Crippled Chronicles

These days, people don’t even know what polio means, yet, at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, it would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year. Polio, which I contracted in 1953, left me with no muscles in my lower limbs, so, essentially, I walked with my arms for most of my life. Each morning, I would put on heavy, orthopedic shoes, buckle leather and metal braces to my legs, and leverage myself out of bed with my crutches. There were no special needs services, at least not where we lived. I went to the local schools and was determined to try to do what everyone else was doing. A hyper-developed upper body allowed me to walk, climb stairs, swim, travel, study. I became an artist and teacher. In some ways, I acted as if I didn’t have a handicap at all. I just needed to do things differently, be more driven, work a little harder. By the mid-1980s my wife and I were raising four children and renovating a house, while I was rotating between teaching gigs at three different schools and making paintings that were ten feet high and sixteen feet wide. In your thirties, you feel like you can do anything.