The Sliding Board

The Sliding Board

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THE SLIDING BOARD
by Marc Maurer

As readers of previous Kernel Books know, Marc Maurer is President of the
National Federation of the Blind. He spends much of his time helping other blind
people come to believe that blindness need not prevent them from working or
playing or achieving success. But how did he come to believe this himself? Partly
through his mother's good sense. Here is how he tells it:

Childhood is often regarded as a time
of cheerfulness and joy—and certainly I believe it should be like that.
However, I also believe that children have the same depth of emotional feeling
that adults possess. Not only love and joy but black despair and bitterness
can be the experiences of childhood—and towering anger. It happened to
me when I was six.

I was born blind, but I had a bit of
remaining vision. I did not know that I was blind until I was five years old.
Nobody ever told me. When I was standing on the front porch, I could see that
there was a tree in our yard out by the street. When I stood next to my father's
car, I could tell that it was red
with a white top.

On my fifth birthday I was given a beach
ball. It had a red section, a yellow section, a blue section, a green section,
and a white section. I stood in our front yard and looked at the beach ball
in the bright rays of the midday sun. That colorful ball is the most striking
example that I now recall of color. I was convinced that my vision was no different
from anybody else's.

However, I sometimes wondered why I couldn't
tell what people were talking about when they said something such as "See
that antique car over there?" I couldn't tell where the antique car was—but
I tried. I sometimes wondered why I was missing so much.

One day my brother said to a friend of
his that he wanted to go look at the truck that was parked at the corner of
our block. I was astonished. I went inside to tell my mother. "Did you
know," I said, "that Max can see way down to the corner?" She
didn't seem to think such talent was the least bit noteworthy. When I was six
my parents took me to the doctor for an eye operation. They were trying to improve
my sight. The operation failed. When I came home from the hospital I was totally
blind. I was devastated by the change.

For a week I didn't do a thing except
sleep, eat, and sit in the corner of the couch during all the rest of the day.
I took no action. I ate when I was told, and I went to bed when I was told.
The joy was gone. The day-to-day excitement about what to do and where to go
and how to live was no more. I sat and brooded.

Our family lived in a house in the state
of Iowa. It had a fine big living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a pantry
on the first floor along with a
big front porch where we could play outside even if it rained. It had three
bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The front yard was a good enough place to
be, but the back yard was the best. My parents had saved their money to buy
a swing set for us. They thought that I wouldn't be able to get to the park,
and they wanted our back yard to be fun.

There was also a great big picnic table
close to the swing set. My father had painted a checkerboard in the middle of
the top of the table. The squares on the checkerboard were almost four inches
across, and my father had painted them black and yellow. The checkers were bigger
than my hand, and they were painted red and blue.

My father thought that I would be able
to play checkers on the table because the board and the checkers were big enough
for me to see. However, I couldn't distinguish the detail well enough to play
the game, but he had worked so hard that I didn't want to tell him. I pretended
that I could play, but I was never really any good at the game on that checkerboard.

The swing set had a slide, two swings,
and a glider. I particularly liked the slide-especially when it had been rubbed
down with waxed paper. You could wax the slide by hand, but the easy way was
to sit on the paper and slide down. When the slide was waxed, it was fast. We
thought it was like lightning.

There was also an old garage on the back
end of our lot. It housed gardening tools, the lawn mower, the wheelbarrow,
and a whole lot of miscellaneous junk. It was a great place to play. The garage
belonged to my Dad. Sometimes he let us play in it if we were very careful and
didn't get it too messy. But after my operation I didn't go outside—not
even onto the front porch. I didn't care about the picnic table or the swing
set or the garage. I wanted to stay inside, and I wanted to be left alone. I
sat in the corner of the couch being gloomy, doing nothing.

After a week my mother had had enough.
She told me that I was going to go outside to play. I said I wasn't. But she
said I was, and she was bigger
than I was. She said, "You are going
outside to the swing set, and you are going to slidedown
the slide." I refused. My mother took me by the arm and pulled
me to my feet.

Although I resisted, she marched me out
the back door and across the back yard to the swing set. When we got to the
ladder that led to the slide, she said "Climb!" And I climbed. I slid
down the slide and turned around prepared to head back inside. But my mother
wasn't having any. She said, "Now do it again." I thought it wasn't
fair. She had said I was to slide down the slide, and I had done my part. Now
she wanted me to do it twice.

My brooding despair changed to boiling
anger. Once again I climbed the ladder and slid down the slide. But I thought
to myself, "I'll show you.
I won't go back in the house. I'll stay
out here, and maybe I'll run away."

My mother left me and headed for the
back door. I stayed in the back yard, and after a time I forgot both my despair
and my anger. I began to play with the things in the yard until I got hungry.
Then I thought that my mother was maybe not so bad after all. She made the best
grilled cheese sandwiches, and she was also good at cookies. I found my way
to the kitchen, and I was not disappointed.

All of this came to mind when I attended
a recent convention of the National Federation of the Blind. I was speaking
to a large gathering of parents of blind children. What are the problems that
these parents face? And what are their blind kids thinking and feeling? Whether
we are adults or children, we need to know that blindness will not prevent us
from working or playing or achieving success. I don't know how other children
react to becoming blind, but I remember vividly how I felt. I'm glad that my
mother made me get up and move. I am fortunate that my despondency lasted only
a week. We in the National Federation of the Blind are committed to helping
others recognize that blindness properly understood cannot prevent us from playing
checkers, swinging on a swing, playing in a yard, or having a good life.