Of Blind Girls and Dog Poo

Though I'm likely never to forget that Memorable Memorial Day of 2008, each year I try to put it behind me a little more and a little more. Today I need to prepare the yard for the Wifester to cut the grass, and in an instant I am taken back to those horrible memories.
But almost as horrific as that day, that scene, is the realization that I, the "blind girl", have the duty of going into the yard to scoop the dog poop. And mind you, we have a new upstairs neighbor who also has a lab mix, Daisy. So my job is to locate, extract, and dispose of the pooh of three quite large dogs, all while doing my best to avoid stepping in any of it. If I keep my head down and my eyes on the ground, I can see my feet, but not both at the same time, so that window is pretty small. Or rather the window of opportunity for a smelly disaster is quite large. Either way, it is not a job I am eager to embark upon. Hence my presence here, with you instead. Oh, I tell myself that I am waiting on the coffee to kick in, but the truth is I am, simply and honestly, procrastinating.
Don't get me wrong, I love being in the yard. I love to garden and till and plant...but the minefield that is our yard is treacherous to navigate, even for a fully sighted person. Still, the job must be done, and since I apparently can not, nor do I want to be trusted with the task of mowing the yard, especially after what I saw on that Memorable Memorial Day, I suppose my contribution is limited to me putting my big girl panties on and heading outside to scoop the poop. Besides, I do have the Cadillac of poop scoopers. 

See. Isn't that nice? My hands get to stay clean. Hopefully, if I'm very, very careful, so will my feet.

What's on your agenda today? Yard work? Barbecue? Both?

The In Between Place

Learning to adjust to my vision loss is an ongoing process. I have found that using the blasted white cane given to me by the National Federation of the Blind has been quite useful, as much as I hate to admit it. I really try to overlook the sideways glances I get when I'm walking down the street with it. I realize most people are simply curious. I always was before I began to experience this thing, this retinitis pigmentosa, this  slow but certain death of my sight.

I always thought I was just clumsy. Everyone did. My nickname as a kid was "Fumble butt". I wondered how everyone else seemed to get in and out of movie theaters without holding on to the hand rails and searching, searching for each step. I can't count the times I tripped and fell or nearly fell in a movie theater.

I remember as a kid my mother would tell us to be home at dark. I was always home long before my brother or neighbors considered it dark. 

I remember struggling to take notes in the classroom when the teacher had turned down the lights in order to use the overhead projector. (Yes, I'm that old. I remember overhead projectors.) I never knew how everyone else had notes that were neatly written, in the lines, and cohesive. Mine were scribbled, traipsing along, going over and under and back over the lines of my wide ruled paper, often trailing off to one corner or another. I could never see those lines to guide my pen. 

But I digress...

The cane. 

Before I truly understood what being "partially sighted" meant, I saw people with their canes and assumed, wrongly, but assumed that they were completely blind. I wondered if they could see anything at all.
Light? Shadows?
Was it pitch black in their world? Was it all white?
I wondered.

As my field of vision gets ever narrower and as my world, at least the world I see, closes in and gets smaller, yet smaller, I find myself in this strange place. Not quite blind, and not quite sighted.
I land somewhere in between. And that seems somehow apropos. I've always landed somewhere in between. Not all white, not all brown. Not all girly-girl, not all tomboy. A few popular friends, a few outsider friends. I never completely fit in in any one place. And honestly, I've always felt a bit more comfortable in that in between place. It's what I know. It's comfortable. I can indulge both sides of my personality there. I can lean left and then right, and always land somewhere in the middle, on what for me is solid ground. 

The cane has fallen right in step with me in that in between place. Some days my eyes are strained, clouded by a thick gray or sometimes white-ish film that veils the world from me. Some days they are showered with "floaters" that make it quite difficult to determine if I'm looking at something real, something there in the world in front of me, or just an imaginary nothingness that my eyes and brain have colluded have produced. Some days my eyes are clear, and I seem to see just fine, until I realize that I only see through a peep hole, while the rest of you are looking through a bay window. Always, though, my eyes see bright, swirly, spirally lights that pulsate from their centers, enlarge, and then recede.
It is because of all of these things that I choose to use the cane. Not because I can't see anything, but because I see differently. Some days I feel confident and choose not to use the cane. Other days, I make no doubt about it, I need it.

