October 11, 2009
We canoe over red and gold fall reflections on a mirror calm lake
Under a blue-bonnet sky full of crow calls and little bird twitterings
Through olfactory sensations of bacon and maple syrup from the shore
I’m ferried Cleopatra-like by my husband
Across shiver shadows and sun fingers
We glide to old friends
On the porch of the hilltop getaway
For coffee and sweet remembrances.
When did I become “poor thing” I wonder.
These are the things I hope and believe I am…depending on my mood , it varies.
I like me for these characteristics. I’m confident none of these attributes warrant the often heard remark…
“Poor thing… Bless your heart.”
I’m well read, well educated, well informed, well travelled, and live fully with the aid of technology in the 21st century. And yet…and yet, my education, years of living, experience, speaking, teaching, writing, and performing become a total nil when I hear these bone-splitting, brain-paining words. ”Poor thing, bless your heart” With that one remark my ego blisters, my persona is obliterated, my soul turns into a lump of clay. I become a torn blanket flapping in the wind.
People, mostly women, say…
“I like your top…poor thing bless…
The sweater you’re knitting is nice… Poor thing etc.
Are you teaching, speaking, performing? Poor …
Who makes your bed, cooks your food, plans a party, does your laundry, packs your clothes , waters your plants, dresses you… poor thing…
I know many disabled people all over the world. They are like me, just another human with a defect. I’ve never heard this comment spoken about them.
My brother is like me—dead-black blind. He is a fine human being, everybody loves him. His career has been in banking in South Africa. He is also a motivational speaker and athlete – has run the New York Marathon, twice. He has climbed Kilimanjaro. He is a loving caring husband, raised two successful children. Or perhaps I should say he and his wife successfully raised two children. To the best of my knowledge I’ve not heard the ‘poor thing’ comment about him either. Is it only women who mutter this about other women? Is it a Southern show of sympathy or is it simply a jealous put down?
I’ll ponder this issue for a while.
The other day I heard a large fly as it flew around my kitchen revealing its location. I grabbed a magazine to either kill it or shoo it out. But then I came to a new realization. The tick-tick here and tick-tick there defined the space for me. The sound re-sparked my knowledge of objects in my kitchen.
Once at least fifteen years ago I could see my kitchen and everything in it. As my vision faded my home’s visibility shifted into a visualization in my mind. When we updated the kitchen I took all the old remembrances out and replaced them with the new interior. My house, its exterior and interior is omnipresent. At a glance, sighted people see the whole. It is only in direct contact or through sound or smell that I, a blind person, become aware of my surroundings. Now here was this fly. It flew against the tall windows high above my kitchen cabinets. Instantly I became aware of them. Not only the windows but the cabinets below and the new copper sink below them. I became interested in all the fly helped me to recollect – the large round copper plate from India, the bronze giraffes from an artist in Wyoming, my new black stove, the arrangement of pottery on top of the dark ebony cabinets. These things are always up there but I’m not aware of them. When the fly ticked its wings against them the sound defined them and I realize their presence.
The fly in the kitchen became important to me. Through the sound I perceived the objects and it sharpened my consciousness of the space itself. The tall ceiling, the width from one wall to the other the fly showed me the half wall where it slanted into the den It flew from the bar through the open door into the dining room as if it were guide fly, it led me with its sound from room to room, from object to object. It ticked when it encountered something. When the sound flowed freely through the space it indicated open space.
Later when I went up stairs the fly was there. Did it follow me up there I wondered. Was it a different fly? I couldn’t tell. It buzzed and ticked around for three days. I normally don’t care for flies but developed some feeling for this one. I greeted it, talked to it asked it questions and worried that when I get up the next morning I might not hear it anymore.
It defined my bed and bathroom in the same way as it did downstairs. I became almost sighted. At its tick, I knew immediately where the mirror was; the mocking mirror I look in daily, but daily it refuses to return my reflection. The sound of the fly reminded me of the mirror’s presence. The sky lights came into my knowledge, the bath tub the wall hanging the granite vanity the entrance to my laundry room. Just like a sighted person in a split second I realized my space again with the help of a fly.
