Station to take the train home, not something I had ever done before — and Patty felt OK about letting me — Celia texted me.
“Mom said you’re taking the train? I told her to walk and pick you up as an ode to Brooklyn life — I love this side to you guys! Keep it up.”