The Unfairness of Chairs

Photo description: A collection of chairs, in black and white.

"You sit all the time Dave," said Sadie, looking at me with great seriousness. She's 5 years old now and is ready and willing to serve up her view of the world to those around her. I love this. She makes comments about what she notices about things and about people and she does it without prejudice or judgement. It's just factual. She tells us because she wants to make sure that we've noticed what she has seen.

"Yes, I do." I said. I didn't want to quibble with the fact that I can walk, unsteadily, a little bit.

"You sit in this chair," she said, pointing to the front room chair that I use, and then she pointed to other chairs, "and you sit in the wheelchair at your desk and you sit in the big wheelchair." The big wheelchair mentioned is my power chair.

"Yes, I sit in those chairs, but I sit in other chairs too."

"What other chairs?" she asked, seriously.

"I sit in my wheelchair at work, I sit on the car seat, which is kind of a chair, and I sit on an airplane seat, which is another kind of chair."

"Oh, that's a LOT of chairs."

"It is. But you sit in a lot of chairs too. Like your chair at the table at home and the chair in the front room and the chair at your desk in school and the school bus seat, which is a kind of chair, you sit in lots of chairs."

"Yeah! I do."

"You will spend your life walking from chair to chair. I spend mine riding from chair to chair."

(Long pause)

"That's not fair!" she said.

She's non-disabled, she's going to have to accept that fact sometime, might as well start young.