The title to this essay is a phonetic one as spoken by Americans. Its real derivation comes from baseball. If a hitter gets two hits in his four or five at-bats, he will announce that he had a “twofer.” (If he was hitless in his times at bat, he would mournfully say, “I had an o-fer.”) I am quite aware that in proper English the phrase should be “two-for-four at-bats” or “zero-for-four at-bats.” But for all of the years that I have been involved in baseball, a two-hit game is called a twofer.
Now I have a twofer to offer you in this essay because it arrives at about the same time that my 88th birthday will occur. The second part of the twofer is that the birthday coincides with five years of blindness.
These are not things that all of my readers should celebrate because I surely do not. On the other hand, they are to be marked in my memory because of their longevity.
A twofer is a logical figure of speech because it refers to cases in which two items are given for the price of one. In a double-header baseball game, we are able to see two games for the price of one. Here in New York, there is a clothier named Joseph A. Banks who on many occasions will provide you with two suits for the price of one. I won’t attest to the value of Mr. Banks’s suits, but it does show that the twofer is an accepted practice in American marketing.
Let us take the longevity of age to start with. As it turns out, I have outlived my parents and all of my siblings in terms of the length of life. There are two or three of my friends who have exceeded me in that department. Howard Davis is now well into his 93rd year and Tom Scanlon recently celebrated his 90th birthday. I am not quite sure how long my own life will last, but I only spend a very small amount of time thinking about it. In the meantime, I salute Howard and Tom.
What I have learned about it is that life is not like an electric light switch that can be turned on and off. It lets you down in stages so that in the end you are lucky just to keep moving.
There is much to be said for the light switch comparison. It does not appear to be among the options granted to most of us. So I suppose that we will have to be content with the gradual let down in our performance ratings and try to make the best of it.
Now on to the blindness issue which has hung around for five years. Blindness in and of itself probably will not kill you. If you make a mistake when walking and fall down some steps and break your neck, it might then kill you but that is the result of the fall, not of blindness. I would not say that blindness has no painful features at all. The pain arrives from the inability to do things that other people can do which are impossible for a blind person to accomplish.
When my case of blindness arrived back in 2005, in a perverse way I tended to welcome it. This was not really a welcome to blindness but rather it was a welcome to the end of the tests and experiments that were taking place at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia and other institutions. Not only were the treatments painful to a degree, but for the Philadelphia part, there was a 90-mile trip each way to get them accomplished. So when the surgeon, Jay Katz, said that this was all they could do, I did not necessarily celebrate, but I was glad to be done with the extensive experiments to see what might happen to restore my sight.
Now five years later, a physician recently asked me about the blindness issue. I told him that in the beginning, I regarded it as a challenge to be overcome. Now, five years later, I regard it primarily as a pain in the ass. Ass pains will not necessarily kill you, but they make life a little less worth living.
One thing I can state unequivocally is that blindness is not something that I would ever wish on any other living creature, including bats.
When blindness occurred back in my 83rd year, my wife Judith announced that from this time on she was going to be my eyes. It turns out that she is not only going to be my eyes, but my right arm and everything else as well. Kaye McCormick, a wonderful chief operator in Chicago, had a long life but at the end Kaye said, “There is no reason left for me to stay here.” If I were alone, I would cheer heartily for the Kaye McCormick advice, “There is no reason left to stay here.” But in the instant case, I have primarily my wife, who protects me. Then there are my two daughters and two sons-in law and five grandchildren. And there are several treasured friends who make life worthwhile. All of them are a great source of joy to me.
So I have reason to hold off the Kaye McCormick advice for the time being. In the final analysis, I don’t fear death. What I do fear is the prolonged inactivity in a wheelchair or a bed that accompanies death. If I could turn off the light switch short of wheelchairs and bed confinement, it would seem like a good deal to me.
Well, there I have troubled you with my twofer. Again, I remind you that this is not an occasion for celebration. It is only an occasion for me to mark in my diminishing memory that 88 years have passed and so have five years of blindness. But even under those circumstances, there are songs to be sung and laughter to be enjoyed. And more than anything, there is my wife Judith to whom I owe everything.
So I think I will probably stick around for a while and hope for a rally in the 9th inning to pull the game out of the fire. I leave you with the thought that we should always stay strong as the advancing years take place.
E. E. CARR
July 14, 2010
Essay 472
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Kevin’s commentary:
Man, and here I thought I was in for an essay all about baseball. I know far too little about the sport. I suppose I also don’t know too much about what it’s like to be blind though, so I guess I learn either way.
So far as an update goes, three years have passed since this essay was recorded and I can confirm for all readers with relative certainty that being blind continues to be a pain in Pop’s ass. This is to alleviate any doubt that anyone may have about the matter. What is also true is that things continue to be worth celebrating, experiencing, and sticking around for.