After my stage performances, speaking engagements or story telling sessions the memory of my deeds and the applause quickly fade. Two or three days later when all the props, costumes and sound systems are stowed I have nothing to hold on to. For a while the remembrance of the audience’s reaction to me during the performance and testimonials afterwards lives in my heart. There might have been an audio or video recording, photograph or a newspaper article which also will be put away in a drawer and as time goes by all these things will be forgotten. Nothing concrete to prove that I did the work but the notation on my website and on my resume.
As a totally blind person who experiences life through my senses my profession is real to me in the moment of doing it or when I can hold the results of it in my hand, against my skin at my nose or by ear or even lick on it. That is why, after a while my performances, speeches or storytelling sessions lose their validity. Though I know all we ever do as humans, have become part of our personal history and body\mind existence.
I know the material value isn’t as important as the intrinsic value we derive from our life and work but sometimes as a blind person I become as shallow as a puddle and enjoy the evidence of my labor. For instance, in my other life, as a writer, potter, knitter or rug weaver I have the results of my labor to touch, to pick up and show.
“Here, see, I wrote See the Ocean. See this pot, this scarf, this mat…I made it.” Those words give me satisfaction and validate me as a person. When I make contact with a tangible object of my past efforts my work becomes real and I manifest inside the borders of my skin.
On Blindness and two Marshmallow Fish
I was born in South Africa and grew up in a dusty hamlet 30 miles west of Johannesburg. When I was a toddler my parents took numerous pictures of me with their Brownie box camera. My mother dressed me up, tied ribbons in my long blond hair and posed me by the rose bushes, on my tricycle, in the chicken coop, and with the dogs or cats.
“Smile and look at the camera,” they’d insist.
“Here, here, look here!”
I would look here there and everywhere except at the camera. Something was wrong with my vision. I didn’t know what it was like to see like other children.
“She fell over the stool that was right in front of her… she walked into the door… bumped the table … knocked over the milk… did you see the bruises on her shins?… Her knees are always scabby it’s just not normal … I don’t see her playmates fall as often as she does… Do you think we’ll have to see a doctor, or do you think she’s just clumsy for her age?”
They whispered when they thought I wasn’t listening.
Slowly and silently the rods and the cones in my retina died. Died like the purple morning glories in the relentless South African sun. Others noted my impaired vision but I didn’t understand that I was supposed to be able to see ants or individual leaves on trees – things were blobs or smears. Unless it was under my nose nothing was defined or articulated. .
My parents went on a quest to find help for my failing eyesight all over the country and took me from one optometrist to another. One by one the specialists shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders.
“Something is wrong in the back of her eyes in the retina. We don’t know what the exact diagnosis is. Let’s just say she has…sick eyes.”
They prescribed eyeglasses which didn’t help much. Disappointed with the unsatisfactory diagnosis, my parents chose other healers. They took me from soothsayers to faith healers, from homeopaths to herbalists, from acupuncturists to witch doctors. I took preposterous remedies.
I ate several pounds of carrots every day and my skin turned bright yellow, I drank port wine steeped over beet root every night before bedtime and slept like a baby. I held Epsom salts under my tongue while sipping dissolved bicarbonate of soda on an empty stomach, and never suffered from constipation. I lay down in a darkened bedroom with half of a raw potato over each eye supposedly extracting the eye disease and, at the next new moon, I buried the potatoes in our backyard, supposedly transplanting the eye disease. Someone swore that eating seven lice on a slice of bread would stop the deterioration of my vision. Alas, none of these remedies had any influence on my sight what so ever.
I often heard the word, blind, but I didn’t know what it meant. The word was said with reverence as if it was a holy word. A boy who lived down the road had this thing called blind. I associated it with poverty and an alcoholic father. I knew it had something to do with eyes and knew if you had it, they’ll send you far away to the Cape and you’d only get to come home during vacations.
A fear wormed into my heart. I tried to dispel it by never admitting to anyone, least of all to myself, that I didn’t see things and that I was eaten up with fear. I feared crossing the street, riding my bicycle, playing with a ball. I grew frightened of the dark, of bright light and of people.
