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Excerpted Inspirations #177

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • May 12
  • 0 min read

[Anna Solden tries to explain to her school friends about her limited vision.] “Half the time, I forget about you not being able to see,” Maggie confided. “You just seem like anybody. And then, I realize you hardly ever can see what’s on the board even when you’re up front, while I can see that from the very back of the room.” Anna had taken her limited vision for granted for so long now that their bewilderment caught her off guard. While she tried to think of what to say, Paula plunged on. “Yesterday when you came to meet us, I could tell you knew where I was even thought I was standing right beside a bunch of people waiting for the bus – and I was way farther away from you than any blackboard.” “You had on your red plaid skirt,” Anna said, “and your yellow sweater. I wouldn’t have known you except that I recognized the color of your clothes. I didn’t see your face or anything. Sometimes I’ve thought I recognized people and I’ve waved, and then when I got close I found out I’d made a mistake. Now I just smile until I know I’m right.” She was figuring out the answer as she went along. As she came to a halt, she realized that she knew something new about herself. She had sensed it but never before defined it in words. They were close to the school now. She suddenly had a lot more to say. She tried to put it all into a few quick sentences but it was too complicated. “I’m like you, Maggie. I don’t think about not seeing until I’m up against something I can’t see. At home, where I know where everything is, I run and never think of falling. But as soon as I’m in a strange place, I have to watch out for steps and stuff.” “You look around just like the rest of us,” Paula commented. “You don’t seem to be missing anything.” “To me, what I see seems normal,” Anna answered. She smiled, perceiving it as funny rather than sad. “I don’t see what I’m missing, so I don’t think I’m missing anything. Mostly, I just feel ordinary. Until I need help,” she finished, a bit abashed at so much talk about herself. “I just don’t understand what you DO see,” Maggie said in frustration. “I don’t either, exactly,” said Anna. “I asked Dr. Schumacher that and he made it a bit easier for me to understand. He said that I can see at twenty feet what you see at about one hundred. If we are both standing looking at a door, for instance, I see the door and you see the door – but you also maybe see the doorknob and the keyhole and the grain of the wood. I just know there’s a door there. I see as far as you do, more or less, because we can both see to the horizon, but everything’s dimmer and less distinct for me.” Suzy had been silent throughout this whole discussion. Now she put a hand out and clutched Anna by the elbow, jolting her so that she almost missed her step. “I think it’s awful asking you things like that,” she said. “It’s bad enough to ... to be different and not to see ... but it isn’t kind to talk about it. I don’t see how you can be so unfeeling as to ... to discuss it as though it were any other fact,” she said to Maggie and Paula. “It’s cruel!” Anna, for the first time since Paula had made up the rhyme which had started the whole conversation, felt embarrassed. Not only embarrassed but furious. Suzy made her poor eyesight sound like a shameful secret, something to be hidden away and only talked about in whispers when the afflicted person was out of earshot. She jerked her arm free and tried to think of something to say which would finish Suzy’s gushing over her. “Oh, shut up,” Maggie said, “and get that drippy look off your face, Suzy Hughes. Anna doesn’t have two heads or ... or ....” “Her foot in her mouth,” Paula said. “Which is where yours is. How can we help her if we don’t know when she needs help? Who would know better than Anna herself.” “The trouble is,” Anna said as they hurried up the steps and down the hall to their lockers, “that sometimes I don’t know when I need help because I don’t see what I’m not seeing so I don’t know I’m not seeing it.” Suzy refused to laugh but the other two made up for it. “We’ll just have to keep playing it by ear,” Maggie said. “But you’ll understand that if we make mistakes, it’s only because you have us thoroughly confused.” Jean Little, Listen for the Singing (1977), pp. 103-105

 
 
 

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