Disability and the Local Pie

I went to a diner yesterday with my friend, the writer Alison Towle Moore and we ate a local kind of pie made of out berries that are only found here in the Pacific northwest, and now I can’t remember what they’re called though I think the pie lady called them Marion Berries, which of course sounds like the former Mayor of Washington, DC, so that can’t be right. 

While Ali and I were talking, rather candidly about our respective parents and the struggle to live in the shadow of family dysfunction, the pie lady picked up on our conversation and decided to join us. She has had a tough life. We wound up, the three of us, talking about how to live and what to do. That’s the way of it. The pie lady needs her antidepressants. I need mine. Without them we’d live under the couch. 

I love the assumption of “ableist” types who imagine that invisible disabilities are just a bunch of hooey–you know the types–the ones who opine in a school board meeting or a faculty meeting or what have you, a living room perhaps–that in their day there weren’t all these learning disabilities and “conditions” etc. In “their day” (Jurassic?) no one ever talked about disability–they’d beat you senseless if you tried to explain why you were unable to achieve in school. In fact, they’d just beat you senseless anyway. 

I’ll take the local pie and an anti-depressant please. Please. 

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto