Sorry for the dearth of posts; I’ve been traveling. First, I flew back to Charlotte, North Carolina to attend a “train the trainer” session for a wonderful safety program called Safe Start. It’s owned by a Canadian company and they are based in Toronto. Nice people, great program. And what a treat that my boss approved the travel and accommodations from California and back. It was quite expensive to fly me back there, put me up in a hotel for three nights and pay for my rental car in addition to the training cost. However, the school of thought is, of course that the money spent will be recouped in an ROI consisting of a lowered mod rate and thus lowered worker’s comp premiums.

Blah blah blah, that’s work crap and probably boring to the rest of you who are into into risk management. Of course it’s boring to those of us who are, so I can imagine the rest of you must be scratching your heads and going, “huh??”

ANYway, since I was back on the east coast anyway, my dear friend who lives in Atlanta suggested that I come visit since Charlotte is only a couple or three hours by car from Atlanta. So I arranged my flight so that I flew out of Atlanta, and after my training was over, I flew down to Atlanta from Charlotte and spent the weekend at his house.

This is a Second Life friend, mind you, whom I’d not ever met before in person but have been friends with in and out of the game for two years now. I was very excited to meet him. He is an absolutely wonderful man, and were he not 3000 miles away and in possession of a long-time girlfriend, I’d snap this guy up in a hot second. But none of those can be changed so onward and upward.

My friend is in a wheelchair. Now, mind you I work for a nonprofit organization that deals with people in wheelchairs every day, but the folks in our agency all have cognitive impairments as well as physical impairments, so if they are in a wheelchair, that isn’t their only disability. It is natural and understandable (although not very polite, really) for others to overlook them and speak around them to their companions as if they weren’t there.

I’ve never spent much time with anyone in a wheelchair before, and this was quite the eye-opening experience. I knew enough about wheelchair etiquette to know that you treat their wheelchair like a part of the person’s body, and if you wouldn’t lean on or sit on that person’s body then don’t do that to their chair, either. I also knew enough that my friend had been handling his disability for the eight years since his accident, and that any interference from me or “help” from me without his express request would be interpreted as being pitying or condescending. So I tried to treat him as if he wasn’t in a chair and while I watched him struggle in and out of his chair in his van, clearly it was something he was used to and I arranged my face (hopefully) so that I didn’t look pityingly at him. I do not pity him; I in fact admire and respect his man a great deal. He’s dealt with his paraplegia better than most, and is a kind, gracious, humble down-to-earth southern gentleman.

My friend, I’ll call him Jay, picked me up at the airport. I told him that I’d meet him at the curb so he wouldn’t have to park and get out of his van, which is a much bigger deal for him than it is for you and I, and he said absolutely not would he pick me up at the curb, he was coming inside the airport to meet me because it was the gentlemanly thing to do. This floored me, as courtly behavior and chivalry are gasping a dying breath these days, thanks to all the women’s libbers deciding that being treated like a lady is somehow demeaning. I love it. I do not see it as demeaning at all, but rather is a sign of respect by men.

Let me digress a bit. This is actually a good segue, albeit interruptive, to one of my other points I wanted to make here. I have found people in general in the south to be kinder, more polite, and I had more men hold the door for me in the south than I’ve had on the west coast in years. I don’t mean just older gentlemen, but younger ones, even children. The children address their parents with respect and call adults “Mr.” and “Mrs.” The drivers are more polite and there isn’t a lot of horn honking or middle finger salutes either. Drivers actually merge in harmony, not taking the fact that a car wants to merge personally, dropping back or slowing down to let people into the lanes, moving over for lane changes, etc.

Of course as with any generalizations there are always exceptions that prove the rule, and they certainly had their share of asshole drivers. But generally speaking, the people in the south are kinder, more laid back, and the pace is a little slower. People are willing to stop and talk to a stranger, to say “hey” and chew the fat with you for awhile. If you go into a restaurant and order sweet tea it will be the best thing in the entire world on a hot, humid summer’s day, and it is very likely you’ll get called “hun” “darlin’” or “sweetie” by the waitresses in the restaurants. I could listen to Jay talk all day, as I love his honey-rich southern drawl. He can make asking to pass the butter sound sexy. Swoon!!

So… back to my original point. He is late picking me up at the airport as he called and told me he had not been able to secure the afternoon off work as he had previously thought he could. My flight got into the Atlanta Airport about 1:30 in the afternoon, and after I collected my bags from the baggage carousel, it was only 2pm and I knew the earliest Jay could get to the airport to pick me up was around 5:00 p.m. depending on traffic and if he could slip away from work a little early. I sat in the atrium between the north and south terminals, managed to find a seat and sat and did some people-watching, which is always fascinating at an airport.

Atlanta is a really nice airport, as airports go, and it has this beautiful atrium area with seating around it where people can sit and wait for various reasons. I wish I could get the photos off my phone, because I snapped some nice ones. They have a lot of military going through that airport, and there were tons of guys and gals in desert camo, which was awe-inspiring. I have never felt safer in an airport than when surrounded by a hundred or so military people!

. . . to be continued tomorrow!