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GLAUCOMA, CATARACTS AND FONDLING
My father, the original Ezra, developed a medical condition in his eyes called glaucoma during the early 1930’s when he was about 50 years of age. From everything that can be read and from advice from ophthalmologists, glaucoma typically makes its appearance around the age of 50 years. Five children of my father survived to…
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NO REGRETS
When a man, such as myself, reaches the seventh decade of life, his friends and relatives congratulate him warmly and ask about his state of health. They seem to really want to inquire how long do you think you may stick around. When the eighth decade turns over on the speedometer, the efforts of friends…
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A LETTER TO MY READERS AND FRIENDS
Last December when I wrote the essay “Sing No Sad Songs for This Old Geezer,” it was intended primarily to tell my friends about the onset of blindness. Your responses have been overwhelmingly generous and I am deeply touched. I am not that good and not that courageous. The situation now is very much like…
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A LETTER TO A FRIEND CONCERNING LIFE AFTER BLINDNESS
Word has reached these ears that you have expressed the view that life would not be worth living if blindness ever occurred to you. This letter is not meant to chastise or to criticize that point of view, because the author has had many of those same thoughts in recent years. I fully understand the…
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A MATTER OF DIGNITY
Those of us who have lost our sight frequently wrestle with the thought of our potential uselessness. It has always been so. In the Irish folksong, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye,” an Irish soldier who served with the British Army returns from a battle in Ceylon minus two limbs. The song’s lyrics say, “You haven’t…
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BLOODY NOOSE-I-NANCE
EEC dictation 11-17-05 1st DRAFT The subject of this essay today is blindness. No circumlocutions, no euphemisms, just plain blindness. The blindness, of course, has to do with your old essay writer. As time went on during the recent series of eye operations, it became apparent that aphasia began to make giant strides toward erasing…
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WHAT WAS THAT GUY’S NAME?
In a previous essay, I commented on the effects of aphasia, which is a stroke-induced ailment. As I mentioned in that essay, aphasia is a brain-related injury as opposed to a heart-related injury. People who have strokes often call for the cardiologist but in fact what they need is a neurologist. One of the characteristics…
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THE EFFECTS OF APHASIA
There are those in academia who claim that knowledge of Latin gives a student a major leg up when it comes to understanding other foreign tongues. I am a great dissenter from that viewpoint. Latin is of no value in deciphering some of the world’s major languages, such as English or German, or any of…
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REFLECTIONS AS LIVES DRAW TO A CLOSE
For two or three years, it has been my intention to write an essay on poetry. If there is a human who knows less about the mechanics of poetry, it would be my pleasure to meet that person. Knowing almost nothing about how a poem is constructed does not bar me from commenting on the…