Since becoming blind, I have been very conscious of the need to be healthy and strong. As a result, I do a great deal of exercising, including aerobic training four days a week and strength training two days a week. In part, this regimen has to do with my insistence on looking sharp. But it all belongs to the determination not to be blind.
If you were to see me in the hallway of the Watergate, you would not know that I am blind. My eyes look fairly normal, in spite of a half-dozen surgeries over the course of sixty years. Seeing me when I am eating, of course, you would know, as my hand searches around for the water glass, the bread basket, and the napkin. If I were to walk fast, you would definitely know. But I walk slowly, for my own safety.
When Jerry Speyer gave the commencement speech at Columbia Business School in 2008, I realized that others had long been onto my game. He mentioned that I had “deftly adjusted” to my new life and then said, “Upon meeting someone for the first time, Sandy would extend his hand quickly, thereby avoiding having to search for the other person’s hand. He also wore a watch and glasses to make it easier for the rest of the world to bear the tragedy of his blindness.” Yes, sparing other people pain and embarrassment has been part of my game.
You would think after all this time that when I take a walk with my wife, and she holds my arm, I wouldn’t care what other people think. But I do, a little. I don’t like thinking that others are taking pity, imagining the burden of our lives. The insecure part of me worries about that. I’d prefer that a stranger think simply that here is a nice, handsome couple, in the way they would call a 1950s couple handsome.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have traveled alone many times, and it can be awkward. It is always interesting, shall I say, for me to try to use the bathroom on an airplane. The aisles are narrow; I bump into people, into their armrests. If the drink cart is in the aisle, flight attendants will sometimes get annoyed with me. Should I worry about turbulence? I don’t know because I can’t see other people’s faces. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
When we land, a flight attendant has to help me off the plane. Then someone has to meet me at the gate, which is nearly impossible these days. I have to coordinate the entire affair ahead of time, which involves paperwork to get my driver through security. If I’m by myself at the hotel, I have to get myself to my room, find my toiletries kit in my suitcase, find my shaving gear, and so forth.
One thing I have to do alone is use public men’s rooms. This involves its own set of delicate issues. In fact, going to the men’s room gives rise to the generalized apprehension constantly simmering just below my conscious thoughts.
I often have to ask a stranger if he would be so kind as to show me to the men’s room, or show me out. When the stranger is silent, I have to wonder if he’s unsure what precisely I am asking of him. If I’m in a restaurant, I may turn left to go slowly down the hall, as directed. Am I about to enter the men’s or the women’s? I will slow down even more and turn up my hearing to a high sensitivity, straining to hear molecules bouncing off a ceramic urinal. I move as slowly as the formation of planets from a gathering of dust. And yet I fail all the time.
People without sight have a special reverence for trust. I must trust people to lead me in places where I have never been. I must trust people to read written materials to me accurately and completely. I must trust accountants and business partners (and there have been betrayals in my life), as well as people who make change for me, especially with paper currency, and so on. Many are people I have encountered by chance, and so they surely cannot yet have earned my trust. It is all too frequently just not practical for me to wait around while someone earns my trust. Hence, that casual everyday term: blind trust. I am something of a Federal Reserve of trust, doling it out—sometimes reluctantly, often under pressure of circumstance—as if there is no end to it. Yet I admit my reliance on trust. The oft-repeated phrase of modern diplomacy “trust but verify” may sound wise at first blush, but it is actually an oxymoron. If you do the one, the other is negated.
Then there are the everyday pleasures of life, or what should be pleasures. Sue and I like to go to movies every so often. A blind person going to a movie might seem to be a silly thing, and yet it is not. Steven Spielberg once said that movies are about music and the story, both of which are accessible to me. An excursion to see a movie is one of the small adventures of a handicapped life, and it means a lot, but the excursions don’t always turn out as hoped.
I recall a particular movie Sue and I saw in a suburban Maryland theater. She drove. On the way, we talked about our children, of course—a normal thing for parents. Then we talked about what we had heard of the movie, the reviews and the word of mouth, and what other movies we had seen starring the actors in this movie. It was a big Holocaust movie, Schindler’s List, directed by none other than Steven Spielberg. He had provided me with valuable assistance at an important time in my life, putting me in touch with players in the movie industry.
Even though we got there early, the place was packed,
