A Tragic Tale

Today was my first official on-campus day at school. Let's keep in mind that on very rainy, windy, stormy days I keep my rear-end at home. Life in a wheelchair is strenuous as it is- wet, ice-cold hands can hardly grip a metal handle bar (whatever it's called), the seat backing that acts as a sort of parachute working against high-velocity winds, water from the tires that soak the undersides of sleeves which in turn dampens the outer thighs, and to add insult to injury, rain tends to gather in places that shall remain nameless. (I won't get into slugs, worms, chewed gum, dog piles, or anything like that. But it's rather amazing how those things stick to a thin wheelchair tire, especially on rainy days.) Oh, and let's also keep in mind that I don't have legs...

So I'm at school. Two classes back-to-back, same building, same floor- the 4th floor. Did I mention it was stormy? So guess what happened... power outage! During class #1 it lasted less than a minute, so I didn't panic. But I had had a bad feeling all along, even before I went up the elevator. Being that it was the first day and I didn't want to get dropped as a no-show, I stayed. Class #1 ended. The lights stayed on. I was cool. It was about five minutes or so before class #2 began that the power was officially off. But class remained in session, and all the while I prayed for electricity. Instead, security came around to tell us the campus was closed for the day. Nice.

Yes, I was stuck. A little anxiety kicked in, the blue phone was busy, couldn't reach campus security from my cell, so I had no choice but to smoke (shhh, it's a non-smoking campus but I was going through a trauma). Power soon returned but somehow the elevators were still unoperable. Some jackass with an oversized wrench came up and tried to pry the elevator doors open. Yeah, that was my thought too... "Hell no!" Several security guys eventually came to my rescue and offered to carry me down in my chair. Down four flights of wet stairs? With no sandpaper grips? Without non-slip shoes? "Nah, it's ok. I'll walk down," I laughed. Piggy-back down? He looked about 2/3 my weight. "No, really, I'll walk." And I did. All the way down. My ass was soaked, filthy, damn near frost-bitten. And it poured all the way to my car. To top it off, it took 20 minutes just to leave the parking lot because it was flooded with cars.

The highlight of my first official on-campus day at school? Two minutes after I got in my car to leave, the sun came out...