The Ralph Who Loved to Ride Fast

Suzy is laughing, as everybody seemed to be laughing yesterday, as they told stories about Ralph. The man on the right in the white hair is Ralph's twin brother Richard. He looks so much like Ralph it's spooky, except that none of us ever saw Ralph looking like that. By the time The Great Plotnik and The Great Ducknik and all the Tiaposians met Suzy and Ralph, Ralphie was already seated permanently in his chair, unable to move any part of his body but his chin and eyes.

Which made yesterday's testimonies to the early days, given by the friends gathered at Ralph and Suzy's house who had known Ralph as an outdoorsman, cyclist, tour leader, skier and all-around do absolutely anything kind-of-guy, so hard to take in all at once. Standing next to Duckie and Mush in the back of a crush of people, Plot couldn't hear much. So he jumped up onto Suzy's fence railing, the fence which adjoins the ramp Suzy and Ralph's friends built to get Ralph's chair up and down the ramp and into the house through the back door. From there Plot could hear the people telling their stories, watch Suzy laughing and remembering, and think himself of how many times he and Duck left an evening with Suzy and Ralph saying to themselves, as all of Suzy and Ralph's other friends must surely have done: "Good God. One split second and your life can be turned upside down. Let's take that trip to Poland right now."

Yes, some good things came out of it for Suzy, new personal growth, new awareness, new friends, new understanding of the power of community, maybe even a different spirituality, all of that, but it's all garbage in the end. If Ralphie could have gone down another road on his bike that day, or not hit whatever it was that blew out his bike tire, or landed in a slightly different position, or not stayed on the street unable to move for hours, or any of a million other possibilities, none of which had any less likelihood of happening than the one that actually did, he and Suzy would have been spared the next twelve years of a kind of torment unimaginable to the rest of us.

OK, garbage is the wrong word. Plotnik remembers listening to the radio the night Otis Redding was killed in a plane crash. The announcer read the news about Otis, then paused and said: "Take the bus next time, man. Take the bus."

So, personal growth be damned, Ralph. Take the bus next time, man.

Not that Ralph and Suzy didn't come through it with strength and humor that inspired us all. Maybe that's the whole point. If you're Ralph and Suzy, you plough forward, because you can't think of any other direction to go.

I see Ralph Hager sitting in his old chair, moving his computer mouse with the gizmo he fixed up to operate with his chin, and then I see him speeding into Taqueria Cancun on Mission Street in his new chair, smiling, enjoying how fast he can go, as everyone in the restaurant dodges out of the way. I think that's the guy everybody was speaking about yesterday: the Ralph who loved to ride fast.