Tag: essay

The Blind Feeding the Lame: Growing Disabled with Dad * Essay & Live RISK Performance

This essay about the very different experiences my father and I had growing disabled first appeared at Catapult last June. I performed a storytelling version for a live taping of the Risk! Podcast, which aired in December in an episode called “Quality Time.” Scroll down for the performance followed by the essay. I republish both versions here in honor of… Read more

What I See/Saw I: Hallucinations (Essay 2 of #52essays2017)

I am blind, but that does not mean I live in darkness, and I’m not just talking metaphor here. These days the visionscape confronting me sparkles and undulates, with greater or lesser intensity, constantly, veiling the world beyond with simple and complex hallucinations. The brilliance of my visionscape is not less intense in a dark room than in a brilliant… Read more

In the Beginning Were the Eye Doctors, essay 1 of #52essays2017

Before the base closed to make way for the National Park, Lucasfilm, and the Thoreau Center, my mother and I drove regularly through the Presidio to buy cheap groceries at the commissary or to the Letterman Army Medical Center for visits to the pediatricians and then many eye doctors. My dad was in the military, and as a dependent, I… Read more

THE HAND OF THE WORLD: Helen Keller on Social Blindness

[From Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913). This text has been lightly edited for apparent scanning errors and hyperlinked by me] As I write this, I am sitting in a pleasant house, in a sunny, wide-windowed study filled with plants and flowers. Here I sit, warmly clad, secure against want, sure that… Read more

A Flame’s Progress, Greek Easter 1981

We arrived late as always, so that there was no place to sit, though there’s not a whole lot of sitting in Greek Orthodox churches. Standing in our coats, clutching our unlit candles, we crowded in with the others who, like us, came to church but once or twice a year. I was between my mom and my Thea Yvonne… Read more