My brother was 3 years old at the time. I had been 5 months. And because our dad was in the hospital when he learned how to use a pencil, brush his teeth and walk again, his struggle was lost on us.
We learned only later that we — his boys — had been a major motivation for his push to recovery.
So, aside from a penchant for naps, which no child just escaped from being sentenced to them could understand, our dad seemed normal to us.
Well, there would be a fall every couple of years. He once missed a step while carrying a sewing machine and ripped apart the ligaments in his ankle.
There were crutches and canes, and he often soaked his ankles in hot water.
Just after I turned 7 and we moved into our new house, I recall him getting a skin graft on his ankle for some kind of repair. A family legend was born the day a man walking by fetched my mom and helped her get my father in the house when he’d been stranded working in the front yard.
The drama of such events was amplified by my mother’s concern and love. Still, we always got the sense that, from dad’s end, nothing ever got too exciting.
Probably because of that, when our smart-alec days arrived, it seemed normal to give him the endearing nickname, Step-and-a-half.
To put it in context, by that time, my older brother, a large lad for those days, was known in the neighborhood as The Ogre. How could someone called The Ogre not have a father with a nickname?
My dad took it in stride (or stride and a half, as we might have put it) — just as we knew he would.
Now 82, he’s doing much the same. He uses a cane around the apartment he and my mother share in St. Mark’s Village retirement complex. He also takes more naps these days. (A photo-copied story my mother kept from a magazine says fatigue is a part of post-polio syndrome.)
Some days he’s up to doing things. Some days he’s not. That he’s wise enough to know which days are which was clear to me when, on several occasions, the ladies who far outnumber the men at St. Mark’s described him not as a grouchy man pre-occupied with his increasing physical challenges, but as a kind man.
So often we notice grace and gracefulness in physically talented people who, in the midst of hard-driving performances, bring an aesthetic beauty to what they do. But there is a grace of the spirit as well that many who face challenges possess.
I know that because, in my family, that’s embodied by a man who, on days when he’s not too tired, lolls his gray head slightly forward and moves his kind spirit down the halls of St. Mark Village, a step and a half at a time.
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