22
Old Friends Sat on the
Park Bench Like Bookends
As readers of the epilogue will learn, our End Blindness Prize has not been a stealth campaign. One of my many appearances brought the prize and my backstory to the attention of Susan Goldberg, editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, and at her urging, on March 18, 2016, Arthur and I reprised our 1962 subway odyssey for a lead-in to an issue devoted to blindness viewed globally.
Once again, we started out in Midtown Manhattan, but this time I knew Arthur was with me and the Geographic was photographing as we went. I didn’t bump into people and smash myself up. Nor did I have to grope my way hand over hand from the 116th Street station to the gates of Columbia. Still, when we made it back to the Columbia University campus and I went to sit down on a bench, my leg slammed into it—almost predictably. I soon realized that this was the same stone bench on which I’d sat in 1961 with classics professor Moses Hadas while he told me, without beating around the bush, that I was “finished,” that Columbia was over for me because of my blindness.
I had long remembered that pronouncement as a thunderclap of doom. What was now flashing through my mind as I sat in that same spot more than a half century later was something entirely opposite. With this reenactment, my life as a blind person had come full circle in an unimaginably beautiful way. Thoughts and memories just kept flooding my brain, pouring in from somewhere. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
What was it? Relief? That old sense of being fortunate beyond any reckoning, maybe even undeservedly so? Both, I’m sure, were a part of the moment. But really, at the heart of what overwhelmed me was something I have seldom allowed myself to feel: pride. Pride that a junk dealer’s son, a blind kid from Buffalo, had done all this. Pride of accomplishment. Pride that I’d managed the impossible despite Moses Hadas’s malevolent benediction—finished at Columbia and with my own class, won fellowships and advanced degrees at Harvard and Columbia, attended Oxford and Harvard Law School, been a White House Fellow, served on important boards, founded highly successful businesses, made much more than a good living for my wife and children, even helped launch a substantial prize that my wife and I believe will help end blindness forever.
Richard Axel, the 2004 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine and (appropriately) a long-time Columbia professor, would later say that in my story he recognized, “perhaps for the first time, a true triumph of the human spirit…. Sandy showed me that it is possible not only to endure, but to prevail.” I’m still deeply touched by those words, and by their echo of William Faulkner’s unforgettable Nobel Prize acceptance speech in the early, often terrifying days of the Cold War. Sitting on that stone bench after Arthur’s and my reprisal of what seems in memory almost a primal event, I had something of the same thought: Dammit, Sandy, you did do it! But the thing is, I had no idea how I had managed it—and still don’t.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the psychic aftermath of that reenacted subway ride has changed the architecture of the life in my mind. My old feeling that every day was a dawn-to-dusk marathon, of having to constantly prove myself to others (and myself most of all), was finally gone. The race was over; the jury, in. I’d won. It’s a strange thing to admit, but for the first time since becoming an adult, I felt fully human.
A famous prayer in the Jewish religion has taken on new meaning for me. It is the Shehecheyanu: “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this glorious moment.” For me, that glorious moment arrived as I sat on that stone bench on the Columbia campus, my journey finally over.
Just then, I heard the strangest thing: music coming from I knew not where. Not from Arthur, although he is apt to break out in song at any moment. Not from any external source that I could discern. And then I realized the music was coming from inside me—my own internal celebration in music and song of the life I’ve led, the challenges I’ve overcome, and the many friends who have helped me along the way; a symphonic and choral arrangement orchestrated by me and performed solely for the enjoyment of the luckiest man in the world.
23
My Big Party
While I’m on the subject of music, there’s a lot of it coming from the ballroom. Trumpets mostly—I’ve paid for them to go all night long. What with the bright lights, the musicians almost seem to be holding champagne flutes to their mouths.
This is a party, a really big party—my big party, spun entirely out of my imagination. But remember, for the blind, the imagined and the real are often a hair’s breadth apart. Even dead people get to attend. In fact, they are the ones who do the most dancing, along with me, on the wide parquet dance floor.
The smokers are smoking. The silverware is cool and comfortable to the touch, and all the drinks go down smoothly, disintegrating worry. You can eat the food—every kind you could want—and never get full, only satisfied. Clocks keep on going, but at this party we are making a big fool of time, and space, too.
Arthur and I take over playing and singing together for a time, he on the guitar, me on the drums but coming in occasionally on the trumpet—switching back and forth from the instrument Sarah and Carl had given me back in Buffalo to the one Sue gave me much later. Sue’s gift is magnificent, shiny and new, while the one from my Buffalo days is a bit dull, scratched
