There was an outside world, and that was itself a refreshing and reassuring bit of news. I parked up the hill, just 100 m or so, turned my wheelchair downhill and waited for the redoubtable 36 Muni. It was not so much the existence, as the worthwhileness of the outside world that vanished along about 3:30 AM when I awoke to being shot. Nothing like a little nocturnal stroll down memory lane. Somehow, I had convinced myself that getting back to sleep was possible. And I really tried to believe this until about 5:45 AM. And the rest is daylight history.
As for the plan for the day. Well, there was one. And it amounted to turning up at Jewish services. But before that plan got very far, the bus turned up, lowered its ramp and I rolled into place. “Here or there?” This from a man on one of the benches. He was offering to fold up his bench or the one opposite for wheelchair access. The left one, I told him. And thank you very much. The man resumed his previous stance, which was an acute bending over, a collapse, head in hands, almost a cliché of cringing. He was bearded, dark skinned, perhaps South Asian.
After he had folded up the seat and I had rolled into my precarious place, our hill being what it is and moving buses being what they are…I told him he was very helpful. He didn’t respond verbally, but nodded, no eye contact. We continued for a few blocks. “Where is the Mission?” he asked. I told him it was on 16th St. and Dolores. This seemed to satisfy him. He wasn’t asking how to get there on the bus. Nor was it clear that he was asking about Mission Dolores or the Mission district. And in another world, or another time, it would have been easy to conduct him there in one way or another. But I am so vulnerable and rightly or wrongly feel afraid of San Francisco’s many scruffy people of the streets. So we carried on. I soon got off to change buses.
And I had changed gears. Psychic ones. I am not a homeless person. I am a very disabled person who is miraculously alive. And I am beset by first world problems which, in the city of feudal wealth divisions, is a kind of luxury.