Jane seemed a little surprised to find herself heading south on I 280 this morning. I felt a bit that way myself. In fact, what really surprised me, if anything, was how soon Black Mountain Road appears on the freeway. Damned if Santa Clara doesn’t move itself just a slight bit northwest. And then there it is, the MobilityWorks garage near San Jose Airport.

I have a chat with the mechanic. I urge Jane to take part in this, but she declines. The whole thing has me slightly paranoid, for what if I forget something? No, the mechanic assures me, we have covered all the ground. The mechanical device that locks my wheelchair into the driving position will be permanently moved to the passenger side. I am permanently moving to the passenger side. I am giving up driving.

There were moments this morning, I will admit it, on the way to the freeway, driving the hilly blocks around my house…. There were moments, remembering exactly where the parking spaces are, which are available on Fridays, if one gets there early, to avoid the street cleaners on the other side of the street and those available on Tuesdays to avoid the street cleaning machine on the Friday side of the street. The ticket for parking infractions being $85 a pop, street cleaning being the vital function that it is.

And then there were all those times, just in the last few years, when I drove up and down the hill that is my hill, knowing every inch, trying to get over my fear of driving. Was it four years ago that I backed into two parked cars? I never got over it. I worked hard to deal with the fear, but then I got older, and it wasn’t just fear but pain in my foot and increasing difficulty sitting straight in the wheelchair as I drove, but I tried. I would get up on Sunday mornings and make it a point to drive straight up the hill to the first stop sign. And in the next block just hope that fear did not overtake me so much that I would have to pull over and recover. The big fear was that I would get so scared that I would not be able to get home. But I would park, try to get over my panic, and just abandon the car there because driving seemed impossible.

So while dealing with my post-parking-accident trauma, I knew I was dealing with much earlier trauma, but I did get to know the neighborhood. There was about a one mile round trip I would make, maybe four times on a Sunday morning. Then, relieved, I would park the car in front of the house and call it a week. At the worst, I would just leave the car there. A week later, I would drive it somewhere, perhaps just into the nearest legal parking spot to avoid getting a street-cleaning ticket. 

There was a place at the bottom of the neighborhood hill by our shops and cappucino outlets where I would stop at the stop sign, let my foot up on the brake and allow myself to coast around the corner to the next stop sign. Then I would start up the hill again, praying that no one would have taken my parking spot. A couple of years of this marked the end. And in the end I had to give up on facing the fear, for I never could get beyond it. Never mind. My body overtook me. And now I am mostly, but not entirely, relieved.

In Santa Clara, the garage being next to a freeway, we take the frontage road out for lunch. In this industrial neighborhood there are no sidewalks, so I roll my wheelchair dangerously up the road. This will be the second time in a year that Jane and I have been inside a restaurant. I mean to actually eat. It is a Vietnamese place. We have Pho. I dump all the bamboo shoots in the soup. Plus all the sliced jalapeño peppers. And every single one of the Thai Basil shoots. I didn’t even remember that book title about linguistics or something. How a panda eats shoots and leaves. And the restaurant murderer does exactly the same thing. But with a comma.

Getting on 101 north, Jane has a momentary confusion following the satellite navigation commands about turn right versus turn somewhat right. I am now a passenger seated beside her. This feels right, as though it has always been this way. Though in reality, I have always been in my wheelchair between the two front seats and the rear one. Now I am in the position of the passenger seat in the front.

It is no big deal, and it is a permanent life transition. And it is OK.