February 22, 2003
Teaching the Blind to See

I didn't want to go in to work today. I've been slaving away over one project after another all week. And who wants to work on Saturday, for crying out loud? But when the alarm went off this morning, I knew it was time to face the music. I had hours of work to put into a big project, due first thing next week.

It turned out to be a particularly beautiful Saturday. The heavy clouds were breaking up and a spectacular blue sky was peeking through their shattered remains. The wind was up, and the air was rich and fragrant. It smelled like the start of spring.

By the time I got downtown, it was about noon. I knew I had at least five or six hours of work ahead of me, and I hadn't brought anything to eat.

I stopped at the only restaurant by my office that was open — Subway. I was paying for my sandwich and preparing to leave when a man sitting in the dining area stood up abruptly and started moving around the restaurant.

I was standing in profile to him so the only thing my subconscious understood for a while was that he was moving awkwardly, and not at all in the fashion you would expect someone to move who was trying to leave the restaurant after lunch. Finally I glanced up and I realized that the man who was walking around was, in fact, blind.

I sometimes see blind people on the street downtown and am completely amazed by the sort of presence they have. The fact that they cannot see hardly seems to matter at all. They move down the sidewalk swiftly, with fantastic confidence, cane smoothly working the six feet of sidewalk ahead of them. They are — yes — a sight to behold.

Not this guy. He was not confident at all. As I took my change from the woman behind the counter, he strolled with his cane toward the back of the restaurant. The woman behind the counter said, "Sir, can I help you?"

"I'm trying to leave," he said. The frustration in his voice was evident.

"Just turn around..." the woman started to offer.

"I'll help you," I said, grabbing my bag and advancing toward him.

I showed him to the door (which was quite possibly the most handicapped-unfriendly door in the entire state of Georgia) and asked where he was headed. He was going to the library. It was three blocks in the opposite direction, but suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to walk to the library with him.

---

My grandfather was blind. It still puts the fear of God in me to consider how he found himself, at the age of 50 or so, coming home from work one day with a splitting headache. He lay down for a nap before dinner, and woke up to complete darkness.

The doctors determined that he had suffered a stroke to the optic nerve, but they may as well have given him a death sentence. My grandfather's world collapsed that day, and he never put the pieces back together.

I'm saying all this, and of course I know that going blind would be nothing short of catastrophic for even the strongest person. I pray to God that I will never have to experience blindness (or deafness, for that matter). But my grandfather really did take the diagnosis as a death sentence. He did not "fight back." He withdrew from life almost completely, throwing his woes on the shoulders of those around him. He never bothered to learn Braille. He never bothered to learn to walk unassisted. He never decided to embrace life — much to the chagrin of my mother, who at the time was working part-time while caring for her three young children and still trying to support my father and play the role of the happy homemaker. Now, suddenly, she had another dependent to add to the group.

My grandfather died when I was thirteen. I never really had a chance to know him as an adult. But when I think about him now, I still think about him as someone who let himself be slowly strangled by fear and loneliness and shame. I remember him as a defeated man.

---

I threaded my arm through the blind man's and gently led him down the broken sidewalk. We made small talk — the kind of small talk you make when you're walking down Peachtree Street with a blind man and the clouds are breaking into a million pieces and the sky is so pure and blue that it makes your heart catch in your throat.

I recalled to the man that we were right in the middle of tornado season, told him that the radio was broadcasting the possibility of tornadoes popping up suddenly in this weather.

"Yes, I heard that," he said. "Wouldn't that be something?" The wind swept down the street with gale force and caught at his trenchcoat. The gust was so strong it made me giggle. I told him I was glad that he was there to keep me from blowing away.

We made slow progress toward the library. He leaned into me, as if he needed me to encourage his walking as well as guide his path. I remembered suddenly what it was like to walk with my grandfather, when I was a girl. I was the child, but when he walked, he was like a little baby, never taking anything more than tiny, shuffling steps. "Curb up," I'd say, when we came to a step up. "Curb down." "Okay, you've got four short steps in front of you." I hated giving him those directions. I hated walking with him. I was so impatient with him.

The blind man and I rounded a corner and crossed Marietta Street. At that moment, the sun burst from behind the clouds, and the light fell on us. The man breathed in sharply. "Ah, the sun's coming out!" he cried.

"Oh, it is," I said. "It's just beautiful."

How I wish he could have seen it all. I wish he could have seen the sun winking from behind those clouds for the first time in what seems like weeks. I wish he could have admired the ragged clouds blowing through on their way to the ocean. I wish he could have seen anything, and everything. The tiny buds starting to appear on the poplar trees down the sidewalk. The little girl in the stroller, pointing gleefully at the skyscrapers. The paper cup blowing down the street in the wind. I found myself hoping that he had a finely-tuned sense of smell, or taste, or mortality, or something — so somehow, somehow, he could take it all in, soak in the purity of the moment.

I showed him to the library door. He thanked me for walking with him, and I said, with all sincerely, "Sir, it was my absolute pleasure."

And I walked back down the street to the office, feeling twenty pounds lighter, and eight hundred times happier, admiring the brilliance of the sky, pushed along by that persistent, playful wind.


(Do you suppose that the whole reason I had to work today was just so I could walk down the street with that man, and to see the sky, as if for the first time?)