MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE WATER

 

 

 

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.