Blind-Boy, Writer-Girl

There was a boy. His mother died. In childbirth. With him. He lived, then, with his father and grandparents. He had never seen any of them, though. He was blind. Complications from childbirth took his mother and his sight both.

There was a girl – a precocious little girl with big brown eyes. She lived with her mother, father and younger sister in a huge yellow house in the country. She was healthy and happy.  

The boy’s family was poor, of course. They eked out a living on Ireland’s western-most coast. Their lives and hearts were dull and gray. Except for the boy’s. He lived in a world of his own. As a toddler, he was delighted by each new discovery he made in the cottage. Stray buttons and broken crocks to put them in were his joys. His disposition could not be dampened by the blight of material things nor by the faces around him, etched in worry, because he did not know any other life then what he felt with his hands and heard with his ears. His blindness shielded him. And he was likely happier for it.

The girl loved reading more than anything. Her parents read “Little Women” and “Stuart Little” with her. She read countless books by herself, delighted with each new discovery she made in their pages. Long ago times and far-away lands were her joys. Yes, she loved reading more than anything. Until she discovered writing, and then they were about the same.

Slowly, subtly, the boy’s sheer joyousness at, well, everything impacted the other members of the family. It’s hard to stay down when there a bright child in the house. His father noticed his cleverness. He noticed the way the boy had a mental map of the cottage and never tripped over the same piece of furniture twice. He heard his son’s astute questions. The father began to hope. Hope for his son, the son’s future. This hope became more concrete – a desire and then a yearning to send his son to a school for the blind in the city. But how? How to afford the tuition?

The little girl went to a school that seemed big to her but was really quite small. In fourth grade, she loved her teacher, who wore a smile always, it seemed. The girl loved that they sang sometimes in class, even when it wasn’t time for music. The teacher told the girl she was so proud of her for reading a sixth-grade book. The girl smiled and never forgot that.

Between his son’s giggles and occasional tantrums, the father made a decision. He would go to America for a year, two at most. There, he’d heard, he could earn money – and lots of it – in the coal mines. His mother begged him not to go, fearing that a trip across the Atlantic was not one he would make back. The grandfather, however, remained silent. He understood a father’s longing for something better for his son. He didn’t fully dare to ask himself if he had failed his son. Perhaps not, though, if he had the courage to sail away, lonely but resolute.

In fourth grade, there was a writing contest.  The girl had the courage to give it a go. The goal was to write a story that went along with a painting of a man and a boy. Looking out at the ocean. Her parents helped her type the story on their new computer.

The boy didn’t understand his father leaving for a faraway place. His concept of place and space was limited, very. So the four-year-old boy hugged his father good-bye and then immediately re-immersed himself in his make-believe world.

                

The girl wrote the story, won the contest, and then promptly returned to her book world.

A year to the day of the father leaving, the boy and his slope-shouldered grandfather began their daily trek to the top of the hill. The looked out at the sea, west toward America, looking for the passenger ship that might bring the father home. Most often, all the grandfather saw was waves. But he and the boy stood there hand-in-hand every day, waiting, for twenty minutes or so. The grandfather seeing the driving waves. The boy seeing nothing. But imagining so much more.

The little girl is grown now. She still loves to read and write. And sometimes she dictates stories to her dreams. Or is it her dreams that dictate stories to her?