May 2007

My mother was born with a dislocated hip and her parents didn’t realize anything was wrong until she started trying to walk. The problem was diagnosed; the doctors operated; and, in the process, hit a nerve and paralyzed her right leg. After that, it was a series of doctors and operations and hospitals and body casts. My mother entered adulthood with a pronounced limp, but she never wore a lift or a brace or a special shoe. She was a good dancer. She moved with a peculiar kind of elegance.

When I was about ten years old, my mother and brother and I were in the Woolworth’s in Pine Hills, Florida, and we managed to talk our mother into buying us grilled cheese sandwiches at the lunch counter.

I loved Woolworth’s. It always smelled the same, like mothballs and fingernail polish remover and somebody else’s coat closet. The place was huge and obviously doomed: the overhead lights flickered and hissed, the aisles were devoid of customers and full of things that people didn’t want anymore: Teaberry gum and plastic hair bows, rain bonnets and bobby pins; the lunch counter seemed to be patronized only by men in hats and women in wigs.

We sat at the counter on stools that were covered in a faded red plastic. If you exerted a lot of energy, the stools would, eventually, make a cranky, joyless circle. While my brother and I were trying to make our stools turn, my mother got up and went over to look at a display. A woman came out of the dark aisle and grabbed hold of my mother’s arm.

“I’ll pray for you,” she said.

“What?” said my mother.

“I’ll pray for you, honey. I’ll pray for your crippled leg.”

“Are you kidding?” said my mother.

The woman wasn’t kidding.

She dropped to her knees and started praying. She kept hold of my mother’s arm. “Please heal this broken woman,” she said.

“What are you doing?” said my mother. ”Get up.”

My brother and I sat, unmoving, on our stools.

“Please,” said my mother, “stop.”

Eventually, the woman must have stopped.

Eventually, she must have gotten up and let go of my mother’s arm and walked away.

I don’t remember.

What I do remember is that in the car on the way home, I said to my mother, “Are you crippled?”

“Do I look crippled to you?” said my mother.

“No,” I said.

“All right then,” said my mother.

I had watched my mother walk for ten years and it never once occurred to me that anything was wrong with her. I didn’t think she was broken. I thought of her as spectacularly whole.

For the first time in my life, I understood that what we see is a product of who we are. The world opens or closes, is beautiful or ugly, depending on our hearts and whether they are broken or joyful, despairing or flooded with love.