It started during a "break" in my work, a short vacation. I fell off a rented bicycle while on Shelter Island. It has been a long time since I've fallen off a bike. Scraped knees and elbows. Like a child. After I disentangled myself, I discovered I had injured my foot.

I managed to get myself back from an isolated point two miles from my hotel. I dropped off the bike, packed up, and begged a lift to the ferry. Three hours to get home, riding on the Hampton Jitney in the rain. By midnight I arrived at my apartment. Next morning, I hobbled to the hospital. After three hours in the emergency room, another hour in the examining room, couple of x-rays later, I got the news: I had fractured my foot. They wrapped it up in plaster, handed me a pair of crutches, and sent me out to the streets of Manhattan.

The abled: they push by you -- it doesn't matter that you are on crutches. I had one fat tourist bump into me, he said he didn't notice. Oh, I can see how you can ignore a woman wearing a Luke Skywalker boot and propelling herself around on two huge sticks.

There were those who seemed to believe if you're ambling along on crutches, they can touch you. In sympathy, I guess. They would just reach right into my space and cluck. And the advice. Ack! The crutches are too low. The crutches are too high. Tuck them way up there in your armpits. Take calcium. Walk as much as you can. Don't leave your sofa, you need to rest.

Infirmity drove me to change my means of commuting. Car service got old: too slow and wasteful. I love the NYC subways: nothing like getting right in there with the great unwashed. Rubbing shoulders and other parts, bouncing along with arms akimbo - hands wrapped around the poles or hitched up on the handrests above. But, navigating stairs and being somewhere I couldn't really exit quickly was not an option. I turned to buses.

Buses apparently are the preferred conveyance of hobblers in the city. I quickly learned what it meant to be disabled in the city. It can best be characterized by the bus experience. Where to start. There are those seats at the front of the bus earmarked (allegedly) for the disabled. In reality: they're often taken up by children, fat people, tourists, or the lazy.

Sitting in those front seats: the panoply of the disabled with their canes, walkers or wheelchairs. We all sit there knowingly. Smiling at one another in secret sympathy. Cautiously of course, this IS New York City. A private club of casts, boots and crutches.

One day a blind woman sat next to me, her seeing eye dog sprawled on my broken foot. When she turned him away from my foot, HIS feet were now jutting into the aisle. So, every time the bus took on more passengers, folks would exclaim "watch out for the dog, watch out for the dog." Or, the blind woman would tug up on its canine legs to keep him from harm's way.

I discovered something when I was forced to take the bus rather the subway. On the subway, you crowd on, you stand or sit, people rarely give up their seats for anyone. I've often thought if the Titanic sank now, the men would push the women and children aside to get into the lifeboats. We don't look at or talk with one another. We careen through dark, underground, horizontal holes that take flights of stairs to enter and exit. We live in our private worlds.

Not so on buses. They are a petri dish of public chatter. You wait sometimes as much as a half an hour for the buses. You commisserate while you're doing so. Once aboard, you're elbow to elbow, and perhaps because the ride takes longer, and you can actually hear one another, and, without that clamor of clattering wheels on tracks, you actually converse. This, as much as anything, was what I learned from my experience as a disabled person in New York City: that difference between the underground and overground ways of commuting.

Clearly the universe wanted me to slow down.