Gene Said No to a Cane Until This One

Gene said no to a cane for eleven months. I counted. Every time our daughter raised it, he changed the subject to the weather or the ball game. He is 74, his right hip is weak, and his balance comes and goes on him. He had decided a cane was the first step toward being old, which is a funny thing to hear from a man who is old. He said no to the HurryCane too, and he said it before he had so much as looked at one. Meanwhile I had a left knee replaced four years ago, and he watched me use a rollator for months without one word of complaint.

So I stopped arguing. Arguing with Gene is like arguing with the radio. Then came our anniversary dinner, and the whole thing turned in about four seconds.

We had a table near the window. The restaurant kept a plain cane in the coat room, and it was already leaning against the wall when we sat down. Gene propped it against the table edge while he read the menu. It slid off and hit the floor with a crack that made half the room look up. He had to ask the waiter to fetch it back for him. He said nothing in the car on the way home, which is how I knew how much it stung. The next morning he said two words: never again.

And that, strangely, was the opening I had been waiting eleven months for. Because the problem was never the cane. The problem was that a plain cane is a badly designed object. It falls over. It has to be leaned somewhere, and there is never somewhere. In a restaurant, in a church pew, in a doctor's waiting room, you spend the entire time managing the cane instead of yourself. Gene was right about that, and I had been too busy being right about his hip to notice.

I went looking the next week. What got my attention on the HurryCane listing was one plain sentence: it stands on its own. I read the rest of it. Aluminum, 16 ounces, adjustable from 30.5 to 37.5 inches, folds down to 13.7 inches, limited lifetime warranty. I ordered it the next week and told Gene it was for the car, which was a small lie and the only one I told him through this whole business.

He carries it in his left hand, opposite the weak right hip, which is what Dana, my physical therapist, showed him. He has used it every single day for two years. It stands next to his chair in the living room, upright, waiting. That is most of the review, honestly.

He has used it every single day for two years, and it stands next to his chair in the living room, upright, waiting.

Here is what surprised me. The standing-up part is not a gimmick. It is the whole thing. Gene sets it down at the table and it stays. He sets it beside him in the pew on Sunday and it stays. He does not lean it, prop it, or hunt for a wall. The one thing he hated about a cane simply disappeared, and what was left was a tool that helps him walk. Eleven months of refusal came apart over a design detail, not over an argument.

The HurryCane is also light. Sixteen ounces sounds like a number until you carry one around, and then it is the difference between a cane that goes into the restaurant with you and a cane that waits in the car. It folds down to 13.7 inches, so it drops into the glove box of our sedan and vanishes until he needs it. On a long day out we still bring the rollator, at the fair or the farmers market, and that is a different job entirely. A cane is not a walker and I would not pretend otherwise.

Two honest complaints. The base is wide, and it catches on thresholds and the metal strip at the bottom of a doorway now and then. Not often, but it happens, and if you shuffle instead of lifting your feet you will feel it. And folded, it is still bulkier than a plain cane. This is not something you tuck into a purse. It rides in the car or stands by the door or lives next to the chair, and for us that is a fair trade.

The HurryCane adjusts from 30.5 to 37.5 inches and stays where you set it. Gene is 5 foot 10 and we set his once, two years ago, and I have not touched it since. I am 5 foot 4 and I have borrowed it on choir Sundays when my knee is complaining, and it comes down to my height in about a minute when I do. That is not the arrangement we planned. It is the one we have.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you the cane is not the hard part. The eleven months of no is the hard part. If you are the spouse, stop making the argument about safety, because that argument has never once worked on a proud man. Make it about the object instead. A cane that falls on a restaurant floor is humiliating. A cane that stands up on its own is not. That was the door that opened, and it opened because Gene found the shape of it himself, at his own table, on his own morning.

And I would tell you to ask your own physical therapist about height and about which hand, because I am not a doctor or a nurse or a therapist and I am not going to play one here. Dana set Gene's height and told him to carry the cane opposite the weak side. That is the only piece of advice in this story I did not learn the hard way. Two years in, Gene still calls it the cane and not my cane, and I think that is the most honest progress report I can hand you.