Last night I threw together a quick pasta sauce to put over Costco raviolis. Our neighbor has been kind enough to loan use freezer space for small, plastic bags of mooshed-up tomatoes from last summer. The defrosted tomatoes with a little added fresh garlic, oregano, and olive oil makes for a quick and easy sauce over whatever pasta product we have around.

Last night I went to my go-to cookbook, Mark Bittner’s “How to Cook Everything,” and found a recipe for tomato sauce puttanesca, or sugo alla puttanesca. It was quick, easy, and a hit with my wife, Lyndi, and our 16 year old regular dinner guest from next door. Of course, the etymology of the sauce came up. Did the name really come from the dish Neapolitan prostitutes made between tricks? Well, no one seems to know for sure. From my search it appears there are six to eight different theories.

OK, this is a roundabout way to get to my point. Etymology got me to thinking about the origin of the word handicap. Ed Roberts, like most of us disabled baby boomers, hated the term. He would say that the word came from when our only legitimate occupation was begging and that “cap in hand” got shortened to handicap. It turns out that the word handicap comes from an English pub game, hand in cap. I have yet to be able to figure out how one would win the game. It has something to do with a referee holding two items of dissimilar value hidden in a cap. But then, I can’t figure out how one wins Texas Hold Em or cribbage from reading the rules. Paul Longmore claimed that he knew how to play the game, but he never demonstrated his expertise.

Handicap then got applied to putting weights on racing horses to equalize their differing abilities. Sometime after that we got tagged with the word. Snopes, the website that debunks urban legends and other myths, has a nice article on the history of “handicap,” as does Ron Amundson. I’ve always disliked the word handicap as it represents to me the paternalistic, oppressive attitudes I encountered in the fifties when the word was universal.

Now that we’ve got all that straight, I have a proposal. How about those of us with disabilities reclaim our begging history. We have a long and somewhat proud tradition of surviving through the kindness of strangers. Thus, we should call ourselves Capihands! It has that too incredibly cute ring to it that we’ve shed since we became disabled people or crips. I know it doesn’t work too well for our brothers and sisters without hands—I’ll think of something to rectify that wrong. Ron Admunson, in his essay on handicap, coins the phrase but doesn’t go as far as I want.

Let’s all rally around being capihands, capihand brothers and sisters, capihand rights, the Americans with Capihands Act.

Oh, never mind, I think I’ll have to come up with something less cloying, but it’ll have to be tomorrow.

Rahnee Patrick on TODS

I am the host of “Telling Our Disability Stories.” It is sponsored by the Accessible Technology Coalition in partnership with the California Emerging Technology Fund. Once a month “Telling Our Disability Stories” brings you thoughtful and personal interviews with people in the disability community.

Sandie Yi's gloves.

Yi’s presentation is in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.” Seen as prosthetics, orthotics, or an unsettling dream, Yi’s work elevates disability-inspired clothing to the level of art and high fashion. Freelance curator Amanda Cachia will introduce Yi and talk about current trends in disability art. Disability scholar Anthony Tusler will explain how Crip Couture contrasts with and often surpasses Gaultier’s radical approach to fashion and art. The Crip Couture presentation and Disability Access Day are free.

The first viewing of the art pieces created by Chun-shan (Sandie) Yi. They can be seen as prosthetics, fashion, orthotics, or an unsettling dream. Her art violates our most polite impulses to avoid looking at disability and deformity. In addition to forcing us to stare at a disabled person she elevates disability inspired clothing to the level of art and high fashion. Her nonconventional body structure, two digits on her hands and feet, informs her work. “Gloves Made for Two” is a display and photographs of practical and fanciful gloves that fit her body and displays of gloves that fit any number of fingers up to six. She is the model for her creations clearly showing her hands and feet. In “Project Imperfect” she has sewn infant clothes for babies who are missing limbs.