I had to strain to recognize faces and when my parents had guests over I hid in the smelly chicken coop, too afraid to come out and embarrass myself. When I heard the guests leave I would come out, pretending I didn’t hear them call me or know that we’d had company. I learned quickly to pretend to see so as not to alarm those around me.
I was sharp and memorized everything, including my reading lessons.
“Come and read for Aunt Nora,” said my mother one evening when her friend was visiting. When I finished reading to Aunt Nora I overheard her telling my mother, “Kate, she didn’t read what was on the page, she recited a totally different reading lesson.”
On the other hand, my parents were proud of my precocity and good memory. After all, most children pretend to read in their early years.
Pretending to see, made seeing real, cancelling the overarching debilitating fear that cloaked my six-year-old life in suffocating blackness. The fear that woke me screaming in the night that made me wet my bed, that made me throw up my food was the fear that I would become like Peeti the boy down the road.
My parents owned a general store with an adjacent butcher shop on the main street. Two ladies worked with my mother in the shop, Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Van Buren. My father was assisted by Mrs. Green in the butcher shop. After school and during vacation I dawdled from store to butchery, doing minor errands and listening to town gossip.
“He is mad you know,” I heard Mrs. Rose say one day when Peeti Cracker came zigzagging up the dirt road. I knew he was that thing called blind, but mad? Now I also equated blindness with madness, poverty and an alcoholic father. I reasoned that if I was going blind I must be going mad as well, and that my father would start drinking and the welfare woman would have to give us money and they’ll send me away. I became hysterically afraid of Peeti. When I heard Peeti was coming I ran and hid. Peeti went to the school for the blind near the Cape. When he was home during school vacations he came to buy candy at our store. The dirt road which was mostly used by donkies and donkey cart drivers was safe enough for Peeti and that was the way he took to get to our store. When he walked he cocked his head to one side, squinted with one eye at the road and zigzagged along. Children made fun of him and grownups patronized him.
One day while I was rearranging the shoes on the shelves Peeti entered our store without me being warned.
“Go see what Peeti would like,” said my mother.
On hearing his name it felt as if someone had poured a bucket of water over me. I felt ice cold and paralyzed with fear. I looked around; he was near enough for me to see. He was standing in front of the candy counter. The brim of his khaki hat turned backwards away from his forehead as he pushed his face against the candy case, attempting to look at the candy behind the glass. I felt too lame to move.
“Go on Estelle, go help him,” urged my mother.
I wondered, if I hadn’t already caught my blindness from Peeti and wouldn’t I now also catch his madness and the other things? It seemed that my mother didn’t care that I might catch his impairments. Why would she want me to go near him? Peeti stood still with his head cocked to one side, trying to see the candy with the good part of his one eye.
“I’m busy here, go see what he wants,” said my mother again.
“Mother…” I finally whispered.
“Estelle go on.”
My legs started to move without me, I approached him in slow motion.
“What?” I asked.
“One.” He clicked his penny against the glass in front of the pink and white marshmallow fish.
I saw his eyes close-up for the first time. One eye was completely shut, the other eye was open, and this eye was brown and rolled uncontrollably in its socket. The color of the roving eye was a soft shiny brown. That one brown unruly eye which tried so hard to see broke my heart. Suddenly I felt unspeakably sorry for him. I wanted to do something for him, help him.
“One,” he repeated softly.
As if I had shrugged off a heavy coat I moved freely behind the counter and pulled out two marshmallow fish. I wrapped them in white paper, went around the counter and pushed the package into one of Peeti’s dirty hands. With his other hand he held the penny out in my direction.
“For another time,” I said as I took the penny from him and shoved it into his pant pocket.
He mumbled something and scuffled uncertainly towards the door. Since I had gained courage to be with Peeti, I guided him in the correct angle for the door. My heart thudded in my ears as he disappeared out of my sight.
In my childish way I believed I bought myself a period of partial vision, my sanity, a sober father and prosperity for my parents with two marshmallow fish, one pink and the other one white.