I'm finding my footing now in this new and ever changing In Between Place, both figuratively and literally. And I look forward to an ever changing world ahead of me. I know I will miss some things, but I also know I will learn new things, and isn't that what it's all about? Learning and growing, avoiding being stagnant...At least, that's what I think it's all about. 

The C Word

When did people stop calling it "The Big C", or "The C Word", and just start saying it, "Cancer"? I remember my parents and grandparents in the kitchen in hushed voices saying, "Did you hear? Shirley's got the Big C. It came back..."
I wondered if she was taking classes and not doing very well. I was young, and I was wrong, at least about the school part.
I recently found out that two of my cousins have been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
One is my Tia Anita's daughter, the other is my Auntie Maggie's. My friend lost his wife last year after a very short, dramatically short battle with pancreatic cancer. It was only a couple of weeks after her diagnosis before she lost her battle. She was young, and left behind two young daughters. I hate that for their family. Hate it.
Then again, I don't know whether that was a blessing or just another one of life's cruel twists of fate. I suppose it was a little bit of both.
I watched my aunt die slowly, painfully, mercilessly from cancer. She was deluded by the morphine, overwhelmed with pain, and frightened.
It took that woman two years to pass. Two years of bed baths, tubes, needles, nurses...
Two years of my uncle tending to her dutifully. Two years of her children and family watching her suffer day after day, after day...
Cancer. She doesn't care who you are, how old or young you are, how much money you do or don't have to spend fighting her. She pays no attention to how kind and generous you've been in your life. Karma is not in her vocabulary. She'd just as soon pick you as anyone else on this planet.
No rhyme. No reason.
Cancer is an equal opportunity bitch.

Muchas Gracias, Tia-Nita!

There's something wonderful that happens when I talk to my Tia Anita, or as I called her when I was a kid, "Tia-Nita"- at the end of each conversation I get to hear, "te quiero mi hija".

It never fails to fill me with the warm fuzzies. I don't know why hearing it in Spanish makes so much of a difference. Maybe it reminds me of being young, with aunts and uncles aplenty, surrounding me with love. Hearing them all speak in Spanish with one another always made me feel like I was being granted access to a secret society. One that was forbidden in my house. 

"You look white, so you never have to tell anyone that you are half Mexican. They'll just make fun of you." I remember my mother saying to me. "Always check the box that says White-Non Hispanic", she'd tell me on the first day of school. She was and continues to be, I don't want to say ashamed, but I can't think of a better word for it...I guess that's it, she was ashamed of her heritage, her ethnicity. 

I would ask her how to say one word or another in Spanish, and she'd always say, "Oh, I don't know. Ask your Auntie Maggie or your Tia-Nita next time you see her. Eventually, I learned to just go directly to my Grandma. She was always happy to teach me Spanish. She was quite disappointed that I knew so little of it, and often spoke to me wholly in Spanish and then asked me to tell her what she'd said. Mom hated that game. 

I wonder when it started for her. Was she embarrassed of her own skin color as a child in school? Was she picked on, teased? She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have seen her yearbooks. She was beautiful, seemingly popular, and above all, she seemed to have a good number of Hispanic class mates. I can't imagine that self-loathing came from those years. 

Maybe it started after she married my father. 

I remember going to a family reunion for his side of the family. I wondered why I had never met so many of  his aunts, uncles, and cousins. I remember a man coming toward us saying, "Well, there's ole' Jimbo with his half breed kids!" And I remember another man, apparently a minister at a rural Baptist church telling my dad he should visit his church, but he warned, "You shouldn't bring that spick wife of yours. They won't let her kind in." I think we left the reunion right after that. 

It's funny how things like that stick in your head, but I think if that stayed with me the way it has, what effect did it have on my poor mother? 

I wonder how those men would feel if I met them today, and introduced my wife to them? 

I wonder how, after experiencing those situations in their own lives, my parents could treat their own daughter's partner with such disdain, without even taking the time to get to know her.

I wonder if they'll ever come around. 

I don't know the answers, and I don't know if I'll ever know them. But I do know that I have found a place within myself that is proud to be half-Mexican and half-German. Proud to be a lesbian. Proud to be exactly who I am. And maybe, just maybe, my Tia Anita reminds me of that place within myself, and reminds me that I am a part of that secret society that my own mother was so frightened by. And for that I say, Muchas Gracias, Tia-Nita!  