Ms. Yi explains, “I provide intimate and empathetic bodily adornment, not as a correctional physical aid, but as a tool for remapping and engaging with a new physical terrain, one embodied with personal standards of physical comfort and self-defined ideals of “perfection.””

The cumulative effect of Sandie Yi’s art is to confound our beliefs and standards of human beauty. We are challenged to accept the unacceptable notion that deformity can be beautiful, intriguing, and tantalizing without being fetishistic. It is difference raised to a level not of acceptability but of celebration—expanding the aesthetics of fashion and art.

Anthony & the maker, David, with off road, people-powered wheelchair mover.

I tried it out at the Petaluma Rivertown Revival event when the maker, David at di Falco Fabrications, cajoled me into giving it a try. I thought he was crazy until we started rolling. The ground was rough and pocked with gopher holes. I barely noticed them while gliding along on the large wheels. He found that larger wheels worked better for mountain bikes and decided to see what he could do to help wheelchair users and people with mobility limitations get around at the event. He put a chair on the platform for non-wheelchair users to give it a try. The height of the wheels was dictated by the 20 foot lengths of iron he had in his shop. I assume he had a pickup truck to bring it to the event.

In the disability community we joke that every inventor dreams of an invention to help the blind. Well, almost as many dream of creating a new, wonderful, usually stair-climbing wheelchair. I’ve been using wheelchairs and other modified conveyances since 1952. Some specific adaptations work fine. When I was six or seven years old I rode around the block using an oversize tricycle as part of my rehabilitation after my spinal cord injury. My father attached an old pair of my shoes to the pedals and I had just enough strength left in my legs to pedal. It was a great workout. My primary mobility aid then was a child-size Everest and Jennings POS. Since I’ve owned manual and electric powered wheelchairs from a Stainless folder to Quickies and now a power Jazzy. Except for the revolution in design in the 70s when wheelchair users began designing their own vehicles there really hasn’t been much that’s radical since. It’s not say that there hasn’t been interesting tries. I enjoyed my ten minute ride on an iBot. It really was fun balancing on two wheels while being over six feet tall. Primarily, the changes have been in the materials used to construct the frames and wheels. The Quickie was made possible by the availability of tubing being used by bicycle builders. The flow of expertise and designs from the bicycle world has made for better and better refinement, including aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, sealed bearings, brakes, and aerodynamic wheels.

This is all to say that I rarely see anything in the world of wheelchairs that captivates me. The off road whatchamacallit pictured not only interested me, it also amused me. I love the simplicity of the design. Who knows if it’s a new branch on the wheelchair tree. In any case, it was fun. Of course, it’s not going to join my stable of wheelchairs anytime soon. But, it’s rare that I see simple, different devices for mobility that make sense.

This time they took three of the four pieces I submitted.

Humpty Considers His New Disabled Life

Grad Ramp Flag

Polio Shoes (hipster c2010)

Where the Hits Keep Coming

Majority Whip, all the DJs have odd nom de plumes, played a Tom T. Hall song for Hall’s 1936 birthday. I hadn’t heard the song before. It’s “Who’s Gonna Feed Them Hogs.” Tom T. Hall is known as a storyteller with a country flair. If you haven’t heard “Harper Valley PTA” it’s a wonderful snapshot of the late 1960s.

It turns out the “Who’s Gonna Feed Them Hogs” captures one of the realities of disability life. The story concerns a hospitalized hog farmer who is concerned about his livelihood with no one to feed his pigs while he’s incapacitated.

I met him in a hospital about a year ago
And why I still remember him I guess I’ll never know
He’d lie there and cry out in a medicated fog,
“Here I am in this dang bed and who’s gonna feed them hogs?”

It seems to me that this is what we worry about sometimes. How are we going to meet our responsibilities? How are we going to support ourselves? It’s the real issues of disability. As I get older, even without hospitalization, they are thoughts that I have periodically. Fortunately, I don’t have to get out of bed to sell 400 hogs so I don’t go broke.