1/17/2024 0 Comments My life my story quotes![]() I was an agnostic Hedonist child who’d grown up in a rough-and-tumble hard-drinking family on the South Side of Chicago during the late 60s. We soon discovered that our backgrounds, our family and life experiences, even our disabilities, couldn’t have been more different and contrasting. One of her claims to “fame” was that at the age of 5, she’d contracted one of the worst cases of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis recorded in Canada. I quickly discovered that Joanna was a Canadian from a snowy city 500 miles north of Vancouver, British Columbia (hence that sweet little accent). Joanna was an 18-year-old who, like me, loved languages and adventure and trying improbable things long before any law or Congressional Act mandated help for people with disabilities. I am just a couple of inches over five feet tall, and I tended to like girls who didn’t have a big height advantage.īack then, in the winter of 1975, I was 21 and a fourth-year junior at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I realized right away this sweet-sounding girl with the slight accent was in a manual wheelchair. The elevator was in an intensive-French school located in a quaint little village called Val Saint Andre, just up a steep hill from a picturesque town in the south of France called Aix en Provence. It began just like in the movies: we really did meet in an elevator. That plaque says, “Every love story is beautiful, But ours is my favorite.” ![]() There’s one particular plaque I implore her to read often, just so I can hear her lovely voice recite it one more time. ![]() I’ve been blind all my life, but my darling Joanna reads them to me any time I ask. We have a number of precious and very poignant plaques situated tastefully around our house out here in sunny Tempe, Arizona. Bryan graciously agreed to write a Valentine’s Day post about their relationship, and this is part one of a two-part series. Bryan was born blind, and his wife Joanna uses a power wheelchair - she contracted juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was five. I met Bryan McMurray years ago when we were both in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois. “Every love story is beautiful, but ours is my favorite.”
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