From: rodhugen
Date: Fri Mar  5 09:52:15 MST 2004
Subject: The 'Buh' Sound

THE 'BUH' SOUND Rodney J. Hugen I was in first grade and it was a sin to look at the light. It was warm outside the window so I stared I was blind then and I can hardly see now, it is still the expectant eyes that kill me and the assuming faces who all seem to be in on the joke. "What letter is it?" the Miss Kimic blob once asked as she made the ‘buh' sound and I was busy guessing ‘eight'. I remember Central Park had blurry green trees until the day my brain blew up and all the data was too clear. It didn't feel like mystery, just a monster ripping through my brain, while the doctor smiled as though he thought he had done me a favor. The prescription for the optician said 20/450 which has no benefits since you are not really blind and only means you stumble some and never see the right cross coming so you learn to dodge at shadows and duck your head at unflung punches. Just in case, I bob and weave at imaginary peripheries where the illumination hurts my eyes and makes me go blinder so I hide in the dusky drab where it seems safer and the B becomes either an eight or an E so you go with E because everybody knows that is the big letter on the chart. I don't know what part of me slipped down the birth canal two months early but I suspect it was my left eye and my right brain and that piece of my mind that deciphers fog so I am stuck with a white cane and a help dog named Brutus and I keep staring out the window at the multicolored trees I can't get my eyes around Truth is light, but I live in the blur of the almost blind where you get neither sympathy nor insight and are left to beg for grace.

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