Waiting for the crutches to arrive was a slow and tantalizing ordeal. I looked up Newark on a map and it seemed more remote than the North Pole. I felt I might get better results by writing to Santa Claus.

I was certainly ready to walk! My strength was definitely back. In fact, it was as gusty and explosive as a hurricane bottled up in a barrel. Dolls went dull on me. I had read all the children's books in the public library and I knew my own books by heart. I was headed through the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the theory that I would learn a few facts every day until I knew absolutely everything, but the going got grim before I'd made a dent in the A's. I was sick of playing jacks on the front porch. I was even bored with mumblety-peg, the most vigorous and hardy sedentary game I knew. The only recreation I could tolerate was plowing up the front lawn while rolling my wheel chair over it in a self-invented polo-croquet. To play this game I required two or three competitors - also mounted on vehicles of their choice. The lawn was beginning to look somewhat haggard, and so was Mother. I was already a veteran hopper. I bounced all over the house, much to the concern of my grandmother, who was convinced I'd disarrange all my internal organs.

"And then where will you be, young lady?" she popped the moot question. "No leg - and queer things wrong with your insides, too." Grandmother's complete lack of tact was undoubtedly good, rugged training for me. Certainly after Grandmother, no one was ever able to embarrass me.

Every afternoon my sister Bernice pushed me to the corner where we had a clear, three-block view of Father's direct route home from the office. Usually several of the neighborhood children kept the vigil with us.

Finally, one day when hope was almost dead, we spotted Father looking very jaunty. When he saw us, he waved and held up a brown paper-wrapped parcel. Then he abandoned all dignity and sprinted down the street.

"They've come!" I shouted. "The crutches from Newark, New Jersey!" Johnny Nesbitt, who lived next door to us, took up the tidings and ran with them up and down both sides of our block. Children spewed out of houses. By the time we got home, a large audience had accumulated. You'd have thought I was about to uncrate a Shetland pony.

I probably never in my life unwrapped a more significant package than the one that contained that first pair of yellow pine crutches. One dollar and twenty-five cents' worth - Mr. Bennett let us have them wholesale.

They must have been very small crutches, but they seemed frightfully heavy and cumbersome as I freed them from the paper and twine. Eagerly I slid out of my wheel chair.

"Maybe you'd better wait until later to try them," Mother suggested nervously.

"Wait!" I gasped. What had I been doing for the past interminable month! Then I saw the fear on Mother's face. she thought I'd fall. It was obvious my silently pitying audience shared her dire expectation. Suddenly, so did I.

"Of course, she won't wait!" Father announced sensibly. He slipped one crutch under each of my arms. He knew I was a show-off and would try harder in front of my friends. I grasped the handles.

"Now lift the crutches ahead of you," he instructed me. "You've seen people walk on crutches - remember when Jim Ralston broke his ankle. Just swing your foot up in front of them. That's all there is to it."

My knee shook, but I walked alone across the room. I was incredibly clumsy, but I was once more self-propelling and I felt triumphant.

My father, I think, recognized from the start that other people's fears and pity would always be more threatening to my security than my own. He worked hard at concealing his personal concern over me and he was singularly successful. So successful that some of our neighbors regarded him as unfeeling. So successful that he even gave me the comforting impression that he thought children with two legs were just a little bit odd.

"It's easy," I said breathlessly. "Very easy." I started to sit down on the davenport and made my first technical discovery. Crutches won't bend. They must be put aside before you start to fold up. Father rescued me as I tipped over backward.

"I sure bet it's fun to walk on crutches," Johnny Nesbitt sighed enviously.

"Oh, it certainly is!" I crossed my fingers to protect myself from the bold-faced lie. Actually, I spoke the truth; walking on crutches is great fun, as I discovered eventually.

"Could I try them just for a second?" Johnny asked.

"Me, too!" It was a chorus.

Crutches are invariably fascinating to children. It surprised Mother, I am sure, that they were immediately treated like a new velocipede or a scooter. Everyone lined up and took turns for the remainder of the afternoon. The children in my immediate neighborhood and most of my classmates in school all became quite adept at walking on crutches.

For Johnny Nesbitt, at least, the skill proved useful. Last year he wrote me from an army hospital where he was convalescing from a leg wound received in the Pacific war theater. "The eyes nearly popped out of the nurse's head when I put the crutches under my arms for the first time, whinnied at her, and then did the five-gaited horse act down the hospital corridor." The five gaits were a spectacular and horsey bit of fancy work that I invented early in my careeer on crutches.

