Audience

Today I am audience.

At The Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, this morning, Joe will be making his first appearance in the choir. During the summer, with the regular choir taking holidays, they ask for congregation members to step up, step in and sing. Joe has a lovely voice and he sang in a choir for nearly 10 years when we lived in Quebec, so he volunteered. He's been to the practise and he's ready to go. He'll be singing in both the 9 and 11 o'clock services. The 11 can be watched live on their website and I think it's available for a few days afterwards too - for those of you who want to see his shining face set ablaze with song.

For me, this is great. Joe's always in the audience at my lectures, I now get to return the favour. We had a rough time getting WheelTrans booked for this, as it ends up they can get us there but can't get us back. So we decided that we'd make our way to the nearest accessible subway stop, which is a long walk, but I so didn't want to miss this experience.

During the whole time we were attempting to get a ride there was never a thought of 'oh well, I can just watch it on line.' We've learned as a couple, that if we want to do what we want to do, we have to consider my disability and then figure out how to work things out. It's never really the disability that's the issue, it's thinking of a creative solution as to how to make our life work the way we want it to work. It helps that Joe hasn't grown tired of the constant nature of  'disability deductive thinking' - he, like me, remains determined to make things happen the best way we can.

This doesn't mean that we're 100 percent successful or that we don't run into issues that we just can't figure through - but it means that haven't let those times influence the NEXT time. We haven't learned to just 'give up' yet.

I fear that.

Because it's tempting.

But, for today, we've got it figured, and I get to go and ...

be audience.