The Bad Ex

This blog is like that bad ex you can't get out of your head. Every now and then you bump into each other and sparks fly again. Before you know it you've jumped in, head first, and are starting to think, "Yeah! This time I'll make it work!"  Eventually, you each recess back into the shadows of the forgotten until the next chance encounter.
I can't help it, I still hold out hope for this place, this thing, this blog.
Hope that I'll find what I'm looking for through it.
Hope that we'll improve each other.
Hope that you'll enjoy coming here.
Hope.
And that's all any of us are looking for in this life, right? Hope.
I've lived my life filled with hope, and I've lived my life utterly and completely hopeless. And now I'm cycling back to hopefulness.
I don't really know where this blog is going, but it's been with me a long time now, and like myself, I think it has a pretty good way to go yet. I think we'll try to keep each other company for the next leg of the journey. Are you in?

The Crippled Line

One thing I detest is poor customer service. Last night The Wifester and I went to Marc's grocery store. The customer service is probably the worst I have ever experienced in my life. The cashiers are too busy talking amongst themselves to even acknowledge their customer's presence. Tonight the cashier ringing us up was discussing "the fat-ass with the cowboy hat over in the crippled line" with the cashier beside him. Seriously? "The crippled line"??!! Who talks like that? The two guys (cashiers) were shooting the bird at one another, and there was lots of "fuck that" and "what a dick" being said back and forth between them. I was appalled. Meanwhile, The Wifester was not able to hold herself back. While this was all going on, another employee came over to bag our groceries and our cashier said to him, "Finally, the customer service was sucking because you weren't here to bag" and The Wifester shot back, "No, actually the customer service is sucking because of the foul language, the shooting of the middle finger, and calling the disabled people 'cripples'. That's what sucked." I just love my outspoken wife! I would think this kind of language and behavior would not be permissible at work. When I was a cashier, we would have been fired on the spot if another cashier and I behaved like this on the sales floor, customers in sight or not. I called this location this morning to let the manager be aware of my dissatisfaction. I was further appalled when, after relaying my experience to him, Robert said, "OK." I asked, "So, OK is all you have?" To which he responded in a short, almost gruff tone, "Well, I'll have to find out who was working." I asked if that information is located on my receipt, and he again in a rather annoyed tone said, “Yep, on top.” I provided him with the name of the cashier from the top of my receipt, to which he simply responded, "OK". Having worked in retail myself for many years, and in customer service for many more, I was trained to apologize to a dissatisfied customer and to ensure that the situation will be remedied promptly. At the very least there should have a small gesture of empathy, for example, "I am so sorry that you experienced that in our store. I would have been appalled, too." But all that Marc's has to offer is a matter of fact, casual "OK". I could practically hear his shoulders shrugging over the phone. 
I wrote this up into a letter and sent it to Marc's Home Office. I don't expect them to have much more response than their store manager's, but since I promised them I would tell everyone I know about my horrific experience...See, that's what poor customer service does for ya. 

Adaptation and Peace

Retinitis pigmentosa.
It's been over a year since the diagnosis. In some ways it seems like it was only a month ago they delivered the news. So much has happened in the last year, so many changes...some for the better, some worse.
I've moved from Nashville, TN to Cleveland, OH. I've lost one house and gained another. I met some new folks and left some others in my past. I've finally gotten approved for social security/disability, and I've come to terms with needing to use a cane instead of relying on my eyes to see where I'm stepping.
I've adapted my art to my failing sight. That makes me both happy and sad. Mostly, though, I've found it to be a challenge that I'm quite up for...most days.
I've learned to appreciate audio books, and I've learned to ask for more light.
There's times I want to curl up in a ball and forget that I'm going blind. And there's times that I want to go rally the masses to fund research for a cure. If I was a religious person, I'm not sure if I'd be mad at God, or Allah, or Buddha or whoever, or just feel a little bit screwed. I'm not though, so I just kind of look at it like, well, a matter of biology and chance. After all, that is what it comes down to.
I think if I had found this out back in my manic fuled days of partying and getting high, I'd probably be dead right now. Not intentionally, but it would have made a great excuse to overdo it on all those party favors I used to keep in stock. I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I'm glad I have The Wifester and some really good friends.
I'm learning to adapt to the constant changes in my vision, in my life, in my attitude.
I think that's been how I find my peace.