Lending the crutches, it is true, became something of a burden. A person dependent on crutches likes to have them in sight every minute, and preferably in hand. I have no more menacing, though innocent, enemy than the restaurant waiter who politely snatches my sticks as he seats me at a table and rushes off with them to a check room or some other mysterious place of concealment. It gives me the frantic feeling a normal person might experience if some fiend padlocked his feet together and then, with a hollow chortle, tossed the key out the window.

A rule was eventually laid down in the neighborhood that a child might, with permission, borrow the crutches providing they didn't go beyond the range of my vision. The crutches were my only possessions with which I was allowed, and even encouraged, to be selfish. As Father pointed out, "After all, you don't go around borrowing other people's legs. It amounts to the same thing."

The only share-the-crutch plan that was completely successful was the one worked out by Barbara Bradley and me. Barbara and I were best friends, but we were prevented by my crutches from walking to school side by side, holding hands, or arms entwined. Our scheme solved this problem. Barbara put a crutch under her left arm and I put one under my right. By resting our free arms on each other's shoulders, we supported each other in the middle. By this complicated arrangement, we walked to school every day, and resembled, for all the world, a badly damaged pair of Siamese.

Grandmother telephoned the night the crutches arrived. "I hear the crutches have come." she sighed deeply and with apparent regret. Grandma was a cynic. "I expect you'll be tramping around the neighborhood into all kinds of trouble again. Now, listen to me, you probably think you know it all - about handling your crutches - but let me remind you that there are plenty of older and wiser heads than yours." Grandma was argumentative, even in monologue.

"I can walk just fine, Grandma," I bragged.

"That's what you say," Grandmother sniffed. "You are to go over and see Mrs. Ferris tomorrow, and she'll teach you how to walk like a lady, if you've got sense enough to pay attention."

Mrs. Ferris was eighty-three and had been bed-ridden for seven years, ever since she came to town to live with her daughter. It seemed beyond possibility that the withered, little wisp could teach me anything, least of all, how to walk.

But Grandmother and I had an agreement. I minded her implicitly, in the expectation of deferred reward. When I got to heaven - a possibility that Grandma didn't wholeheartedly anticipate - she would, of course, already be there and she promised to put in a good word for me. Grandma and God were on excellent terms although, regrettably, the same couldn't be said of Grandma and anyone else. I sometimes vaguely wondered what God saw in Grandma.

"All right, Grandma," I agreed, "I will go over and ask Mrs. Ferris how to walk." It wouldn't have been good form to demand what Mrs. Ferris knew about the business.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Ferris knew a great deal. She had been injured in an accident and for fifteen years of her active life, she had walked on crutches.

I don't have a Phi Beta key; Mr. Powers never cast a covetous eye in my direction; and I can't do parlor tricks; but I do allow myself one immodest, extravagant vanity. It is the conviction that no one in the world can handle a pair of crutches better than I. I have my own bag of tricks collected during twenty-eight years of experience. It was a little old lady, ten times my age, who really planted my foot and my crutches firmly on the ground and started me on the quest for a wing for my heel.

Mrs. Ferris's advice was practical and sound, and included the basic technique that distinguishes an experienced lifer on crutches from the temporary time-server.

"First of all," Mrs. Ferris instructed me, "do not lean on your armpits and do not swing your whole body when you take a step. Experts can walk easily with no saddletops at all on their crutches. Lean all your weight on the palms of your hands. The only time when it is necessary to bear weight on the tops of your crutches is when you are carrying something in your hands."

Not only is it much more graceful and comfortable to "walk on your hands," but it is protection against injury of the brachial nerves, particularly vulnerable in the armpits. Injury to these nerves, with the resultant so-called "crutch paralysis," is the blackest specter that haunts a permanent crutch-user.

Mrs. Ferris and I spent an hour together every day for several weeks. I strutted up and down her bedroom while she criticized my technique. My most persistent error was spreading the crutches out to form a wide tripod and swinging my whole body with each stride instead of stepping out with my foot in a normal walking motion.

"Hold them close to your sides! Make them look as if they grew there!" Mrs. Ferris repeated over and over. "Keep your body perpendicular! Walk with your foot, not with your torso."

Mrs. Ferris's methods were not only practical but aesthetic. Making the crutches as nearly anatomical as possible, crowding them to my sides, also prevented me from planting a booby trap with them. Flung out, one on each side, in the instinctive stance of a beginner, they created an infernal device for tripping up unwary pedestrians. Not that I haven't, with design, upset a few minor enemies in my time. This trick is a mild version of the perfect crime. The victim always assumes that he was in the wrong and, even sprawled out on the sidewalk, apologizes.

Before Mrs. Ferris graduated me from her kinder-garten, she had me walking with a full cup of water my hand and two books on my head.

"When you can recite your multiplication tables as you walk down the street, without once thinking about your crutches, you have really succeeded," Mrs. Ferris told me.