Play On

I was in a store this evening, when the sound of accordion music filled the place. While it seemed unlikely that an instrument was being demonstrated for sale, it wasn't impossible; but my first guess was that someone was loudly testing some or another sound system with the most annoying music they could find on their phone before store staff stepped in to stop them.

What I found was a youngish man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, although I have no real way of being certain of this, contentedly playing the accordion while his mother pushed her cart full of items through the line to check out. It didn't take long to realize that the man was mentally disabled in some or another fashion. He didn't have the distinctive facial characteristics that I've come to understand are markers of Down Syndrome; perhaps it was a form of autism, instead. In any event, when the line would advance, the mother would push the cart forward to the new place in line, then come back and take the young man by the arm, and bring him along. He played the accordion the whole time. When the mother would release his arm, the young man would turn around to face the people further back in line (and, by extension, the rest of the store) and keep playing, without a thought to anything going on around him.

I felt for the mother, who was likely at some point in her fifties, to guess from looking at her. This was her life. It had been for at least a couple of decades up to this point, and it seemed likely that unless something happened to one or both of them, that it would continue to be so.

But while I considered the mother unfortunate in what had happened to the child she loved, I realized that as a society, the young man and his accordion were signs of wealth. As a nation, we are long past the point where a person who was unable to meaningfully contribute to their community would be considered a serious liability to the collective. Sure, he may have been a disaster to his mother's prospects for a comfortable retirement (in a few different ways) but for the rest of us, he was simply something between a curiosity and an inconvenience. Of course, this has likely been true for some time. Perhaps in the middle ages, he would have been a village idiot, cared for by the rest of the community out of obligation, pity or some mixture of them.

In the modern United States, however, it seems less true than perhaps it should. People begrudge the disabled any number of minor accommodations. Personally, I didn't have to listen to the young man play the accordion long enough for my patience to wear thin. Still, I'm happy that I'm not a neighbor.