I think I began to grasp the concept of gratitude when I was seventeen.
The summer of 1989, before my senior year in high school, I was dumped by The Boy Friend of my young life who was going to become my husband and the father of my future children. I was sure of it.
“Honey, why don't you eat something?” my good intentioned mom would ask. I tried.
“Stop moping,” my dad ordered. I tried.
In all, it took the better part of three hundred and sixty-five days, and perhaps several more, to get over Him. The guy whose kisses and love notes and white truck had parked in my thoughts and rested there. Maybe too long. In retrospect, most definitely.
Still, I tried to forget Him. I went to school and did my homework dutifully with puffy eyes and a crushed heart and Depeche Mode songs looping through my mind. And I showed up at my part-time job, my self-esteem ticking, just barely, like an almost broken clock.
I worked as a shelver at a local library for the Blind and Handicapped. Albert was one of the volunteers. He was blind and probably close to my grandpa's age. He had a scuffed up white cane with a red sticker wrapped around the bottom. He wore a funny plaid cap, the kind that old men wear, and a tan jacket when it was cold. His guide dog, Hester, never left his side.
Every week or so, I helped him sort the paper bills in his wallet. I would fold different corners of each denomination, telling him their worth. He would feel each bill, the edges and creases, and then carefully tuck them away. In turn, he helped me open the kelly green plastic cassette boxes, the ones the patrons listened to and returned. These tapes were their lifeline to Louis L'Amour, Pearl S. Buck, The Bible, the world.
Feeling his way across the Braille lettering with deft fingers, he'd place the tapes into a black, industrial looking rewind machine. When they were rewound, he'd refill the boxes, snap them shut, and stack them. Then I would sort them, load them onto a cart, and shelve them according to their alphanumeric labels.
For two years we did this mindless work, side by side, talking when he or I was in the mood. Sometimes the only sound between us was the whir of the rewind machine, Hester yawning, or the tinkling bell at the front door, signaling another patron arriving.
We always knew when Albert was wandering around the library because he would smack things with his cane to the right and left as he went, apologizing loudly to bookshelves and walls, bathroom doors and the occasional chair. It always made me smile.
Without his dark glasses, his eyes scared me. They were opaque, unseeing, odd. And yet, I wondered about his lightless life and it's myriad details: his breakfast, his clothes {usually mostly clean} and how he lived without crossword puzzles and video games and sunsets.
Year around we shared bowls of popcorn, a popular office snack. I told him about my growing up years and big Mormon family and college plans to become a Librarian. We listened to bird calls from cassette tapes I pulled from the stacks, and he would quiz me from time to time.
Seasons came and went. We celebrated holidays together in the office, passing around white rectangular boxes of See's Chocolates. And one year, Christmas 1989, Albert gave me a gift: a hand painted ceramic mug. On one side was a deep blue flower, my favorite color. On the other side he had written my name and the year in gold cursive. It was beautiful. I should have asked him how he painted it; I never did.
He took the city bus to and from the library, an Olympian feat of courage I could never comprehend. At the end of each work day, I walked him and Hester down the gray sidewalk to the bus stop at Maryland Parkway, his shuffling steps next to mine. My steps were just as uncertain as his, but somehow I was ridiculously blessed with vision.
Then, one late August day before I left for college, Albert asked to feel my face. I was tentative, unsure of myself and so many things, and for a heart beat, especially this. But some bold part of me, who had rested dormant for most of my youth, stepped forward, then, and said, “Yes.”
Hester lay curled up at our feet under the long brown table, while he reached out to me, at first touching air. Then he touched my forehead, cheekbones, nose and chin. I tried not to squirm or grimace or flinch. His hands continued, his thick fingers running over my eyebrows, lips, and temples, expertly, not missing an inch.
It didn't last very long but felt like forever. When he was done he nodded as if in affirmation. As if a question he'd been holding onto for two years was just answered. Smiling, he turned to me, sightless, and said, “Yes, that's what I thought. You are beautiful.”
Me? A boyfriendless girl who didn't go to her Senior Prom?
Me, who drove a bright yellow Toyota Tercel with homemade seat covers and no air conditioning?
Me, who didn't know who I was or who I could become? At the time, I didn't know, I couldn't see it. But Albert saw.
It was then, at age seventeen, that I began turning gratitude over in my mind, handling it blindly at first, delicately, learning a little of it. And then, in brief glimpses and flashes, I finally began to recognize it and see it, feel it.
Only now, almost thirty-eight years old, do I see gratitude blooming all around me. Sometimes I can't see it at all, but I know it's there if I take life in my hands and look. Then, what has been cloudy becomes clear. And I become grateful for all the steps that have been light, as well as heavy and uncertain, and every blind step in between.
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Note to the reader: This is my entry for Scribbit's November 2009 Write Away Contest.
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How has gratitude changed your vision in life?
"Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."
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