Old Dogs and New Tricks

Old Dogs and New Tricks

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OLD DOGS AND NEW TRICKS

by Kenneth Jernigan

Old dogs, we are told, can't learn new
tricks. Maybe - but dogs aren't human. What about humans? Can they learn new
tricks? Specifically, can a person who becomes blind in adult life learn to
function independently? And what about children? A blind child grows up in a
world designed for the sighted. If the child is to learn to get along, he or
she must find different techniques from those used by sighted associates and
friends.

Can it be done? Of course it can. It
happens every day. The question is not whether but how. Make it personal. What
about you? If you became blind tomorrow, could you manage? How would you handle
the hundreds of details of your daily life? When I was a child, I had a little
sight not much, but a little. If it wasn't too bright or too dark, I could see
step- ups. I couldn't see step-downs, but I could see the lines and shadows
of the step-ups. I could see the contrast between a sidewalk and grass, and
I could see the difference between the country road that ran by the farm where
I lived and the vegetation on either side of it. At night I could see the moon
if it was full, but not the stars.

It wasn't much, but it helped. I could
go into a room at night, for instance, and immediately tell whether the light
was on; and in the daytime I could tell whether there was a window, and where
it was. Under the right lighting conditions, I might be able to see an open
door, and I might be able to tell where a person or a tree was. It was sometimes
deceptive, which caused me bumps
and bruises, but I managed.

When I was in my early thirties, I lost
all sense of dark and light. It happened so gradually that I wasn't aware of
it until I thought back a few weeks and realized what I wasn't seeing. For all
intents and purposes I was totally blind from childhood, but shortly after I
became thirty, there was no doubt about it. I was and almost forty years later,
I still am.

With that background, let me talk about
techniques. How do blind people function? How do they manage the nuts and bolts
of daily life? More particularly, how do I do it? I can't give you a complete
catalogue, of course, but I can give you a sample.

Let's begin with whether a light is on
in a room. When I was a boy on the farm in Tennessee, it was a kerosene (or,
as we called it, a coal oil) lamp. Today in my home in Baltimore it is an electric
light. But the problem is the same. How do I
know whether the light is on?

In most situations there is a switch
on the wall, and if it is up, the light is on. If it is down, the light is off.
But there are three- and four-way switches, allowing a person to turn a light
on in one part of the house and turn it off in another.

I have just such an arrangement in the
house where I now live. You can turn the hall light on at the front door, at
the back of the hall, or on the upstairs landing. The ceiling is too high for
me to reach the light bulb to know whether it is giving out heat, so unless
I come up with some kind of non- visual technique, I won't be able to tell.
Yet, there are times when sighted people visit me and then leave without telling
me whether they have turned off the light. If my wife has gone to bed, I either
have to have some way to know whether the light is on, or else take a chance
on letting it burn all night.

The technique I use is really quite simple,
and it is quick and efficient. Several years ago a friend gave me a set of musical
teacups for Christmas. If you pick one of them up, it plays You Light Up My
Life. When you set it down, it stops. I was curious about this and, after experimenting,
found that when light hits the bottom of the cup, it starts the music. I think
the cups cost six or seven dollars apiece, and I have a half-dozen of them.
I also now have a perfect light detector. I have stored five of the cups in
the attic and have left one of them sitting on the kitchen counter. Now, if
I want to know whether a light is on anywhere in the house, all I have to do
is pick up my teacup and walk through the rooms. It's quick, and it works. There
are fancy light detectors that have been invented for the blind (detectors that
cost a good deal more than six dollars), but I don't need them. My teacup works
just fine. Before leaving the kitchen, let me deal with carrying liquid. If
the glass or cup isn't full, there isn't any trouble. It doesn't matter if the
container isn't exactly level. But if you want a full glass of water as a measure
for cooking rice or something else,
it does matter.

