LEARNING TO SEE

Why do you come back to me now, Miss Julia O'Brien? Now, after all these years? You were the sightless one who helped populate the days of my childhood. Often when we poured out from the school gate, we village children would find you there where earlier there had been no trace of you. It was as if you had been dissolved from the land of shadows to emerge into our noisy, rowdy world, a ghostly presence though real enough to all who could see.

Miss O'Brien I was afraid of you. I was there with the other children, on the fringes of those who crowded about you. But you were the "blind teacher" and I was afraid. I was afraid because you seemed to live in a foreign place. Your appearing among us as we came from school spoke to me of mystery. I held my breath.

You "knew us by our voices", yes I know, but you can't have known much of me for I rarely spoke. And I knew so little about you, Miss O'Brien. I once called to your home up in Billywood with Rosary Tickets. I remember peering past your sister into the darkness of the house behind her and finding you there faded into the shadows.

Miss O'Brien, you taught my mother. She once told me a great secret about you. She told me that you were not a trained teacher but a monitor who, it seems, was someone who was so good at school that they were put in charge of other children and then simply got promoted; teachers by popular acclaim. Miss O'Brien, I never told anyone about this. But now I would like to tell you something about me.

It's not my eyesight: that's fine. I do wear glasses, but, as people say, I don't miss much. But Miss O'Brien, I am going deaf. I keep on referring to it as " hard of hearing" but it is getting worse. In the room next to this I have lots of musical recordings, but it is becoming harder and harder to hear them properly. I can't play any musical instruments but I love Beethoven, his late quartets and some of his piano sonatas and I dread the day when I will not hear them. That day is very near for already the sound is distorted as if someone was cooking breakfast in the background.

Miss O'Brien, how did you cope? Was it enough to know people by their voices, or were you just a brave soul, keeping up appearances? How did Ludwig van B cope? Perhaps it is not really about coping but something else entirely?

You loved the Church didn't you, Miss O'Brien, you and your Rosary Tickets. But Miss O'Brien I am even more afraid of the Church than I ever was of you. The Church can be a brutish place. The best of our leaders often seem more concerned with securing the triumph of the institution than the message we carry. Do you think it is blind or deaf? It claims, sometimes very loudly, that it has the best of all vision, the clearest of hearing, but Miss O'Brien I can't help asking, why, in that case, does it try to force peoples' minds into the straightjackets of history. You know as well anyone, Miss O'Brien, people do grow up.

Miss O'Brien, what's it like to be really blind, or really deaf for that matter? Why can't we all look and listen?