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The World Behind My Eyes Neal Ewers Can you hear a smile? Have you ever heard that certain quality in a friend's voice that says that he is lonely? Can you tell from your mother's footsteps that she has had a very stressful day? Do you ever listen for that certain something in a friend's laugh that tells you your friend is laughing to cover up his sadness? For my entire life, I have been totally blind. Now, before you say to yourself something like "Isn't that awful?" or "Boy! he must miss a lot," stop and consider the following. You see my blindness as it might seem to you if, all of a sudden, you were no longer able to see. Let's make no bones about it, that would be a most devastating occurrence. I, on the other hand, have never known what it is to see with my eyes. So, I make do with my other senses. I ‘see’ with my hands, my ears, my nose, and my mouth. If you really stop and think about it, it's a wonderful way to look at things. In my world, there are no pimples, no one is fat, no person I know has any kind of physical deformity, and we are all the same color. Social scientists have said that as much as 80 percent of what we perceive is perceived with our eyes. Even if that percentage is greatly overstated, I think it is safe to say that we use our sense of sight more often than any of our other senses. Yet sight can be, if we let it, a distancing phenomena. We can see things and people from so far away, that we often think we have no need to get close enough to use our more distance limited senses. We can look at a person and draw a conclusion based mostly on their physical appearance. However, it takes some time to get close enough to speak to them or to hear what their voice is saying to you just beneath their words. Life-long friendships have started in just that way. A small stone beside the path may catch our eye, but it takes time to pick it up and discover that it is so smooth and so very right in our hand. It may be just the very stone we want to keep in our pocket to rub whenever we are tense or anxious or to give to a special friend who may be very sad or lonely. Some may say that because I am blind, it is obvious that I am aware of these things. Perhaps. But I believe that what I ‘see’ and how I ‘see’ it is a very special gift, given to me by some very special people. My mind drifts back now to those long, hot afternoons on the riverbank with my father. "What's that sound, Daddy?" I would ask. And he would put down his fishing pole and go in search of the cause of an unknown noise. Sometimes he'd be lucky, and my childhood curiosity would be appeased by the discovery of yet another bird, or cricket, or frog. But most of the time, he never found it. Creatures of the forest have a way of becoming quite invisible when you are trying to find them. I also remember the times I would ask those hard, perplexing questions about life as I understood it as a six year old boy. "Daddy," I would ask, "why do trains run on tracks, and what does a train look like anyway?" To a six year old boy, trains can be the extremely important stuff that dreams are made of and daddys like mine always seemed to understand that. One of the earliest recollections I have of my father is the touch of his hand on mine as he handed me a train which he made with modeling clay because he wanted me to see a train in my mind's eye. Those very rough, weather worn hands, acquired from many years of hard labor in the factory where he worked, knocked at the door of my consciousness in a very strange and perplexing way. His hands were so large, so rough, and so full of power, and yet, they were so very gentle as they handed me that crude model of a train. I know it sounds strange, but there was something in his touch that seemed to say that he was sorry it wasn't a better train. There was something in the way he placed it in my hand that made me know that this large, quiet, man, making hardly enough money to feed his family, would spend every penny he had to buy me a real train if I had asked for one. "But, it will never run on a track," he said. He was wrong. In my dreams at night, it carried me with it to far off, wonderful places where I could have never gone without it. I can still smell the smoke coming from the engine as it climbed the mountains near my home. I can still hear the far away, haunting whistle echoing off the frozen stillness of a winter's night. I can still feel the rumble of the wheels beneath my feet as it sped toward some unknown place. "But he can't see the train," I remember hearing a childhood friend say. For many years, I remembered but did not really understand, my father's reply. "Oh, yes, he can." I write these pages in celebration of that unexplainable something my parents had that transcended the world of my blindness and set me free from a constant longing for physical sight. Although neither of them was lucky enough to graduate from high school, their love for me and their common sense approach to life gave me the ability to ‘see’ the beauty which is all around me. I also write these pages in appreciation of my sighted friends who have allowed me to see much of the world through their eyes. For years, they have described for me the things I cannot see. They have talked of giant skyscrapers, ocean waves, mountains, works of art, rivers, trees, animals, birds, ships, planes, clouds, and people. Although there are many things I can touch in a way that will give me a perception of their totality, other things remain literally outside my reach except as they are described by sighted friends. A cathedral spire is too large to be felt at one time, even if you were able to reach it from the ground. And an amoeba may have never been discovered in a world of totally blind inhabitants. For just as many years, I have been describing to my sighted friends the things their eyes have sometimes overlooked: the laughter heard in the footsteps of a child, the loneliness and pain apparent in the voice of a friend, or the special beauty that can be sensed when you close your eyes and touch a tree, a moss covered rock, or the delicate pedals of a newly opened blossom. It has been, I think, a fair trade. Their words have taken me to places I would have never gone without them, and mine have opened doors which they may not have thought to look behind. The thing is, you don’t have to be blind to ‘see’. You do, however, have to take the time to get close enough to discover the world behind your eyes.