I couldn’t help it. I was just a child who thought the crows were far more interesting than the Sunday school lesson. Moses was in his basket. Shit. I was only five and I thought: “good for him.” Later I’d see something of myself in Huck Finn and much later I’d admire a series of ruinous literary boys but not just then. The crows were fighting over something dead. How could the bullrushes compete? I wondered if Moses heard crows as he floated. This was one of my first lessons in art as I saw early there was no one I could ask.
**
Sometimes I think that if I’d been a sighted person I’d have avoided attending college, been like Orwell and gone off to Burma. But I couldn’t see and had no training in independence and with no idea about how to live or what to do I attended the University of New Hampshire in the Fall of 1973. I was too blind to pursue higher education without serious accommodations. My parents were certain that I’d just go on living my life of half successful “pretend sight” and really, in truth, they couldn’t care less what happened to me. Too blind to read more than an hour a day and heavily reliant on marijuana I stumbled around Durham, New Hampshire in a depressive fog. My dormitory was less than a mile from the church where I’d admired the crows just thirteen years prior. One cold morning I went there alone and sat under the crow tree.
**
The war in Viet Nam was raging. Even the largely square UNH students were against it. Some were innocent by which I mean they went streaking for 1973 was the heyday of throwing off clothing and running wildly across campus. I joked with a friend, said, “they’re doing this because the food is terrible.”
**
A boy across the hall from me called me “blindo” almost every day. I found out where he parked his car and pissed in his gas tank.
**
My year at the University of New Hampshire went poorly. I smoked pot daily and earned “C’s” in the few classes I bothered to attend. I couldn’t see shit. There were no reliable adults in my life.
I took to sitting under my church tree at least once a week.
**
The crows got to know me. I was convinced of this. Even when they were mobbing and spatting they knew me and some would take food from my hands. Some sat in the branches and talked. The thing is, I had no one to tell.
I understood my fierce loneliness as being other than a happenstance thing.
**
When you’re blind as I am you can still see tiny motes of light appearing and disappearing.
Planet of the Blind 