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.

Summer Reading

If you've followed this blog at the Workpad site, you will have read that I am currently enmeshed in a mad, mad love affair with a new gadget of mine, a miraculous device called the Victor Reader Stream. Previously, I had borrowed exhausted cassette tapes from the Washington State Talking Book and Braille Library. Except for the cassette failures and frequent malfunction of the 1970's tape machines, it was an adequate way to keep abreast of one's reading if you didn't happen to know Braille. But in the end, all those breakdowns and tape failures wore on me and I gave up on books for a few years.

Then I acquired a Victor Reader Stream. This device enables you to download books in digital format and read them at various speeds and volumes, and depending upon the size of the SD card you eploy and the size of the books you read, you can store four or five dozen books. It's a portable Alexandria, and in fact, I have labeled my SD card "Alexandria" in honor of this fact.

This device has saved me hours of time wasting with online multiplayer games. I have read WAR AND PEACE, THE DIVINE COMEDY of Dante and now THE SILMARILLION, Tolkien's mythological basis for THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It's simply an astonishing bit of technology, and once you master the telephone keypad it's practically witless to operate. Besides some newer fantasy titles, including Suzanne Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, my wee Alexandria currently houses BLEAK HOUSE, HARD TIMES, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE GREAT GATSBY and numerous other classics.

It almost makes you want to go blind, doesn't it?