sesame place

after spending a couple of hours going on several slides, climbing up structures and getting soaked, i found myself on line for a ride that involved none of these things. more like a free-fall for kids, this ride requires you only to sit while you get lifted and dropped, along with your stomach that follows a couple seconds after the rest of your body.
like every other line at sesame place this one was half an hour long; enough time to observe all the other people on line. i spotted one woman in a wheelchair with a young child sitting on her lap. once i saw her i couldn't stop looking at her.
it took me a moment to realize that the girl was not sitting on the woman's lap because the woman didn't have a lap. her body ended under her rib cage. i kept looking again and again to make sure i had it right. it was difficult to tell where the limits of her body were because the lower-most part of her was wrapped in some kind of pocket. i imagined what kinds of things a person would need in such a pocket. what things her body could and couldn't do on its own (what kinds of bags and tubes must have been attached to her some way underneath her ribs).
the most impressive moment was when a towel fell off my sister's stroller and no one else was around to grab it. the woman reached for it from her chair, but was unable to get it. so she hopped out of her chair, scooped up the towel, returned it to the stroller again, and hopped back up to her seat. i use the word impressive because until that moment, there was this illusion of her body being complete. the position she was seated in made it appear that there was a lower half to her upper half. but when she got out of her chair, and you could see her entire body as a stump - that her arms were the only thing that could propel her, it left an impression.