Things are getting smaller.

Things are getting smaller: did I say that already? Well, it bears repeating. After four weeks of not moving around a whole lot, I'm starting to move around again, and with that, the world starts to shrink. On Monday morning the 21st, the morning after my accident, the world was about the size of my bedroom. It took a couple of weeks before I could move about with some ease, but as I started to move about easier, as the leg pounded less as I tried to swing it over the side of the bed, suddenly the distance down the hall seemed to shrink to a manageable way to travel. The whole world seems like that.

If you happen to be unable to get around, the world seems like a really big place. I still don't walk all that far without tiring, so the distance from the parking garage at work to my office is about all the walking I can do; in fact, the walk back seemed downright un-doable the the other day. If I have to, I can walk down to the end of my block to get the bus, which saves me the need to step on the clutch of my Subaru; what happens if there isn't a bus stop at the end of the block? What if I had to walk two blocks, or ten? And then if that walk can not happen, the world is an infinitely bit place -- make that, Albany is an infinitely big place. You can't get there from here.

In the City, bus options are pretty good, at least where I am. To my south, in Delmar, it's going to be a bit further to the bus stop. What happens to folks who "age in"? What happens when people don't have the ability to walk as far, or to drive, and their options to travel are taken out of their own hands? My mother, on Long Island, would say that the worst thing that ever happened to her was not being able to drive (I pointed out that living in a country that had gone to war four times, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq war -- Kuwait hardly counted -- was a significant social upheaval, but she missed that point: I don't think she would be alone). It is scary how we don't have a way to, how shall we put it, degrade gracefully (that's a communications term I picked-up years ago about how communications systems should be designed as they go through the EMP, electro-eagnetic pulse, associate with a nuclear detonation).

The point should be taken, that people are going to become increasingly limited in their transportation options as they age, and if they wish to age in place, to stay in their homes, to be able to get around, they are going to need some transportation infrastructure when their own means fail. Of course, they could be like me and get a disability of sorts earlier on. But then, my disability is of the passing nature.

So for me, right now, things are getting smaller. That may well be only a temporary experience.