Life at 8 Mph_How a Man With Cerebral Palsy Taught Me the Secret to Life by Peter Bowling Anderson

Author:Peter Bowling Anderson [Anderson, Peter Bowling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, People With Disabilities
ISBN: 9780999742280
Google: ackgwAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 46043227
Publisher: KiCam Projects
Published: 2019-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

A Safe Haven

Our smiley faces had blossomed into paragraphs into full-length letters. Leslie and I wrote every day, except for a two-day stretch when I didn’t hear from her and I was certain I’d scared her off. I had no idea how, yet her sudden disappearance convinced me I’d ruined everything. I felt like Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas: “Everything I touch gets ruined.” Actually, that sounded a lot like Bryan, too. I sent two extra letters to Leslie apologizing for my reprehensible remarks that had driven her into hiding, though I couldn’t unearth them no matter how meticulously I combed my memory. Finally, catastrophe was averted when she let me know she’d simply been out of town for work (complicated medical stuff involving 3D mapping systems for heart procedures that I struggled mightily to understand yet hadn’t a solid clue). She even called me “my worrisome friend.”

We’d advanced from strangers to acquaintances to pen pals to friends.

Now we just needed to talk on the phone.

I wasn’t a big phone talker. In fact, I hated it. I’d just recently bought my first cellphone, a TracFone, because Richard needed me to have one handy and this looked like the easiest to learn.

I never knew what to say on the phone, when I was allowed to exit a conversation, or how to terminate the torture. Once I said hello, I was trapped. With letters, even online chatting (which Leslie and I had just started doing), I didn’t feel put on the spot as I did on the phone. I was also cozier expressing my thoughts in writing than wedging them into spoken words every few beats. The odds of me blowing it increased dramatically once I opened my mouth. However, while letters provided a sturdy, dependable foundation, I knew speaking was basically unavoidable in a relationship, though plenty of marriages had given it a shot.

Thankfully, we were progressing gradually at a cautious pace, so there was time before we played phone roulette.

At least, I thought there was time.

Leslie and I exchanged letters each day, but we scheduled one night a week for “chat” sessions. When the next one rolled around, my Internet connection was so poor we couldn’t maintain a conversation without minute-long pauses during freezes. At first, Leslie suggested we try tomorrow night. Then she wrote, Or we could talk on the phone…

I was so caught off-guard, and so fearful of impaling myself on the phone, I typed exactly what skittered through my head: Yikes.

This wasn’t the wisest choice of words.

Instantly, Leslie began apologizing for rushing things and making me feel awkward and reading too much into our friendship and wasting my time, and she concluded it was definitely best if we didn’t contact each other anymore and she wished me the very best.

“Huh?” I grunted from the floor where her message left me. “What the heck just happened?”

I scrambled to write her back, explaining that I didn’t feel pressured and I wanted to speak to her

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