Disclaimer:
The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer.
Their experiences are mine to share.
Episode Two:
My name is Edward and I am legally blind. This means that I can see just well enough to get myself into trouble.
As I share my adventures with you I will be revisiting many points in my life, from toddlerhood to teetering old man. I will reveal all my smart bets, lucky guesses and near misses and through it all I hope to relay the message of self-confidence, self-control and self-reliance.
I will get to more college stories later on (there is one about riding Big Wheels down a ten story spiral parking garage ramp that is pretty wild), but today I will write about:
The Air Show
I wear glasses so thick that I should be able to see the future. The spectacles made me a target for bullies, but I could usually talk them out of picking on me by offering to let them try the massive things on and jump off a chair. (I hear it's quite the rush because it looks like one is jumping about nine feet down.)
With my glasses on, I have 20/200 vision. This means that I gather about one-tenth the information as someone with perfect vision would. Now, I know it sounds bad but you might be surprised at what one can accomplish without seeing the details.
Then again, it should come as no surprise that there is a lot of truth hidden in the details.
I remember one incident where that was definitely the case. It was 1989 and I was at a Presbyterian church that was converted every Saturday night into a teen night club. Bella was with me and I know we had been going out for at least six months by then because she had enacted a liberal touching policy.
She was wearing a red sweater and I was pleased to have such a bright target to zero in on whenever we were separated by the inevitable bathroom break or a game of Blackjack. (Oh yes, they had a full on Monte Carlo game room set up in the church each and every Saturday. Poker chips bought prizes for the kids at the end of the night.)
I spotted her curls in her banana clip and hugged her from behind.
(Is it just me? Or is Geordi La Forge 's visor ((From Star Trek Next Generation)) made from a banana clip?)
So there I was, hugging her from behind, and I must point out that it was a familiar although not lewd hug. I didn't grind my crotch up into her acid washed jeans or anything like that. (Although I may have detected some incidental under the boob contact on my arm as it wrapped around her belly.)
As you may have already guessed, the girl was not my Bella and I can only say that I was very lucky that she found the shock on my face humorous enough to forgive the confusion. In my defense, her color and style of hair, her short height and even her Keds were the same as my Bella's.
The important detail I missed that would have tipped me off was in what she was doing, and not what she was wearing. She was dancing with another guy.
He was cool too. Thank God!
Overall, memorizing one's wardrobe was a tool I relied on to get me through any situation, especially in the eighties. (Hell, the eighties were so flamboyant that it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that Boy George was gay at the time.)
I subconsciously catalogued dozens of peoples' wardrobes in order to recognize them quicker. Now if you are calling shenanigans on the fact that I am analyzing something that I just described as subconscious, I submit that the phenomenon became apparent every year after Christmas when everyone wore new outfits and I couldn't find anybody I knew for a week.
Come to think of it, the first day of school sucked too. People changing their hair, losing weight, buying hats…shit wasn't fair.
But it was my lot in life and I learned to adapt.
Pick up enough gray dog turds, and you become disinterested in starting a rock collection.
Try to get a drink out of enough tall silver public ash trays, and you suddenly aren't very thirsty when visiting the State Capitol building. (admittedly, smoking laws have made this observation moot, but nonetheless useful as an example for today's purposes.)
I still had not learned the art of detail hunting when I got a chance to watch the performers in an air show practice over the Pacific Ocean. The jets were lining up for their stunts several miles away.
My whole family was gathered at the big picture window in our living room, and because the planes were so far away, I was loaned my grandpa's huge binoculars to look through.
It was spectacular! I swear I could see one of the planes doing barrel rolls.
Except that I was looking the wrong way.
While my family was looking in one direction and enjoying the skillful aerial antics, I was looking in the opposite direction. It was several minutes before anyone noticed.
"What are you looking at?" My sister asked the question as she reached up and flicked the speck on the window that my lenses had trained on. "The planes are over here."
She grabbed the binocular strap and guided my gaze to a much livelier target for my interest.
I watched as three specks danced together, and when they dipped below the tree line near the house, my sister retrained my scopes to the emerging aviators.
I rather liked being in a plane as a kid. My family usually let me have the window seat but that always seemed like buying the deaf guy a boom box, so I usually gave it up to a more deserving sibling.
I liked the feeling of being inside the plane, the express elevator feeling, and the sheer speed of air travel. Plus, I always got to board first.
When I was able to make something out from the milk jug sized windows, it was the aqua jewels that peppered Southern California (swimming pools) or a blanket of billowy clouds that convinced me an engine failure would result in a soft landing.
I'm paranoid about engine failures. We are all flying around in forty-year old machines and I have three friends who have piece of crap cars half as old that can't get across town without shimmying harder than Shakira.
Some may think that my poor eyesight might make it easier to forget the potential danger, (Lord knows it works when I water-ski) but I am cursed with an active imagination coupled with an artist's attention to detail. Fortunately, I am also easily distracted.
Airplane bathrooms suck.
They have buttons with writing next to them but not enough room to bend down to read. They have a toilet that makes a noise like a hungry sea cave and they have more mirrored surfaces than the playboy mansion.
Mirrors confuse me. In that respect, I'm not much different from a parakeet.
I do use mirrors, but only to make sure that my hair isn't sticking up like a post rant Charlie Sheen and call it good. After that, mirrors are only good for making everything look twice as far away and I don't need that shit.
Bars and pubs have a lot of mirrors, and I have walked into my fair share, spilling my drink in the process. It sucks, but if I was lucky, the music was usually loud enough that no one heard the ruckus and only the people looking directly at me saw the buffoonery.
Also, if the music was loud, I couldn't hear said people laughing their asses off.
Mirrors behind the bar are okay. They pose no danger but they still make it hard for me to see where the bartender is.
I was at a bar in Boise that had a huge mirror. The bar itself was shaped like a horseshoe, with pool tables at one end and the juke box at the other.
I was shooting a game of nine ball with some buddies and listening to some god awful music one night when my eyesight got me into trouble once again. I am not great at pool, but better than most beginners, so my friends were happy to let me participate.
I'm not much of a drinker and a lightweight besides, so after my third Coors Light I went over to the juke box with a few quarters. I was finally going to put some good music into the room, a statement I made loudly as I dropped coins into the squatty machine.
I stood there pushing buttons and growing frustrated that I was harassed by such sludge in my ears. I was mocking the limp vocals and clumsy rhythm as I searched for more appropriate music by the likes of Jimmy Buffet and The Steve Miller Band, when I was tapped on the shoulder by someone. He introduced himself as one of the band members and pointed out the rest of his group onstage. They had been playing since before I had arrived at the bar and they had been listening to my booze fueled critique of their musical ability the entire time.
I responded with the appropriate amount of chagrin, but you just can't take back a statement like "It sounds like a cat being beaten with a sack of broken car stereos!"
Unfortunately, Bella wasn't with me and my other friends are not the type to come to my rescue when something like this happens. Instead, they opt to quietly take out their cell phones and start recording. That particular night, they filmed me being thrown out the back door of a bar by three guys and a girl drummer (totally sexy by the way).
They call that footage The Air Show.
NOTES:
Hello again and thank you for reading my second installment of Cockeyed Optimist.
The third installment has already been written and was released earlier this week as part of the Fandom For Sexual Assualt Awareness fundraiser. I will post it to this site sometime in August.
Much thanks to RandomCran and Ishouldnotbehere for their beta work.
For those of you reading Brutte Parole, there will be update on Saturday, July 8. Thank you for your continued patience and encouragement.
MOG