Two-Edged Swords

Generosity can be a two-edged sword, but both sides can seem justified.

In ninth grade, I was new to blindness. The previous summer, during my one stint at a school for the blind, Oak Hill, I made friends with Al, who had lost his vision in early childhood. Returning to our respective regular schools, we’d compare notes about experiences no one else there could share. Here’s a short chapter that I just removed from the memoir I’m working on.

Al lived in neighboring Stamford. Mum or Dad drove me to his home or his mother or sister drove him to ours, where we stayed in my study, closed the door and played records. He introduced me to the harmonic psychedelia of the Rotary Connection and the deft musicianship of the Incredible String Band. We talked about what Oak Hill called “attitudes toward the blind.”

I told him about a student at school who had asked the people around him to lend him a dollar. I held out a dollar bill, but he refused, even though no one else offered.

“You’re not supposed to be handing out money,” Al said. “You’re supposed to be taking.”

One afternoon I left my tape recorder on the desk in front of the guidance counselors’ couch, where I routinely held court after lunch. My readers used the recorder to tape my assignments. When I returned, it was gone.

“This is troubling,” the guidance counselor said. By the next day it was apparent someone had, to use the Vietnam era’s ironic word, “liberated” it.

“I can’t believe anyone would steal something from a guy who can’t see,” a boy I thought of as the swaggering cowboy said.

During the lunch break, Margot, a girl with long swinging hair, approached me on the guidance counselors’ couch. “On behalf of the student council, I want to say how sorry and embarrassed we are that this could happen at our school. We’d like to take up a collection to replace your tape recorder.”

The habit of delayed reaction I’d cultivated during four months of hospitalization gave me time to think. No one else’s stolen property had become a fundraising cause. By consenting to my case becoming one, I’d acquiesce to being treated as special. On the other hand, if I refused, I’d be seen as denying the student council an opportunity to do a good deed. Even if I accepted but urged them to consider all theft equally important, they might take it as criticism.

So I said, “Thank you. That’s kind of you.”

“It’s the least we can do.”

Hovering in the background, the guidance counselor said, “Nicely done, Margot.”

After I related the story in my study, Al shrugged. “What can you do?”

“We wouldn’t be patronized at Oak Hill,” I said.

He chuckled. “No, we wouldn’t.”

On an unrelated note, I wish to observe the passing of Betty Waterall on January 20. Betty was one of this world’s billions of people whose life goes noticed by only a few, maybe several hundred, and yet whose influence spreads far and wide. During my childhood in England, she coaxed me through a time of turmoil. A few years later, when I returned to Sheffield from America for a term at university, she had me over every week for the family’s Sunday dinner, one of that memorable autumn’s highlights. Through the years, despite our difference in generations, we shared an open, warm and entertaining trans-Atlantic correspondence. When I last saw her in 2018, despite signs of deterioration, she was as cheerful and boisterous as ever. The world is a better place because of how she influenced those who loved her, beginning with her daughters. I’m tempted to say, Betty, don’t rest in peace, but stay as exuberant wherever you are now as you were on earth.