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Tumbling After: Pedaling Like Crazy After Life Goes Downhill by Susan Parker Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Making a Life The tension in relationships following an accident that made one character a quadriplegic made Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier one of the best novels of 2002. A non-fiction version of making a life and changing relationships following an accident appears on the pages of Susan Parker’s book, Tumbling After: Pedaling Like Crazy After Life Goes Downhill. Parker’s writing style features short chapters, almost vignettes, each of which brings a clarity or poignancy to the story being told. Parker’s husband, Ralph Hager, led an active and rugged outdoor life until he was injured in a freak bicycle accident. The injury paralyzed him from the shoulders down. The book presents a little something about their life before the accident, but spends most of the time describing how life changed for both of them in the years following the accident. I found myself wanting to turn the pages faster to see what happens next. The book ends six years after the accident, with the story continuing. Here’s an excerpt from early in the book about a neighbor who helped Suzy and Ralph after the accident. This is all of Chapter 7: “She’s Back Mrs. Scott did come back. She returned every day for the rest of the week, and the week after, and the week after that. She accompanied me to the store, she helped me change sheets, and she introduced us to a steady diet of fried chicken, potato salad, and bread pudding. She offered advice, whether it was asked for or not, and she gave me her opinion on everything. I became accustomed to the sound of her cane thumping up the wheelchair ramp, the burst of energy when she walked in the back door, the roar of her voice booming across the kitchen, ‘Get me a cup of coffee, sweetheart. What do you have to eat around here?’ On the days when she was too tired to come to our house, I went down the street to her small, cramped apartment to check on her. I’d sit on the edge of her soft bed and ask if I could get her anything. Sometimes, I wanted to crawl under the sheets beside her, but I held myself back. If she rolled on top of me in her sleep, I could be killed. We got into a routine. Mrs. Scott would call me in the morning. ‘What are you doin’ today, baby?’ ‘Getting Ralph up,’ I always answered. ‘I’ll be over about ten. You get the coffee on, you hear?’ ‘Yes,” I’d reply. ‘It will be ready upon your arrival.’ She usually showed up midmorning, drank two cups of coffee with generous amounts of milk and sugar, toasted herself some bread, which she slathered liberally with butter and jam. When she finished, we’d discuss the rest of the day’s activities. ‘I got to get me to the store,’ she’d often say. ‘What time are we going?’ ‘I Wasn’t planning on going today,’ I’d answer. ‘Say what? We’ve got to go to the store. We need stuff.’ Sometimes we would go to Pc n’ Save and sometimes we’d take Ralph to his doctor’s appointments. Mrs. Scott became our constant companion. On the rare occasions she wasn’t with us, we’d be asked her whereabouts. No one ever forgot Mrs. Scott, once they met her. She was a huge help to me, not just physically but mentally, too. She was a distraction that made coping with Ralph’s problems easier. Now I didn’t have just Ralph to worry about. I had Mrs. Scott’s needs to think of, too. And, as time went on, our old friends faded away. It was natural that this would happen – after all, we could no longer do the things we used to do. Still, it was hard to face the reality that I was left with only one friends and that it was Mrs. Scott. But she was bug, and as she was often fond of telling me, she was the only friend I really needed.” Some of the pages will bring lumps to your throat. Some pages will leave you shaking your head and wondering what you might do in the same situation. Tumbling After reminds us that we can make a life in any number of ways. Steve Hopkins, July 17, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2002 issue of Executive Times For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com