It took me a few months to notice that my small one-bedroom graduate student apartment in Princeton was what building inspectors would call “accessible.” The doorways are a little wider than you’d expect, and in the bathroom, there are aluminum grab bars along the walls near the toilet, in the shower, at various other points where a person might reasonably need to arrest a fall.
I don’t know why I didn’t realize this when I walked through the empty apartment last September, but I’m pretty sure I know why the person showing the apartment to me didn’t mention it. She thought, not unreasonably given my salt-and-pepper hair (mostly salt, to be honest) and other physical cues, that a ground-floor apartment with a nearly fall-proof bathroom was just the thing. And the extra-wide doors would easily accommodate the wheelchair or old-man scooter that was clearly in the (near) future.
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I’m glad I didn’t notice because I probably would have demanded to see a more treacherous apartment, one with normal doorways and a toilet with zero leverage. But I’m happy to say that I didn’t, and I’m here to tell you that a couple of grab bars in the shower is a damn convenient feature. At any age.
Standing under the hot water with one hand resting lightly on the EZ-grip bar bolted to the tile — well, it’s a spa-like environment. It turns an experience that could at any moment become a mortifying accident, or a bathroom fatality that even your closest friends would have trouble not laughing about, into something safe and pleasant and civilized. Standing up from the, um, seating area of that particular space is transformed from what gym-goers call a “deep squat” into an easy rise by simply using the adjacent bar. It’s a basic act of human hygiene, after all. It’s not supposed to be “leg day.”
My bathroom, in fact, looks like the interior of a spacecraft — with bars and handles bristling from every wall to keep you from floating away in gravity-free outer space. Which turns out to be accurate, because as you get older, everything does seem slightly more unstable and zero-gravity than it used to be. Until, that is, you slip and fall and have to be carried out by the paramedics, naked and covered in shampoo, as your neighbors watch and wonder if you’re going to need a permanent caregiver.
So, yes, I love my safety bathroom. I use every grab bar every day, and I refuse to apologize for it. None of this is defeat. All of it, I have decided, is wisdom. The grab bar in the shower is the physical world finally meeting me where I am, instead of the other way around. I just needed a little time to appreciate it.
And yet: I was in an airport a few weeks ago, walking to my gate, when I heard a familiar sound behind me. It was the electric whine and the officious little beep-beep of the airport cart — that extended golf-cart thing they use to ferry passengers through the terminal. Usually, when I hear that sound, I flatten myself against the nearest wall and watch with barely concealed contempt as a cart full of perfectly able-bodied, but often alarmingly plump, people glides past, bound for Gate E47 or wherever. Beep-beep. And then I think: Losers.
But this time, though, I thought: Wait. I am a man who grips a bar in the shower. I am a man who wears reading glasses and has set the font size on his iPhone a few clicks larger. Which means: I am a man who would love a lift to Gate E47.
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The new me — the accessible, unashamed, sensibly equipped me — would have flagged that cart down without hesitation and settled in for the ride. But I did not flag down the cart. I walked to Gate E47 under my own power. No need to rush things.
But next time, maybe, I’m getting on the cart. And if not the next time, the next next time.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
