Cane and Able 
Citizen Cane
It’s been ten years since I was shot and left for dead on a trip to Mexico City. Since that fateful night, my life has not been easy. But try telling me it hasn’t been blessed.
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A few days after I was discharged from a six-week stay in a small, justly renowned rehabilitation hospital in Houston, Dorothy and I went to see the spine specialist in Austin to whom I’d been referred. After our appointment, I was down a hall from the examining room when I heard him dictating his notes: “Patient is a pleasant and well-spoken man”—oh, thanks—“with incomplete paraplegia.” I really thought, “Who, me?” Then I had to laugh at myself. I was in a wheelchair! But it may have been the very next appointment when that doctor said, “I don’t blow smoke at my patients. I can tell from what I’m seeing here that you’re going to be out of that thing in six months.” Dorothy and I were stunned. We were in the elevator when I finally spoke: “Well, he sure told us what we wanted to hear.”
It ended up taking a year and a half of outpatient therapy to rid myself of wheelchair and crutches. I floundered and splashed in utter despair, trying to make my legs work in the shallows of the hospital swimming pool. Paralysis of any degree loads nuance and menace on the word “gravity.” One day I met an elderly former airline pilot who had survived cancer, but his bones had been turned almost to sponge by chemotherapy. Daily exercise in that pool had enabled him to stand erect and walk again. He adopted me, in a way. He pepped me up with locker-room talk of classic title fights and travel abroad, anything to keep me trying and smiling.
My physical therapist, an ever-cheerful young woman from Long Island in a line of work prone to burnout, also became my friend and godsend. I flopped around tumbling mats at her command as doggedly as I had once whacked the mitts of my boxing trainer, and I made progress in the pool, treading deep water at a sprint and beginning to walk on a submerged treadmill. With the help of the buoyancy, I felt my body remembering how to step and stride and roll my hips. Dorothy and I went to New York on a magazine assignment, and apart from bringing back a profile of a singer I admired, we measured up to the great beast Manhattan, with its blaring horns, thunderous racket of demolition, and buildings with restrooms that were built decades before there was any social, much less legal, obligation to help the physically impaired.
One day, back in Austin, in the home office where I now sit, I watched two young guys from the medical supplier roll the wheelchair out of our lives. After that I thumped along on a walker and in time graduated to two heavy steel crutches. In January, a friend splurged on a wedding in Venice. Dorothy and I accepted the invitation, then I told him I had to back out. I was terrified of the long flight and the lines for customs. But we never canceled our tickets, and then somehow we were in Venice, just nine months after I’d almost died. To my surprise, that first day there was the last that I used two crutches. I realized I could manage now with just one. Or believed I could. Late one night Dorothy and I and some other couples were in Piazza San Marco, marveling at the beauty and our good fortune. The weather was cold and clear, and mist rose from the canals. “Look!” someone said, pointing to the ground.
As we stared downward, the dark stone under our feet appeared to break up like fine crystal tapped with a hammer. At once I knew what it was. The temperature, somewhere in the twenties, had reached a certain flash-freezing point, and I was out in the middle of that large square surrounded by a thin glaze of ice. I inched my way out of it, with help. The evening of the wedding, at the end of the party, we came out into a thick fog and realized the lines of canal boats, the vaporetti, had closed for the night. I could make the hike back to the hotel, more than a mile, or curl up on a stoop. The wedding’s photographer walked out in front of us with a camera and tripod, and he managed to catch an image in the available light. With furry globes of streetlights reflecting across the paving stones, in the mist we looked like ghosts.
My daughter, Lila, was getting married that spring, and I told my therapist I wanted to be able to walk down the aisle with her using a cane, not a crutch. It became our mutual goal, and working hard three hours a week, we accomplished it. After the wedding, I danced with Lila, twirled her around laughing as I propelled my feet with shoves of the cane and we did the step my generation calls the push.
That first cane was the black metal variety with a thick rubber grip. I still have and use it as a backup, but it clanks with each step and makes an obnoxious noise if I drop it. And it looks as if it came from a hospital. Then Dave, who had endured our terrifying cab ride with a Panama hat on his head and a fat and sweaty robber in his lap, found a cane at a garage sale, painted burnt orange by a University of Texas fan. He had no way to know it was the perfect height for me; he just had an eye. He stripped the orange paint, stained the handsome wood, had my initials artfully engraved in the back of the handle, and adorned the front of the cane, just below the grip, with a milagro he’d picked up in a Mexican curio shop. Milagros are small, flat emblems often hand-tooled from soft metal and tacked onto personal possessions as a plea for good fortune (the word means “miracle” in English). They can be anything—a cross, a cactus, a sliver of moon. Dave chose as my milagro the form of a leg and a foot.
Now that I walked with a cane, people saw me coming in a store or restaurant, gave me a quick smile, and held the door open for me. I found I didn’t mind; if I got there first, I held it open for them. Navigating a crowded room, though, was trickier. People don’t look down, and they’ll accidentally kick the prop right out from under you. Because it was available, and one of my doctors wrote the request, I got a license tag for my car with a symbol of a wheelchair. Since my youth, I’ve been known and kidded for my pokey driving, but the tag itself seems to annoy some folks in traffic. I learned that in downtown Austin I don’t have to use up one of the oversized spaces for vans of the disabled. A traffic court judge told me that with those plates I could park at any meter and never have to put a nickel in it. Free parking—it’s my only perk.
Over the years, moving around the house or scuttling back and forth across the patio to my office, I would stick the cane in a wastepaper basket or hook it on a towel rack or bookcase and limp on at a fair clip, preoccupied by the day’s work. Camouflaged, brown on brown, the favorite cane would vanish. Like a set of car keys, I kept losing the thing and always when it was five minutes past time to go.
“What’s wrong?” Dorothy would ask.
“Help me find the stick!”
It was a virtual miracle that the .38-caliber bullet, after clipping off the end of a vertebra and making a downward turn of almost 45 degrees, plowed to a halt without severing my spinal cord, which would have paralyzed or killed me, period. But a spinal injury in that part of the column means that every bodily function below the waist is traumatized or weakened. Walking is just one of the extremely important things you have to learn over again and hope will come back. My once powerful legs grew spindly, the left one more frail than the right, and I tottered through loss of balance. When the lights are out, my eyes can’t tell my legs what to do. Even with the support of a cane, if I try to walk through a dark room, I’ll fall on my face.
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