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Giving It Back

Cris Matthews
Cris Matthews is continuing
to boldly go where no gimp
has gone before.

FROM
The Ragged Edge:
The Disability Experience from the Pages
of The Disability Rag
Edited by Barrett Shaw

Two years ago Gail Linn – my best friend through most of grade school – died. Yet I found out only a week ago – accidentally.

Taking a nostalgic drive through the old neighborhood, I noticed the wheelchair ramp that had taken up most of her parents’ yard was gone. I was unprepared for the news that my old friend was gone, too.

We were diametric opposites, she and I. She was blonde; I have dark hair. She was shy at school, not popular; I was outgoing and had lots of friends. My parents were divorced; her family even included a live-in grandmother! She excelled at everything academic, including perfect penmanship. I was smart but struggled with math; my writing was a more "distinct" scrawl. She was five months older than me. Throughout grade school we were best friends.

Freshman year of high school meant different homerooms, different classes and even different bus routes (yes, in those days, we were bused to "special" schools). Most of the Friends we’d made in grade school still hung with me; Gail Linn could be with my crowd at recess after lunch. By then, I was a hippie. Gail Linn was still Gail Linn.

When I transferred to still another gimp school, my ties to my former friend ended in the blur of adolescence and the unrelenting roll into adulthood. Through grapevines and assumptions, I knew our lives had taken quite different paths. I had been on an adventure with thousands of experiences in my catalog and twice as many lessons learned. I struck out on my own and sometimes paid dearly for it but ended up richly rewarded. I’d traveled a bit, been involved in disability civil rights confrontations in the streets of our city and was now managing to live on my own.

Gail Linn’s academic brilliance brought her an offer of a full scholarship, including room, board and attendant services at a Big Ten University, at a time when gimps like us just didn’t go to college. She turned it down, though, because she couldn’t bear to leave home. There she stayed until she died.

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