Tag: Blindness

Exceptional Vehicles (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

All you people take driving for granted.

I can’t drive because I’m legally blind and it is one of the most horrible kinds of crippling, or at least I imagine it is. Having never been an independent driver, I wouldn’t know.

I don’t know what it’s like to have a notion to go somewhere and just go. Cold night, playing Freeze Out like my dad used to do with us girls in the car—all four windows down, whoever rolls theirs up last is the winner—but with only myself as competition. I’ve never had to keep myself awake with only myself and the double yellow lolling out endlessly before me in the dark dark desert between here and Las Vegas.

I don’t know what hitting 100mph is like on that same highway, in the middle of the night, when I’m sure the CHP isn’t watching.

Yellow line, lulling you to sleep. Blaring the radio to fight it, Botts’ dots rumbling your eyes open again. The danger. The responsibility. The irresponsibility. The win when you get there somehow, miraculously, safe.

I wish I could stand somewhere alone that I drove to alone that I decided to drive to alone, and that no one but me, alone, would know about it.

Freedom. A grass is greener freedom as my side of the fence is on foot or riding the bus or in a cab or mooching rides from patient friends.

It’s hard to be independent when your broader movements are, by necessity, dependent—when, at the very least, the bus driver is going to know where you came from, where you went, and, if you ride enough, most of what your story is.

I sound bitter.

I am a little bitter.

No one to blame but the DNA. I was born wing-clipped in Southern California. Apparently my genetic material never heard the song “Nobody Walks in LA,” or heard it and thought we would be the exception.

Special genes do make one exceptional.

I am exceptionally half-sighted. I am exceptionally good at scheduling my errands around my friends’ errands so I don’t trouble anybody too much.

I am exceptionally blessed with the gift of the gab and, by lack of automotive freedom, have gained masses of unlikely friends all over the country. There is not much else to do when you’re stuck in transit together, breathing each other’s air, than to become compatriots.

Rwandan refugee cab drivers in Nashville—that ride share guy in DC who asked me what color palm trees are—the Uber lady whose dog just died yesterday—the bus driver who wouldn’t take my ticket without putting on gloves first (she was new and we weren’t virus-stricken yet)—the disability cabbie who brought his family along at eleven at night to pick me up from work, his wife sweetly piping up into the conversation from the backseat—the Pakistani guy who asked me to marry him—the Russian guy who also asked me to marry him—that other guy who asked me to use my employee discount to buy him a coffee pot “for church.”

I suppose all of these, in truth, are my own kind of exceptional vehicle and, once-in-a-while bilious drivers’ envy aside, my clipped-freedom grass is brilliant green because of them.

-M. Ashley

Ophelia’s Opal (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When my grandmother knew she was dying
she picked out an opal for me,
had a ring designed
and sized it,
for the short time being,
for her own hand.
I was an infant then, recently diagnosed
lifelong colorless and could-be blind.

My grandmother was a force—
a farm girl who took beatings
for sneaking away to read,
a young woman who left her family
to work among foul mouthed boys
at the Pentagon during WWII,
a single mother,
a stone wall,
razor tongue,
acid wit,
first female management at the FAA.

She held me at the hospital
in a hallway while the final diagnosis
was pronounced to my parents
in a tiny, sterile room.
Her breast was warm,
though the breathing behind it was labored.
Her embrace was soothing
though her hands were not soft
from folding crust-cut sandwiches in wax paper
for her children or grandchildren’s outings
of uncomplicated youth.

She explored my hot face and closed eyelids
with her wise yet diminishing fingers,
the opal slipping forward and upside down
under her nearly exposed knuckle,
resting against my forehead,
cooling a spot just above my eyes.
She leaned forward and blessed me,
“My dear little Michelle-y,
I do hope you can see.”

-M. Ashley

What Does “Yellow Sun” Mean to the Blind? (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

My god assures me that there are worlds of albinos out there in the universe. Whole worlds of us where the light is perpetually twilight and we can all see everything and our skin radiates and no one ever gets skin cancer and no one calls us “Milky” and no one hunts us for our magical body parts.

I hope he knows that in this world, the twilight has to be just the right kind of twilight. It can’t be too much toward dark or light, because then it’s either too bright or the lights have just come on and they are too bright. It’s that sweet spot where it’s too light for the automatic streetlights but too dark to need sunscreen anymore. That’s the spot that world would have to be in for us all to radiate, to be the norm, to keep our body parts intact.

Now, here’s a question: If there were mutated pigmented people on this world full of albinos, how would we tell them how to find stuff? “Look for that thing I think is fuzzy and silver next to the tall thing I think is fuzzy and green?” What does an unsighted person say to a sighted person to direct them through their twilight world?

They would have to be in special schools I think and have their own language of clear letters that make sense to only them.

I once was in a class where I saw a teacher telling a blind kid to remember that the sun was yellow. I was ten at the time, but even then that seemed so odd. I suppose you need to know the sun is yellow to understand what that means when it comes up in literature or on the TV or in conversation, to understand the connection, I mean, but the statement itself is meaningless, is it not? What does yellow mean to a person who is totally blind?

Maybe yellow means sun and heat and summer, not summer and sun and heat means yellow.

“Which blindness comes from looking beyond the mark,” is a Mormon scripture I repeat to myself a lot, directed at myself, or shaking my head at others. I think that’s a more godly way of saying you can’t see the forest for the trees, though it would be more like you can’t see the trees for the forest. If there were no yellow sun, or no white moon reflecting the yellow sun, no one, sighted or not, could see the forest or the trees.

I’m going around in circles. The sun is a circle. The sun is yellow. The circle would be meaningful to a blind person, whereas yellow would be a wild, esoteric theory—something you have to wait for your own world to see, or for the second coming—or for Jesus to walk by and rub mud in your eyes.

-M. Ashley