This Thanksgiving, I have a confession to make: I’m a dirty bird.
Now, at this point in my life, I think I’m achieving many of my goals, with a healthy, happy family, stable career, and virtually no vices – heck, you can even open my closets and peek under my bed, and all is as spotless on the inside as it is on the outside.
Yet, as I roll up to the Thanksgiving table this year, homemade paper pilgrim hat on my head, wearing a crisp, rustic-orange shirt and turkey-adorned neck tie, I will still have a dirty secret cloaked beneath the ironed, white table cloth: My muck-and-mired powerchair.
I swear, I try to keep my powerchair clean – I really do, especially for occasions like Thanksgiving dinner. But, I just can’t seem to keep it spotless and speckless for any duration. It’s like making a bed, only to intrinsically mess it up again the instant you lie down – that is, as soon as I clean my powerchair, it’s dirty again by the time I roll out my front door. It’s a curse, really.
Now, one might suppose that at some point during the year, when there’s a dry stretch of weather and I stick to paved surfaces, I must be able to keep my chair clean for some time, right?
Nope, not a chance. You see, I’ve been convinced ever since I was a child that powerchairs actually create mud. People say that freshly-washed cars make it rain, and I attest that clean powerchairs create mud. Sure, my wife will tell you differently, that my powerchair only gets dirty when I drive through all kinds of yucky stuff on my way to work each day, that I’m then too lazy to wipe it off promptly, resulting in a powerchair that’s always dirty. But, I’m sticking to my story that no matter how much time I spend cleaning my powerchair, it stays dirty because it simply makes its own mud.
For Thanksgiving this year, I will once again sit at our family table, the scene groomed and gracious, silverware polished, turkey tanned, where like a newscaster behind the anchor’s desk, I will look poised and picture-perfect from the waist up. However, beneath the draped, starched tablecloth will sit my dirty bird of a powerchair, having gone another year flawless in its function, but still unbathed, even on Thanksgiving – inevitably the way I like it, surely collecting a few drops of gravy and cranberry sauce on the fenders in celebration, no less.
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