A funny thing happened on my way home from the chili parlor. . . . .

This actually happened last night, but I'm just getting around to posting about it now.

As I was coming home from work last night, Julie asked me to pick up coneys so I stopped at the Skyline Chili on Mall Road, next door to Hollywood Video (which store I really hate, but won't go into that here. The Hollywood, not the Skyline. . . . .) I ran through the drive through and grabbed the food but when I pulled through to continue my loop around the store and onward to the exit, there was a woman standing in the middle of the driveway with an obvious severely developementally challenged boy (wearing a bright green bicycle helmet and the largest bib I've ever seen) sitting on the ground next to her. He looked like he was kind of collapsed awkwardly but he didn't seem hurt or anything like that and they were positioned so that I could drive past them but not very easily.

My windows were down on my car since the air is still broken and I was positioned pretty much so that I was looking directly at her out my window.

She was in her late 40s maybe and was wearing a brightly colored pair of shorts and a tank top. There was only one car that they could have been walking from and, while I missed the actual make of the car, it was obviously a late model, rusted-out something.

"He had a seizure," she said. I had no real idea how to respond to this. I've never been around anyone that had had a seizure before.

"Is he all right?" I asked, feeling rather ill equipped to be presented with this. I generally to deal with things, especially things of a medical-type nature.

"I guess so," she responded. It was interesting listening to her talk because you could tell there was an air of apathy I suppose grown from this happening pretty regularly but it was strangely balanced by an obvious deep concern for him. I was touched by this. In three words, it seemed like she really summed up just how it feels to be her. It was very poignant, actually.

There was a long pause between us where she just stood looking at me and I sat in my car, concscious of the other car behind me that'd inevitably be wanting to pull through soon but also I was thinking about these things. Above it all, I was thinking still just how ill equipped I was to be the one here for her.

Unsure of what else to say, I broke the silence by asking her if she needed someone to call for medical assistance and, as I did so, I took some comfort for myself by sort of grabbing up my cell phone from the seat next to me and kind of brandishing it in front of me. This seemed to me to be a fairly appropriate contribution toward the solution of the problem and its being something which I could competently do, it made me feel much more comfortable.

"No," she said. "But can you just help me get him up?"

This utterly took me by surprise. I'm certain I sat there for a couple of seconds without moving. My car was unparked and still sitting in the drive-through lane at Skyline. The woman and boy were on the ground in front of me. We were all sweating. I'm sure the ground that the boy was sitting on was over a hundred degrees and, I'm ashamed to say it, but I was actually sort of repulsed by the request. But why should I have been repulsed? I am a man in my late 20s, of the same ethnicity as the woman, and we had already built some sort of rapport, but just the same, there you have it: I was actually sort of repulsed.

Now, the obvious response to this, you'll say, is that I was repulsed by the boy. That would be really damnable and completely expected at the same time, and so it'll make it hard for me to try to convince you that that wasn't what made me uncomfortable, but after having thought about it some, I will honestly say that I don't think that he was the cause of my knee-jerk reaction. I don't think that that was it at all. I would ask myself now would I have reacted the same if it had been someone without disability and I think I would.

I think it was the imposition of her request put upon me. The feeling of being pulled into someone else's story, for even so brief a time as this. I'll come back to this at the end.

The shock of the request struck me more than the request itself though and I quickly moved past the knee-jerk really thinking consciously about it, and of course I pulled my car around them and parked. And then I did two things which I'm not at all proud of. First I asked myself if I should take my keys with me or leave them in the car, running, and second, I consciously checked to see where my wallet was and gauged whether or not I should take it with me. Is that horrible, I wonder? Is that normal?

I felt instantly ashamed, left the car running and my wallet in its normal place, and went out to help her.

Helping him up was just a function of us each taking an arm and hoisting him up (much heavier than he looked!), a process which, though I'm still not sure how precisely, ended with me literally being covered from shoulder to waist and hands in a thin sheen boy-slobber.

They continued their way inside. The boy seemed shocked a little; the mother seemed tired. I went to my car and drove home.

Now we come to what may be my point if there is one to be had here at all: I have no reason to suspect these people of anything whatsoever and yet a legitimate request for the most modest assistance from a person in need was, albeit fleetingly, met with suspicion, repulsion and a real feeling of imposition. It's possible that I'm completely unique in this reaction, but I don't think I am. I don't consider myself unique in any respects to be honest, so I'm left to conclude that my reaction was in some measure typical. What does that mean?

Only upon later reflection does this five minute long event strike me as having been something rather literary and glimpsing of a greater truth, but, for now, this thought is done. At the risk of sounding in some ways pretentious, I'm not at all pleased with the implications of the event.