In such cases I used to have difficulty
in carrying the container level and keeping the water from spilling. But not
anymore. The technique I use is amazingly simple, and I think it will work for
anybody. I wish I had thought of it sooner. I pick up the glass in one hand
with my thumb on one side of it and my index finger across from it on the other
side of the glass. I am holding the glass at the top, outside of the rim. My
hand is above the glass, and I hold it loose enough for it to find its own level.
It works well, and I rarely spill a drop.
Try it.

There isn't any magic about these techniques.
It is simply a matter of thinking them up and doing a little experimenting.
I know a blind woman, for instance, who doesn't pour vanilla or other similar
liquids into a quarter teaspoon—or, for that matter, a teaspoon or a tablespoon.
She puts the liquid she is using into a small jar, bends the spoon handle until
the bowl of the spoon is parallel with the floor, and then dips the liquid.
It gives a perfect measure, and it's no trouble at all. Of course, if your measuring
spoons are plastic, it won't work. Get spoons that are metal. Then there is
the matter of cooking eggs. If you want them scrambled, there isn't any problem,
but what if you want them fried? The same woman who taught me about the measuring
spoons also taught me about egg frying.

Take a tuna can, or some other can about
that size, and cut both ends out of it. Get your frying pan to the temperature
you want; place the open-ended can or cans in the pan; and break the egg into
the can.

You can touch the top of the can to tell
where it is, and when you get ready to turn the egg, slide a spatula under the
bottom of the can, and pick the egg up. It will be perfectly formed, and you
can turn it without difficulty. I understand that blind persons are not the
only ones who sometimes have trouble turning the eggs they are frying. Some
sighted persons have the same difficulty. Egg templates are sold commercially,
I am told, using essentially the technique I have described—but why bother?
The tuna can works just fine, and there isn't any point in wasting money or
going to extra trouble.

Some commercial gadgets are really an
advantage in cooking. Earlier, I mentioned rice. Commercial rice-cookers solve
a lot of problems—at least, the one at my house does. My wife is sighted,
and I am blind, but we both use and like the rice-cooker. You put twice as much
water as rice into it, and you turn it on. You don't do anything else. When
the rice is done, the cooker knows and it turns itself off—no sticking,
no stirring, no wondering about how long to cook or when
to take it up.

That rice-cooker also knows other things,
and it has a mind of its own. Once I was cooking oatmeal, and the cooker turned
itself off before I thought the oatmeal was ready. I turned it back on, but
it dug in its heels. It turned itself right
off again. The cooker was right. The oatmeal was done.

As I think about it, I suppose the cooker
has a thermostat, which begins to show a rise in temperature when a given quantity
of the liquid has boiled away. At that stage it probably turns itself off, but
I really don't know. After all, I am not interested in the mechanics of rice-cookers.
I just want to get a good bowl of rice or oatmeal or whatever else it is I want
for breakfast or dinner. Sometimes the techniques I devise almost get me into
trouble. Last summer is a good example. I plan meetings and seminars and make
hotel arrangements for the National Federation of the Blind. The meeting I have
in mind was to be held in Chicago.

A lot of hotels have stopped using regular
metal keys and have gone to a plastic card with a magnetic strip on it. I can
see their point. The cards cost almost nothing while metal keys are expensive,
and if somebody carries a hotel key away or loses it, the hotel has to go to
the expense of changing the lock and replacing the key.

The combination on the magnetic lock,
however, can be changed from the hotel's front desk by a computer that is connected
to all of the rooms. It is inexpensive and efficient. But the card must be inserted
into the door lock in exactly the right way, the proper end and the proper side
being placed just so.

The card is shiny plastic, so how does
a blind person know which side of it to place up and which end to insert? One
way to do it, of course, would be by trial and error. After all, there are only
four ways it can go but sometimes even if you have the card right, it doesn't
work on the first try. So the whole thing can be a nuisance if you can't tell
which side of the card is which.

