I grew up on a steep divide but it wasn’t geographical. Instead it was a ridge or chain of mountains both inside and outside me. I didn’t wish to be blind. I wanted to play baseball. And perhaps, more significantly, I wanted to be a scientist. Neither baseball or physics would happen for me. I became a poet. Compared to physics I think poetry is easy. All you have to do is step barefoot on a worm like Theodore Roethke and you’ve got a poem. Poems fall out of cupboards like a box of starch loaded with spiders.
Now I’ve said two things you’re not supposed to say. Poems are easy and I’d rather be sighted and a physicist. What did the physicist say when he found two isotopes of helium? “HeHe!”
Someone will say there are blind baseball players and blind scientists. This is true. But not when I was a child. Back then the disabled were reviled. And it’s hardly news that evil-doers in films are often deformed and disabled characters. The Bond franchise alone is flooded with crippled meanies: Dr. No’s hand, Blofeld in his power wheelchair, etc.Frankly I’ve always wanted to be an evil disabled chemist. I want to turn wine back into water at Mar a Lago or put truth serum in Preparation H.
That’s Preparation HeHe for those who’ve been following…
Planet of the Blind 