The man in the wheelchair doesn’t like water. When his mother tells him it’s time for a bath, he screams.His chair won’t fit through the bathroom door, so his mother guides his trembling frame on shaky legs to the water.
He is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds; she, 5 feet and 120. If he falls, sometimes she can’t pick him up.
“We push and we shove, and we pull, cuss, rant and rave,” says his mother, Jo Nell Gorman.
Gorman, 76, looks at him with the patience and love of a saint. She has short white hair and eyes of sparkling blue that dart about behind silver-rimmed glasses and see much.
“He’s such a card,” she says.
There are many things that Gorman’s boy, Chris, can’t do. He cannot dress or feed himself. In mid-bite, he is liable to fall sound asleep. If he ever goes outside in the yard, a gully two feet from the door could be his death.
Their little house is clean and tidy, its sills crowded with porcelain cows and ducks and its shelves lined with jam.
But their lives are limited by more than the small, rented place that they call a home.
Chris, 36, has the mental capacity of a 4-year-old. He is deaf and mute, suffers from grand mal seizures, and is in the degenerative stage of cerebral palsy.
When a stranger arrives, Chris reaches for a metal box with his medical information, believing the insurance man has come again. Or sometimes he pulls his shirt up over his red-stubbled face, hiding his toothless grin.
Once, when Gorman left her boy alone, he turned on the stove. Now she never goes out. Usually, she just writes her grocery list and gives it to her son-in-law to buy.
“I didn’t think we’d ever get anything,” Gorman said huskily. “I thought we’d be here the rest of our lives.”
Now, because of the kindness of 2,800 strangers and one former president, their lives forever will be improved.
The Jimmy Carter Work Project is building a specially designed, handicap-accessible home for Gorman and her son. No. 32 Dorsey Road will have ramps instead of steps, extra-wide doorways, and an open shower big enough to park a metal wheelchair. The stove and other accessories will be childproofed. The house will have central air and heat, insulation under the floor and a level yard, and someone will donate flowers. Gorman will put up a fence.
“It will be nice to talk to neighbors,” Gorman says.
She said she saw former President Carter himself dancing at the opening ceremonies Sunday. She laughed as she imitated him clapping.
When they move, her son will be able to take his belongings with him — a framed Crimson Tide poster, his railed bed heaped with stuffed animals, and his “family,” a trio of baby dolls in varying stages of disrepair. He’ll be able to roll around outside and play.
“He likes waving to people,” Gorman says.
Chris could not know the changes in store, any more than he could know that grown-ups don’t play with dolls, or that the disease that has overpowered his legs and his mind someday — maybe soon — will draw him back into a fetal position and claim his life.
Gorman says the move will help keep her son living.
“When he sees people and goes outside, it’s going to help his mind,” she says.
And now he will be able to see the stars.