But in most cases you can. Ordinarily
the magnetic strip is slightly slicker than the rest of the card, and quite
easy to feel. Usually it goes on the bottom and toward the right. Even if you
couldn't tell by this method, any enterprising blind person would make a little
nick in the card or do something else just as simple.

When I was planning for last summer's
meeting, I met with the hotel staff to talk to them about the do's and don'ts.
Mostly I wanted to put them at ease and help them realize that they didn't need
to go to extra expense or trouble just because they were dealing with blind
people. In this context I told them about the hotel keys and showed them that
the magnetic strip was easy to identify by touch. I said that they didn't need
to spend any time or money making extra marks on the cards for those attending
the meeting. They said they understood, and we passed on to other things.

When the date of the meeting arrived
and I checked into the hotel, the man behind the desk handed me a magnetic key
and told me with great satisfaction that he had specially marked it with tape
so that I could tell which side of it was which. What was I to do? If I told
him that I didn't need the marking and showed him how easy it was to feel the
magnetic strip, he would likely be embarrassed and maybe even angry. If I didn't
tell him, the hotel would spend time and money on marking the keys and doing
similar things, and then probably feel that our meeting was less valuable than
others because of the extra trouble
and expense.

I handled it as gently as I could, talking
again to all of the hotel staff the next day and mentioning the matter in general
terms. In one form or another this is a problem that blind people face again
and again. It has no easy solution. Most people have great good will toward
us. They think that if they were blind, they wouldn't be able to do anything
at all, so they try to figure out ways to help us. The situation is complicated
by the fact that sometimes the help is needed, but very often it isn't. I don't
know of any way to deal sensibly with the matter except to try to get people
to approach us straight on and without a lot of emotion. If somebody wonders
whether we need help, ask us. If we say no, accept it. If we say yes, accept
that too.

As a further complication, what happens
if a blind person is rude or touchy when help is offered? Most of us aren't,
but unfortunately (just as with the sighted) a few of us are. Whether sighted
or blind, not everybody is an angel—or, for that matter even a responsible,
everyday citizen.

My answer is that we who are blind should
be treated the way you would treat anybody else. How would you deal with a sighted
person who behaved rudely toward you? Deal with the blind person the same way.
Hopefully, most of us (blind or sighted) will treat each other with consideration
and respect. The techniques to permit a blind person to function on a daily
basis are worth knowing. No, they are more than that. They are key to real independence
and comfortable daily living. But they are not the most important thing that
a blind person must learn. This brings me to the reason I have devoted so much
of my life to the work of the National Federation of the Blind. In my opinion
the National Federation of the Blind has done more than any other single thing
to make life better for blind people in this country in the twentieth century.

I first became acquainted with the National
Federation of the Blind in the late 1940's when both it and I were a great deal
younger than we now are. It and its brilliant president, Dr. Jacobus tenBroek,
helped me learn a whole new way of thought about what I was and what I could
be. Dr. tenBroek taught by example. His blindness did not keep him from earning
graduate degrees and being a respected college professor and Constitutional
scholar. The same was true of others I met. The National Federation of the Blind
meant then (as it means today) that it is respectable to be blind, that blindness
will not keep you from doing what you want to do or prevent you from being what
you want to be if you have reasonable training and opportunity and if you do
not think of yourself as a victim.

A core principle of the organization
is that we as blind people do not want or need custody or paternalistic care,
that we can and should do for ourselves, that we should not ask others for assistance
until we have done all we can to solve our own problems, and that we (not the
government) should have prime responsibility for our own welfare and support.
Does this mean that we do not want or need help from others? No—quite the
contrary. If we are to go the rest of the way to full participation and first-class
status in society, it is true that we must do for ourselves, but it is equally
true that we must have help and understanding from our sighted friends and the
larger public. Without it we will fail. Meanwhile, we will do what we can to
help ourselves. And despite the old proverb, we think that (whether we are old
or young) we can continue to learn.