Outside Reading Post #2

The book I am reading, Moving Violations by John Hockenberry, is a memoir of Hockenberry's life as a paraplegic journalist in which he learns that you've got to keep people in your life not because they are useful or convenient, but because you love them. After his car accident, Hockenberry can no longer feel or use his legs. To his body, they are just purposeless objects that use body heat and blood without compensating for them with services that legs are supposed to perform. He was advised by many people to simply amputate them and get them out of the way. Even though he sees the logic in this suggestion, he finds that he can't let go of his legs and says, "The truth is, I love my legs, not for what they can do for me anymore, but simply because they are my legs" (48). The attachment to his legs is so strong that Hockenberry is unable to just get rid of them. This is not because they make his life convenient- they actually make it more difficult- but he feels a connection to them because they are his. Hockenberry compares his sensless legs to his uncle, who is mentally retarded. His uncle developed a rare disease when he was very young that caused him to lose his senses, and his family abandoned him to a home, never to see him again. Hockenberry marvels at how his uncle's parents could have exiled him in such a way, "...[his] exile from his family and me was unfathomable. For reasons that will perhaps never be fully understood, a few years after he was sent away my uncle was so nearly erased, his existence denied by the family that had brought him into the world" (55). Hockenberry can't imagine why his grandparents would've discarded their sensless son as he was told to do to his with his legs. Hockenberry knows that family love isn't a matter of convenience, it is the fact that family members are all part of each other as much as his legs are a part of him.