He Lost His Sight, Found Courage

I’ve seen fogs when I was sailing that made me lose sight of the buoy I needed to set a course. I’d drop my sails and anchor and wait. Eventually, the fog would lift.

My own personal fog moved in late in the fall of 1988.

My left eye has been blind since 1944, when I was covering the war in Europe for a Florida newspaper. An artillery shell exploded too close, damaging the retina. I’d been getting along fine, but then my right eye began to act funny.

At first I thought I needed new glasses. But after a couple of exams, the doctor declared, “You’re legally blind.”

Macular degeneration was affecting the central part of my retina. It left me with only a narrow, hazy ring of peripheral vision and a big, colorless mass of nothingness straight ahead.

And this fog was never going to lift.

At first, I grasped only the simplest implications of the doctor’s words: I wouldn’t be allowed to drive a car anymore, I thought.

Then: What about my job? And as the minutes and days and weeks crept by, other horrors began--fear, depression, anger, self-pity and the unanswerable “Why me?”

Toughest of all was the guilt. My life had been changed forever, but so had that of Gloria, my wife. Now she had to do the everyday chores that had been mine, adding to those of her own. She had to be caretaker, chauffeur and whatever else I needed. And I needed a lot. I became so dependent that I was near panic if she returned home a few minutes late.

For half a century I had been a newspaperman making my living with a typewriter, but during all those years, I had not bothered to learn touch typing. I depended on two fingers and one eye.

Now I couldn’t even read without a big-screen magnifier that provided more headaches than help. I couldn’t take notes.

Television was only a moving blur. In a room I could make out the walls and perhaps where a table was located, but that was it. I couldn’t find my wife unless she was wearing bright colors. I couldn’t go to the store. I had trouble clipping my fingernails.

There’s a big, boisterous fountain loudly splashing in the center of the Mission-style courtyard at the Braille Institute in Anaheim.

“I know some of you can see the fountain a little bit and some of you can’t see it at all,” said the voice coming from a woman named Alpha Martin. She was leading a small group of newcomers on an orientation tour.

“But all of you can hear it, and it’ll tell you where you are.”

That sound would help us find the classrooms, campus store, cafeteria, restrooms, buses and other facilities. It would help us reach the sensitive and selfless staff and volunteers. They would guide us toward fulfilling, purposeful lives that had been invaded by the mists.

I had wallowed in increasing gloom for several weeks when Gloria and a friend arranged the meeting with Cora Hesley, a staff counselor at the institute.

For as long as I could remember, the word Braille had given me an uneasy chill. I pictured gray people in a gray place bending over sheets of paper trying to decipher rows of little raised dots with their fingertips.

When Gloria signed me up, my first reaction was hardly enthusiastic. But I knew the moment I got on the institute bus in Laguna Hills that my notions of the institute were far off base. The bus was rocking with the homey chatter and laughter of about a dozen men and women of all ages.

“My biggest gripe is, they started wearing bikinis after I went totally blind,” said one man. “I hear I’m missing quite a lot.” Laughter.

“Hey, Frank, is that you? This is John,” says another man.

“Yep, John, this is Frank here. Damn, it’s good to see you.”

The word see was used in such a natural way. There was no trace of irony or any lurking bitterness and certainly no dark humor. The forthright way it was said, the simplicity of it, had a remarkable effect on me. It wiped away the bad feeling I’d had since my sight faltered.

It was my first gift from the institute. I was among people who shared my deepest feelings.

This was the beginning of freedom, most notably from self-pity, because at every session I was reminded that there were many far worse off, and I began to learn about real courage from them.

First, I signed up for a typing class. The teacher, Bobbie Rodgers, warned me that after using the two-finger method for so many years, learning the touch system would be doubly difficult. After many months, I’m writing this on a typewriter.

Then came Lea Ann Myers, one of the institute’s specialists in mobility, teaching those with vision problems how to get around safely.

This confidence-inspiring person had earned part of her credentials by roaming the streets and intersections of San Francisco for six months, blindfolded and carrying only a white cane.

Just as Bobbie had unsprung a mental trap for me, so Myers opened the physical one.

Soon she had me crossing through the torrents of traffic on Pacific Coast Highway and similar pedestrian nightmares. She showed me how to ride buses, and my sense of power and freedom was lovely.

Warm, friendly Cathy Titus taught us simple ways of preparing full meals or snacks in a microwave oven.

Janelle Richardson taught independent living skills, in which we learned, for example, how to fold money so that bills could be easily identified by touch.

Deeper feelings of closeness grew in Mara Jean Davis’ classes, called learning to live with visual impairment. These were like group therapy, where we were encouraged to talk openly about our most secret emotions, with the assurance of confidentiality.

Activities for those caught in the fog seemed endless--basket weaving, ceramics, woodworking, bowling, field trips, dancing and more.

Also, of course, there are classes in Braille, the art of reading with fingertips, taught at Anaheim by Helen Pollchik. There are Braille Institute campuses at Santa Barbara, Los Angeles--the headquarters--and Palm Springs as well as Anaheim, along with numerous satellites in small communities. All are nonprofit facilities supported by private contributions. The Southern California complex is the largest west of the Mississippi.

A few months ago, the Anaheim campus’s fountain fell silent. Leaves and debris stirred up by a Santa Ana wind had jammed the pump, and it took two days to fix.

“It was eerie,” said Al Fitzpatrick, the bus driver who doubles as landscaper. “Everyone felt funny and disoriented, even me.”

After two years, I no longer have my bus service to the institute--a policy that allows people who have already benefited to make way for new clients. But I have gained enough to go on with. I type very slowly, but I am writing again.