Barney Google with those Goo goo googly eyes

When I was a child I wore thick bifocals and my classmates called me, "Goo-goo eyes", and, "Bug eyed monster". 

The Goo-goo eyes was in reference to the song about Barney Google with those Goo goo googly eyes. 

At night, in the quiet of my room I became Super Boy.  With my Super Boy super strength I saved the playfield from the feared Barnes Brothers, the neighborhood bullies.  I won the championship for our school baseball team with a mighty swat that sent the ball toward the Moon.  And as I began to notice that girls were different than boys, I was fawned over by Kay and Annette, the two most beautiful girls in all of John Hay Grade School. 

But in the grey light of morning, I entered the world of, "what is".  In this real world of what is I was still the odd kid, the shy boy, the last one to be picked for playground games and the one that the girls giggled at, not with. 

My world was an, "in between" world.  I saw well enough to "Pass" for a normally sighted kid, until it came down to stuff like seeing a flying baseball, reading lessons from the black board, and dropping things that were handed to me. 

My parents had no understanding about what I could or could not see.  Visually Impaired was not a term yet introduced into our language.  Either you could see and thus you were sighted, or you could not see and you were blind.  So I became known as the "clumsy stupid" kid. 

Would I, living in this never never land between blind and sighted, have used a white cane?  Not on your life.  No way.  Never.  Over my dead body. 

Never mind that the other children saw me as, "different".  And never mind that I knew how they felt and that I could seem to do nothing about it.  Even though the white travel cane was just becoming used by blind people, I knew that it meant that I was blind. 

And I was not.  Blind people begged on the street corners and looked like idiots.  I knew that.  I'd seen them.  So how did I deal with my world?  I became the class clown.  The buffoon.  And I got pretty good at it.  In fact I gathered a few other kids around me and we began writing and performing silly skits during assembly and after school in the lunch room. 

Like so many other kids living on the borderline, I found a way to survive.  But it is one reason that I stay active in the field of work with the blind.  No one should have to go it alone.  No one should have to cry nights because they are being rejected and don't have the tools to fight back. 

 

Curious Carl