The Clown College of Life

  There’s this cripple I know who has cerebral palsy. He walks but he doesn’t talk.

 Before I tell you more about him, let me give him an alias in case he doesn’t want to be outed here. I’ll call him King Ferdinand of Spain.

Anyway, I don’t see King Ferdinand of Spain very often- maybe once a year or so. And when I do I’m always impressed by the way he communicates. It’s kind of like a combination  of miming and playing charades. Like if he wants to have a drink with you, he points to you and himself and makes a drinking motion. And he can get a helluva lot of mileage out of a facial expression. If he thinks somebody is full of shit, you can tell by that certain “full of shit” look he breaks out. He doesn’t have to say a word. He gives the finger a lot, too.

King Ferdinand of Spain walks funny, too. One leg steps just fine but the other leg sort of skips every time he takes a step. It’s like that leg has a mind of its own and instead of walking  normal as the brain commands it skips, just to be a smart ass. I guess that’s how cerebral palsy works sometimes.

Whenever I see King Ferdinand of Spain, I feel bad for him because I think he could have been a very successful man, professionally and financially, had someone somewhere along the line encouraged him to embrace his inner clown.  But probably just the opposite happened. If he asked a vocational rehabilitation to help him get a job, they probably required him to pursue something decidedly uncolwnlike, like accounting. Or hell, the best vocational rehabilitation would probably offer a guy like King Ferdinand of Spain would probably be a job on an assembly line tightening screws all day for a dime an hour or that kind of thing.

But I think King Ferdinand of Spain could have been a distinguished professor at a clown college, teaching eager pupils how to be mute clowns. Because King Ferdinand of Spain has the mute clown routine perfected—all the elaborate nonverbal communication techniques. King Ferdinand of Spain learned it all in the clown college of life. He has a hard-earned Ph.D in clown arts. Or is it clown sciences?

 So it would have been nice had someone recognized King Ferdinand of Spain’s area of true expertise and set him up teaching at a clown college. He could have been a superstar.

But that’s not what  cripple rehabilitation is all about. Cripple rehabilitation is about getting cripples to run away from their crippledness as far as they possibly can. So a guy like King Ferdinand of Spain, whose crippledness is always front and center, is destined to always  come up short. Who would hire a clown as an accountant?  

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