Shadow Vision:
Inspired by Prompt Number 6 from the book Branches by Nancy Beckett.
"Tell the story of somebody you met or knew who was blind or deaf."
I only had one grandparent. Actually, I had four, but what I meant to say is I only knew one of my grandparents. Yet, I always said it the first way for as long as I can remember. It is not even biologically possible to have one grandparent. When you have only one of something, whether it is a parent, a car, a dog, a house, then that one exponentially gathers so much emotional and spiritual weight in your life it is like an eclipse blocking out the big black holes left by the absence of all the other people and things in one’s life.
I called my grandmother, Bubbie. It is a Yiddish word. My mother and my bubbie spoke Yiddish to each other all the time. I only learned a few words. My mother was much older when I was born and she was the youngest of my Bubbie’s five children. My Bubbie lived in a old people’s home about 6 or 7 blocks from our apartment. We would go to see her everyday. She was usually in the lobby in the front when you first walked in sitting on one of the turquoise couches with her big wooden cane in front of her. She wore a hearing aid in each ear and very thick black framed glasses. My Bubbie was blind. So why was she wearing glasses I once asked. My mother told me my bubbie had Shadow Vision. She could see shadows, the difference between dark and light but no details.
“Why is Bubbie Blind?” I remembered asking. “She has glaucoma” my mother told me. It was a curable disease if caught early but they did not catch it early enough in her case and by time the doctors found it, it had progressed too far for the medicine to help. It is also hereditary so you can only get it if someone in your genetic pool passes it on. It does not usually show up until middle age or later. So I knew I would not have to worry about going blind anytime soon, but it did enter my young mind as a distant possibility somewhere in my future. Would I ever become blind? That is how young minds work, they bring everything back into their own existence. It is a necessary survival instinct bread into the species over thousands of years. How will this effect me?
According to my mother when my bubbie noticed her vision was decreasing she never told anyone. She simply found ways to cope by asking strangers for help in the grocery store while shopping or moving her hands over things to distinguish what they were. When her vision had gotten so bad she could no longer hide the fact that she was going blind she had to tell my Aunt who lived with her in an apartment across the street from us. My Aunt had to go to work every day and Bubbie could no longer be left alone. There was no room in our little two bedroom apartment so it was off to the neighborhood old people’s home for Bubbie.
I liked the old people’s home and I loved Bubbie. She would gently rub my back and put her hand on my knee to feel me as I sat next to her. She was one of the few people I let touch me. Kids don’t like being touched and handled a lot, but there are always exceptions to every rule. And even though I did not speak Yiddish, she would insert enough English to allow me to understand her when she spoke to me. Those daily visits to my bubbie brought a kind of peace to my life that I never found anywhere else then or now.
When I was growing up we did not have a lot of things to entertain us. We entertained ourselves by riding bikes, playing in the alley, or playing make believe with dolls and stuffed animals. Make Believe, you are a princess and the dolls are your ladies in waiting, or make believe you are the kind teacher that does not exist in your own school and your dolls are the well behaved children who love learning. Make Believe your father’s painitings of blue mountains are real places you can climb and find caves filled with treasures, make believe your father is not screaming at your brother and chasing him with a belt, make believe your mother likes the smell of Lysol as she bends over the floor on her hands and knees so everything is perfectly clean, make believe your brother does not hate you deep down because you’re the only one in the family your father seems to love, make believe you live in a castle where you do not have to share a bedroom with your parents, make believe your family gets along . Make Believe your father’s parents, the grandparents you never knew, did not go up in smoke along with the rest of his family except his baby sister.
At night in our two bedroom apartment when my brothers and I were bored we would go into a bedroom, turn off the ceiling light and hold a flashlight up to the wall so we could make shadowy figures come to life, Alligators, men with curly hair, dogs and a variety of abstract creatures. We could entertain ourselves for hours with these shadows. And when we were done there would be no toys to store away, all we had to do was turn on the ceiling light and everything real would return while the shadows disappeared into thin air. When I would have to leave my Bubbie and go home to the apartment I would spend my time walking down Devon Avenue looking at my reflection in the store windows while pretending I was a shadow that would never disappear from my Bubbie’s eyes.
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