(i'm a writer. that's what i really do...)
New Orleans
I walk around my neighborhood with my eyes watching the ground 4 feet ahead of me. One might say I gaze at the ground. I want you to know I’m not seeing you, because… if I am looking straight at you, chances are I am not seeing you. I am blind most of the way. But I have enough sight to pass as a narcissist white lady who doesn’t acknowledge her neighbors when she crosses paths with them on the street.
Sometimes a friend will walk with me offering her services as my town crier.
“She’s not stuck up. She just can’t see you. She’s blind.”
Though I’m sure some neighbors believe the town crier, Gilbert the 9-year-old, does not. He heckles.
“If she be blind, why she wearing glasses? Blind people know they blind. They not trying to wear glasses to see. Look at Ray Charles, he wears sunglasses, let you know he ain’t lookin.”
The heft of Gilbert’s astuteness gets no response. Knowing his wisdom has been cast before swine, he dumbs it down.
“Why don’t she have the special dog or the rat-a-tat-tat cane?”
“She’s legally blind,” town crier says.
“You mean, she gotta be 21 to be blind?” He shakes his head in theatrical disbelief. “Woo-wee! Ain’t that some Snoopy snack.”
Soon after Gilbert threw down the Snoopy snacks, I got a dog. I didn’t try to get a dog. If I had “tried,” it wouldn’t have been this dog. Banjo is a super unhelpful and problematic dog who has been a train wreck for my blindness. He chases skateboards and bicycles and tries to bite children and cats. The only good news is he’s missing all but three teeth in the back, nonetheless he snaps like an alligator.
Banjo, who went by his street name “Bang Bang,” forced me to stare ahead and appear fully-sighted and responsive to everyone around me. In the beginning, I canvassed hard in the neighborhood. I said hello 10 feet out to everything that might be a human being. I said hello to shadows, empty chairs, human-shaped bushes. A lot of greetings were being cast before inanimate objects. My vigilant, preemptive friendliness on behalf of having a shithead dog wore thin real quick. I no longer waste my breath on shadows and bicycles. You don’t talk to me, I don’t talk to you back.
Legal Blindness has her hands full with the numbnut dog who darts into traffic to lick mayonaise off the road at rush hour. And just when I think he might be having a good day, he goes Tarantino on a 3-year-old on a tricycle.