A Lifetime Ago, When Winter Came, A Kindred Soul Helped Me Walk Again

I arrived on campus after my discharge, still on a cane after a year of recovery and therapy. I had an apartment close to campus to get around. The college world was light years from where I'd been. The organization for us older students, many of us less than we had been, not as tall, some on wheels, others with extensions like Captain Hook. It was an island of normal, in a world we didn't fit.

Friends were hard to get, harder to keep. The true freshman who had just left home didn't understand us and saw us as strangers in their midst. Soon fall came and went and winter set in. It was viciously cold, I stepped into a small Austrian restaurant, my limp and my cane distinguished me from those within. I sat in a booth and ordered hot chocolate to get warm.

The waitress was German, had been married to GI. He left her after an accident, left her with a broken hip and a deep scar across her cheek. Her limp, noticeable as she attended to the few tables inside. Right then, that cold afternoon we commiserated, me with my injury, she with hers.

She left a piece of paper with her name, Helga, and an address and phone number too. She smiled, her lip caught on her scar. I returned the favor, left my name and address, I did not have a phone. We agreed that afternoon to take in a midnight movie on Saturday night, Young Frankenstein.

We went to the trailer she rented and had sex until daylight came through the window, then showered together, a not complete man and a broken woman. Before I left she showed me a picture of a young woman before she got married, before the accident that stole her smile and left her lame. She was one of us now, and she became my lover.

I spread the word at the club of incomplete men that at this restaurant was a girl much like us. She needed our business, our tips, to make sure to go. For the years I was at college finishing my degree I had interrupted when I signed up. There never really was a world for her and me, not a world beyond the trailer where she lived.

I'm an old man now, still walk with a limp. When it gets cold it reminds me of that winter when Helga kept me warm.