Picnic

In an hour or so, I will be going to a family picnic with cousins from my mother's side of the family. I love many of these folks, at least the one's I know, and have no strenuous objections to hotdogs and hamburgers. But being blind, even "only" legally blind as I am, can put a terrible crimp in this sort of thing. Ordinarily, a person in a social situation scopes out the space for a conversational opportunity; perhaps someone else who is feeling at loose ends in the situation.

But when you can't see well, when the faces of other people are mostly lost to you except at pornographic range, the scope and advance structure breaks down, and you more or less have to hope that someone else sees how you are and draws you into a conversation. Of course, there is the third option, which was not open to me when my blindness began ten years ago, and that is to be very still inside myself, free of the monkey that jabbers desolation, and listen. This isn't always easy, and it's a little bit sideways from the mood with which you want to attend a picnic, but it's better than the alternative, which is to chew on the tablecloth and sulk. Also, I think I have something more interesting to talk about than a lot of what gets talked about at a picnic, and that is, without being a snob about it, that I have written one book and am writing another. It would probably be more compelling if I had published something, but at least I know that I haven't spent the ten years of my exile weeping.

Well. Not all of them, anyway.