Yes, I broke my ankle. No, it’s not as bad as it sounds. And it’s not at all an interesting story. I fractured a tiny bone in the inside of the ankle during a karate lesson by banging it against something (not by giving a killer kick or anything cool like that). Call it a hazard of doing skype karate lessons in the living room of our apartment. Our living room is spacious for a Paris apartment but not compared to a dojo. In any case, I am wearing a “boot” around to immobilize the fractured bone and torn ligament to let them heal.
What’s the story in this? The story is how I am treated in Paris with the boot. I wasn’t expecting anything special, but it has surprised me that people will actually knock me out of the way on the sidewalks to get past me when I am hobbling along. Seriously! People do that normally, but I thought they’d have the courtesy or even common sense to walk around a disabled person. Once I was reaching for the railing going down the stairs to the metro and a young woman dashed in between me and the railing, forcing me to lose my balance. People on the sidewalk still play chicken with me to see who will get out of the way when we’re walking toward each other. It is pretty easy for me to go forward, but dodging sideways is not so easy in the boot (an obvious conclusion from anyone watching me clomp along clumsily toward them).
On the train from Frankfurt to Paris, a woman forced me to lift up my suitcase over my boot to get it out of the way for her so she could get closer to the door when we were approaching the Paris station. After re-stabilizing myself, I looked up and found out that her urgency was to get only one step in front of us and no further! Then as I lowered the suitcase down the stairs of the train car to the platform, awkwardly with the boot, the woman behind me pushed me out the door. Welcome back to France, I thought!
The other day, I was hobbling across the Jardin du Luxembourg with John and Elizabeth. Most of the pathways through the garden are dirt, and some are gravel. I was avoiding the hard-to-walk-on gravel by walking on the narrow sidewalk at the edge of the path next to the palace. Two older ladies were walking side-by-side on the sidewalk toward me. Of course I wouldn’t expect them to step off the curb, but I would expect them to go single file so I wouldn’t have to step off the curb even if I weren’t in a boot. But no, they kept on walking side-by-side and I had to hobble down off the curb into the gravel to get by them.
Recently, I went to a café with a friend who is about 6’3”. We are both tall by French standards and I had on the giant boot. The waiter told us we couldn’t sit at one of the larger tables for four and he brought us around behind a column to a tiny table for two that was wedged between two other tables for two. The chairs were back to back. My chair was lodged in between the table and the chair behind me so tightly that the back two legs of the chair were off the ground. When I sat down, it forced the chair of woman behind me to go up on two legs. When she got up to adjust her chair, mine went back up on two legs. It went back and forth like this for a few times until I managed to untangle the boot from the table legs, move the chair in at an angle, and sit sideways with both feet facing out from the table. This caused the waiter to trip over them every time he walked by.
I can’t say that I’d be treated any better in California. When we lived in San Francisco some years ago, the Chronicle published the results of a study that found that San Francisco was the rudest city in the country. Examples of rudeness included not giving up a seat on the bus for a man with a cane and not offering to help obviously lost tourists with a map. A Californian friend of mine told me that his friend with Parkinson’s Disease has been told on more than one occasion by strangers that he shouldn’t leave the house if he is disabled. I’ve never experienced anything that offensive here and a few people have offered me seats on the Metro.
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