First I apologize for my inattentiveness to the blog these
past few months. Somehow it seems that days can be so ordinary that there’s not
anything happening worth writing about, or else I’ve been concentrating on
future books.
Friday night I watched “the Miracle Worker” for about the fiftieth
time. I don’t really get into the movie until the end, and yet I watch the
entire movie in order to participate fully in the passion of the emotional
discovery, when Helen Keller learns her first word, “water.” It’s so hard to
understand fully the joy that must have run through her emotions, yet she then
had to learn all her words in Braille and became an excellent speaker and
writer. With things like that going on in our world surely none of our days
should be “just” ordinary. There are so many more ways to teach deaf/blind
people now with all the knowledge and technology out there, yet how special it
is to watch them be able to communicate.
In the past few weeks I have been teaching blind people the
iPhone and/or iPad. I figured they’d just pick it up in a day or two and off
they’d go. How difficult it is to remember the hours I spent learning, earning,
learning, and still find myself asking more questions as new upgrades come
along. Yet one day a girl stood up and clapped her hands and laughed when she
realized that in her small hands she held an open door to do some things she
had never thought possible. Frankly I’m not a good teacher; you can’t teach one
of these devices in ten hours. I think it took me ten hours to figure out how
to get my iPhone on wifi back in 2008.
And then I think of that word “water.” How significant one
word can be. In my book “Changing Places” I wrote a segment about my first
drink of water from a fountain instead of our country pumps and wells. As that
water gurgled down the drain I knew that the things I was used to doing in the
country would be changed forever. My mind almost felt it in a tangible way just
as Helen Keller knew the tangible things that she touched had meaning in her mind.
No day is ordinary. Today I suffer with a horrid virus, a
very painful sty, and it hurts to cough. Next week I’ll be blogging again, but
right now I am going to bed once I hook up my iPhone and get my last bottle of
WATER.
