For the second time this week I’ve seen reference to how someone’s disability helped to make a new product or song.
This is the exact opposite of the super crip or the overcomer. It shows a reality that I know. When you’ve got a disability you have to be inventive.
The first is Doc Pomus, a wheelchair user, who wrote “Save the Last Dance for Me” for his able-bodied wife who liked to go out dancing. It’s a wonderful story but the surprising thing is how his disability helped him to be understand vulnerability and thus write many wonderful songs that touch everyone.
The other is a little more prosaic. I was watching a history of surfing on PBS, Liquid Stage. Bob Simmons, a Southern California excentric, designed the first light-weight surf board. The narration described his motivation as being his injured arm. It was said as an explanation rather than a “gee whiz!”
Maybe we’re making headway in the general society if they can be describing our lives in ways that explain the reality I live.