Staring and Waiting

Both writers and students may spend long minutes staring out windows waiting for inspiration. As a student, I probably did it more than most. I was either waiting for my brain to refresh itself or rummaging around in my short-term memory waiting for a recall mechanism to kick into gear. See here’s the thing. I started as a college freshman against several odds. I was fifty-six, so the first odd was a grandma’s brain.

The second odd–the lack of a high school education–meant that not only were textbooks written in a foreign language, or so it seemed, but, like, many of the words I heard, like, swirling around me, like, made no sense either, particularly, the misuse, like, of the word like.

The third odd was the legally blind status because of a genetic degenerative condition known as Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). I expected that to make reading a frustration, but I did not expect that people around me were not seeing where they were going either because years of experience had conditioned me to the fact that my white walking cane was noticed.

That did not happen. For some reason, not only did people seem to have problems with their eyesight but other body parts were off somehow too. In bright daylight, I can still see shapes and on that university campus I saw plenty of moving shapes that seemed human but their hands and arms seemed locked into strange angles; either one hand was glued to one side of the head or both hands were fastened together and attached at the waist. When my cane caused them to trip or got caught between their legs, they seemed as surprised as I was. And doubly embarrassed.

You will find only two categories on this blog:

“Amish Grandma Goes to College” recounts some of my experiences and feelings during my eight semesters at one of the largest universities in the eastern USA.

“Amish Pithiness” adds to the glut of words swirling around our universe and contains a few of my rantings about what it means to be living with an Amish brain in a technologically saturated, consumer-driven, individualistic society.