Beautiful Struggle

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Blind people take taxicabs all the time so in 10 years of being a hack I have met many blind people. But there was something special about the blind lady I met a few nights ago. She is from the hood is 48 years old and lost her vision from glaucoma at 40. I liked the way she talked. She still had the street tough swagger dialect of the inner city, epithets, curse words, slang and all. But she was able to articulate the difficulties of how hard it is to deal with being blind in a way I have never heard a blind person put it before. All I could think throughout the whole fare was “beautiful struggle.”

She is very frustrated and sad and 8 years into being blind is having trouble coping with her new disability. To hear her talk would give you the impression that she just lost her vision yesterday and is still panicking. Because when she’s down and thinks of past better days when she had a good job, boyfriend and life by the tail it seems like she still panics over not being able to see.

For some reason we got along very well and she opened up with allot of tears and some laughter. “You don’t know what it’s like to go into a store to shop and not know where anything is. It’s so frustrating having to depend on others to do everything for you. It’s so lonely. I had a man and this blindness messed it up. How am I supposed to meet the perfect man of my dreams with this blindness?”

She’s in town to visit her mother who has terminal cancer. Her mother sent her to a blind school in Colorado a few months ago. With the exception of her mother, her family in St Louis has been little help as they don’t know how to deal with or care for a blind adult. They still remember the independent lady with full eye sight who could always be counted on to help others.

So her family deals with her disability the way some people in the hood only know how to deal with anything. ‘Hate and bad energy first. What’s in it for me and how do I get her out of the way once I got what I want?’ She claims they only want her around for her disability checks or food stamps. She recovered from a broken jaw when her niece punched her in the mouth last year over a fight about a disability check. The kids make fun of her. She isn’t doing too well in blind school. It seems like the cards are stacked against her with no end in sight.

But there is hope. She has a new family in Colorado at the blind school. Even though she can do much better, she loves the school and explained how they taught her how to cook and take care of an apartment. They teach her to be more aware of how much stronger her senses of smell, feel and hearing are. She learned self defense. They taught her how to smell fear. She said “when someone who wants to harm you comes near, I can smell the danger.” It made my day to hear her say “I feel safe in your cab because I have Jesus and I have you. Thank you for letting me talk about this with you. You are right we are all unique and we need to appreciate that.”

She might miss her mother’s upcoming funeral but she knows that her mom wants her in Colorado. “Once my mom dies I’m turning my back on St Louis and never returning. There’s nothing here for me. I’m going to find me a white man in Colorado and it’s where I’ll live.”

I told her she should document the things she has told me as she has a waiting audience. She would be a great public speaker. We parted ways and all I could think was “WOW, what a fare……..” There aren’t too many taxi fares that put me on cloud 9 but that one did.