My friend Carrie, also a wheelchair-user, but not from a spinal cord injury (she has cerebral palsy: moderately so and can push herself in a manual chair), is a my only friend in a wheelchair who lives in my area. We met one another at David Bowie’s “Reality” tour in 2005, and she’s a woman with some mighty keen insight. 10 years older than me, she looks about 28 years old.
See, Carrie has this amusing theory that people who use wheelchairs from childhood on up, end up looking younger than their real age most of their lives – we live a “soft life” she theorizes, because well, for many of us we have no other choice.
Spending hours in the sun working for example, not many of us could do that even if we wanted. So we end up with the skin of an angel, and love it or hate it – getting carded into our 40’s…read this entry
