A Place to Sit

A few years back, a friend went to a specialist. Walking had become so difficult, she couldn’t go a full block without stopping to let her knee pain fade. She was just past 50, and even though the doctor agreed that her arthritis was bad, he felt she was ‘too young’ to have a knee replaced. He gave her a pair of knee braces to help keep the bones in proper alignment and suggest she lose weight. But the braces tended to slide down her legs, which didn’t keep anything in alignment, and without being able to use her knees for exercise, it was pretty impossible to lose weight.

About 5 years later, she returned, braced to receive shots of fake lubricant in her knees, even though that stuff had to be renewed (more shots) every 3 months. NOW he was ready to replace one of her knees, but felt she could ‘put up with’ the other one a while longer. He still wanted her to lose weight.

Today, she is doing better. Only the one knee has been replaced, but the ‘old’ knee only occasionally gives her any pain. She belongs to a gym and works out fairly regularly, but has only gotten up to 1.5 miles on a treadmill. She enjoys theme parks and shopping malls, and used to enjoy a nature walk from time to time, but she really can’t do those any more. Why not? Because a lot of these places don’t have benches in the locations where she needs them.

For instance, at a theme park, you are expected to walk from your car somewhere in a sea of a parking lot to the entry gate, stand in line to get in, and then walk some more before you come to a snack place that might have a bench. And after you’ve spent the day walking and standing in line (with only a minute here or there sitting on a ride), you are expected to walk all the way back out the gate and to your car, if you can remember where you left it.

She had a handicapped sticker for her car for 3 months while she recovered from her surgery, but now she gets to park out with the regular people, beyond the handicapped stalls, the pregnancy stalls, the taxi stalls ... and there won’t be a bench for her to catch her breath when she finally gets to the mall door, either.

I don’t think a day goes by that you don’t hear somebody mention that today’s citizens are aging, that the ‘baby boomers’ are starting to retire. So why can’t anybody install a few benches scattered along the pathway?