He looked to be in his mid to high sixties, with possible gusts up to seventy, seventy-five. Old folks shrivel to a certain point, you know, like a dry apple, and stick there for as long as their spirit decides to tough it out. His skin was dark but again the migration of all old people towards the same appearance obscured his ethnicity, so really his color was as indiscernable as it was irrelevant. He had that hat on that old men wear, that fedora-like lid that must have been the Last Hat that was in style before men and women started going about bareheaded, a fashion transition I have always lamented. Nowadays one has to go to an AME service just to see some decent hatwear.

I was stopped at a two way stop at the intersection of Superior and LaSalle just north of the Chicago River, watching the roaring rapids of cabs and luxury cars deliberately deny me an opening to cross the street. Ah, the two-way stop, deadly time-waster for driver and pedestrian alike. One of the rare situations in the mileu of traffic laws where you could conceivably find yourself waiting for all eternity, where your turn never comes around. Unless someone is gonna be a good Christian, as my sweetheart's father would sullenly put it.

To make it worse, I was on a bicycle. I was also pulling a trailer, upon which was piled another bicycle and some various crap, all of which was being returned to its owner. A bicycle doesn't give you much clout in traffic- its advantage comes from its ability to slip through the cracks. A bicycle with a trailer doesn't even have that.

The old man was in an electric wheelchair, which I suspect represents in wheelchair-using communities a significant difference from the self-propelled wheelchair. It signifies that whatever ailment has confined you to the chair has also denied you the ability to shlep yourself around. I suspect (but have no grounds for actually knowing) that this makes as much difference in wheelchair-using circles as the distinction between blind-from-birth and lost-their-sight makes to the blind folks I know. United against the abled world but worlds apart. At any rate, if this guy was so knobby and frail and wrinkled and just plain antedeluvian that I couldn't tell his race, it was no wonder he was heading west in an electric wheelchair. But he'd run up agains the same challenge I had, right across the street from me- waiting for a break in Chicago traffic, a rare bird only seen occassionally between 2 and 4 AM. From his resigned posture, it looked like he had been waiting to cross the street for at least an hour.

Eventually a stereotypically agressive SUV came to our rescue. It elbowed its way into the intersection from my side, using the SUV-driver's method of go-ahead-hit-me-I-will-crush-you. So I slinked (slunk?) behind it into the middle of the street. My trailer and I were long enough to block both lanes of angry traffic. The SUV turned but I stayed put, stopping traffic in both directions. "Go man go!" I yelled to the old dude in the electric wheelchair. With a twitch of his wrist, he slapped his joystick foward and gunned it across the intersection.

And you know what? Nobody honked.