[PHOTO/CAPTION: Peggy Elliott]

[PHOTO/CAPTION: Peggy Elliott]

Braille Monitor

November

2004

(back)

(next) (contents)

Paying the Bill

by

Peggy Elliott

Doug

and Peggy Elliott

From the Editor: The

following story first appeared in The Car, the Sled, and the Butch Wax,

the twenty-fourth in our Kernel Book series of paperbacks. It begins with President

Maurer's introduction:

Peggy Elliott lives

and works in Grinnell, Iowa. Her sprightly stories have appeared in many previous

Kernel Books. Here she looks back on an experience she had at the beginning

of adulthood. Her thoughtful reflection is tempered by years of experience as

a successful attorney and active leader in the National Federation of the Blind.

I've been blind for most

of my life, and I was blind when I earned my law degree and got my first job.

I joked back then that I wanted a job, an apartment, and a cat in that order,

and I followed the plan.

My very first apartment

was the top floor of a large old house with a living room, dining room, and

three bedrooms. It was roomy and had lots of windows for ventilation and for

the cat to use to observe the world. His favorite window was the one that overlooked

the sidewalk on which I returned home each night, and in the summer he would

sit in the open window and yell at me as I walked up to the house, demanding

that I hurry up and get inside.

Then

the first Iowa winter came on. As a blind apartment dweller, I had used a steel

file to mark little notches in the thermostat so I could control the heat. Thinking

ahead, I told myself. Or I told myself that until the first heating bill arrived.

I

panicked. It was huge! I couldn't pay that bill on my meager salary as an assistant

county attorney, especially since the next one would be as big. I called the

landlord and insisted that he check the thermostat. It was fine. I called the

power company and insisted that it double-check its reading and billing. It

confirmed the figures as correct. I settled down to pay and close off rooms

for the winter and add electric baseboard heating in the bedroom and learn all

the little tricks of saving on one's energy bill.

But

I always suspected that my encounter with the heat bill had something to do

with my being blind. I couldn't see the thermostat; I couldn't read the bills

myself; I didn't know things that sighted people did, so the huge bill was self-inflicted

because I was blind.

Readers

may think this is illogical, but I'm only telling you what I thought at the

time. I and many other blind people fall into the trap of attributing to blindness

all the ills of our lives, and, rationally examined, the attributions don't

hold up. That doesn't make them any less real to the blind person feeling inadequate

about something.

My

life moved on from the heating bill crisis. I've paid a lot of heat bills in

my years living in Iowa. I got married, and my husband and I bought some residential

rental property in our community as part of our investment strategy for the

future. We now pay heating bills for some renters, and we have bought four new

furnaces and fixed a lot more than that.

Last

year we rented a nice top floor apartment we own with lots of windows and a

living room, dining room, and several bedrooms to a nice young woman who is

sighted and who was moving out of her parents' home for the first time to take

a job as a teacher.

When

the first heating bills came out at the beginning of winter, we got a call from

the frantic tenant. She asked us to come and check the thermostat since she

had just gotten her first bill showing heating costs, and it was impossible

that the cost was that gigantic. I heard later that she had also called the

power company to ask them to do a re-reading on her bill because it had to be

erroneous. Both the thermostat and the power company's readings were accurate,

just as they had been in my case.

I

thought back to my own first apartment and to the feelings of inadequacy I had

experienced at the onset of my first heating bill. I remembered with a mixture

of amusement and sadness how much those feelings were based on my feeling inferior

to sighted persons because I am blind. I now know that the heating bill crisis

is merely a rite of passage for all first-time renters or owners in cold climes.

The sadness was for all my colleagues who are blind and who, like me, sometimes

attribute to blindness what are normal human reactions to growing up or learning

new skills or being the new person in a group of friends or work colleagues.

We

blind people, like everyone else, are challenged to learn new things and succeed

in trying circumstances and make friends in new settings. We, and sometimes

those around us as well, can perceive difficulties in achieving these goals

as stemming from our blindness when a sighted person in exactly the same situation

would have exactly the same problem.

Through

the National Federation of the Blind and my friendship with capable, competent

blind people, I have learned to put my blindness in perspective. I no longer

think that everything that goes wrong or is uncomfortable for me is automatically

related to my blindness. Some of it is, like the effort to find my first job

when I applied to fifty law firms and was turned down by all fifty. My friends

in the Federation encouraged me to keep trying, to believe in myself, to keep

applying. I did, and I found that first job and that first apartment.

My friends in the National

Federation of the Blind have taught me that it is my job to figure things out,

to take responsibility, to take charge of my life. I've tried to do that, since

it makes sense to me, and I have forged the tools--as have my sighted colleagues--to

find jobs, to pay those taxes, and to participate in my community's life. And,

by the way, I just paid another heating bill.

(back)

(next) (contents)