Line of Sight

Middle of the night, shuffling around in circles like a lobotomized mental patient: Where am I? What am I doing?  A dentist drill of discomfort twirls insistently at the base of my cranium as a primal imperative insistently rises to consciousness – find a bathroom and find it soon! 

Shifting nervously from foot to foot in an effort to calm myself, it seems increasingly unlikely that a bathroom will appear in a small room with clothes hanging from racks.  The light is bright but does not provide clarity as I rub my sleepy, rheumy eyes.  With baby steps, I exit the closet after realizing vaguely that the route that took me from bed to hallway in the old apartment angled to the left while the trajectory veers to the right in the new one.

Flicking the light switch off (an automatic habit borne of frugality and a heightened concern for sustainability), I sound my way along the bedroom wall until I reach the hall, depositing mental pheromones that will allow me to retrace and refine trails in the new colony populated by one confused two-hundred pound ant.

Simple rules embedded in my unconscious lead to the complex macro-behavior of disposing of waste in the middle of the night in a way consistent with the survival of the colony, but I wonder absentmindedly: Can a colony consist of one member with no queen?  I make a mental note to look into that later, but the imperative amps up its intensity as the unfamiliar but welcoming sight of the bathroom lurches into view as I fumble for a light switch placed in a diabolically unfamiliar place.

***

On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher asked me, “Kevin, what’s on the blackboard?”  Innocently, I answered her question with another one, “What blackboard?”  My response led to hushed conversations between my mother and the teacher, between my mother and the mother next door, and between my mother and father as I hunched playing over toys, taking perverse pride in the fact that they were talking about me: “He couldn’t even see the blackboard?”  Ultimately, the conversations transmuted into an appointment with Dr. Warren Broderson and my special status was communicated to the other kids by my unceremonious removal from class during the middle of the day.

Dr. Broderson perched on a stool and, as he leaned forward, he violated my personal space, increasing my discomfort.  Harsh beams of light pierced my eyes and made them water as the benevolent doctor murmured reassuring incantations as in a rite of passage.  Later, a phoropter was fitted to the bridge of my nose as a kaleidoscope of lenses began to spin and flip before my eyes.  The chart on the wall filled with strange shapes connected at strange angles that morphed and shifted and jumped in unfamiliar ways fascinating to the uninitiated, the visually-impaired. As new combinations of lenses tumbled and clicked into place, Dr. Broderson invoked the minimalist catechism of this strange, scientific liturgy: “Better here?  Microsecond pause. “Or here?”

The first crisp image of my life rose before my eyes like a revelation: a montage of sparse hairs on the top of Dr. Broderson’s balding head as he stared into the recesses of my eyes.  Controlling the power of sight, he was a magician to a confused little boy.  He prescribed glasses with thick lenses that were both a blessing and a curse: in exchange for the gift of sight mocking references to my “four eyes” were hurled when I dropped the ball or made a bad move.  The frames that supported the powerful optics were fractured often during my ill-fated efforts to play sports, but were a price gladly paid.

During the first five years of my life I developed a capacity and level of comfort with feeling and sounding my way in the dark as I made my way through the world without the aid of glasses.  Sometimes I wonder what happened to children with 20/800 sight before the invention of corrective lenses: Were they abandoned?  Did they experience higher rates of accidental injury or death?  If so, why did evolution not eliminate poor eyesight?  Was there a compensating advantage?

My left eye corrects to about 20/25 and my right to 20/40.  Nevertheless, diminished eyesight in my formative years sharpened other senses.  Sounds that many people are unaware of command my attention and demand resolution – the periodic plops of a dripping faucet in the kitchen interfere with sleep.  My normally sure-footed trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night in a familiar apartment confirm that nature compensates for the weakening of one sense with the increased acuity of others. However, the adaptations are not permanent and lead to unintended consequences and further adaptations in an endless kaleidoscopic search for clarity and fitness.