Girl With a Patch

If you are standing to the left side of me I probably will not notice your pretty face. Keep in mind that I do care, for I do not wish to ignore you, my dear reader. I do not wish to shun you. The fault is not mine; it is not my mother’s; it is not my father’s; it is not my father’s parents’, who died before I was born; it is not my mother’s legalistic parents’ on a farm in South Bend, Indiana. The fault is no one’s, in fact. Just a pure genetic coincidence, if you believe in coincidence and chance and the like. Just a sometimes noticeable, always laughable, never lived-without-it kind of handicap: my legally blind left eye.

My mother did have this physical fault, but I do not blame her. It would be like blaming her for my tiny mouth, which takes about three bites of a sandwich to equal any person’s one chomp. My sweet mother did what she could for my baby self. I went to an optical therapist, something you probably did not know existed. What I remember of the office lobby was like any unimportant and forgotten doctor’s office: impeccably clean yet un-matching furniture, corners cluttered with Highlights magazines, a seemingly ubiquitous toy with winding rods and imprisoned beads. In the examination room, the kind, fat lady asked me to tell her which was better, one or two. I swung my five-year-old legs, whacking her expensive equipment. And in return I was given a patch. A black, pirate-looking patch.

Cool. My mother and I wondered how making me the kid with the patch, the kid you did not make fun of because she is just too pitiful and suffers enough humiliation within the first five minutes of leaving her house, would help reverse my lazy eyeball. Of course, without the patch, if I looked you in the eyes, in your perfectly straight, forward-looking eyes, you would notice my left eye veering towards my nose. That’s humiliating enough. But the patch does not cover it up; it draws much more attention to it. Fortunately, the optical therapist did not insist on any public wearing of the patch. I was only meant to wear the thing over my right eye for a couple hours a day playing Legos in the privacy of my own home. Relief.

This, however, did not suffice. We kept at my patch-wearing Lego-play for about a year to no avail. My blind eye remained. I wore glasses for most of my life; so I was the kid with glasses, not at all a unique characteristic. But if I removed said glasses, my left eye would throw his hands in the air, give up, and become so lazy he just had to check out what my right eye was doing, which was diligently fulfilling his innate duties of seeing whatever my brain told him to see. At times my fellow conversationalist, out of honest sincerity, would look over his or her shoulder and ask to whom I was talking or at what was I looking. And of course there were the snickers. One year a jr. high boy circled my yearbook picture and wrote “Cross Eyed Girl.” How lovely of him. But the handful of rude remarks has not been the downside.

This handicap has actually rid me of any depth perception. Team sports were always out of the question. I was stuck with things like gymnastics, cheerleading, piano, and kickboxing. The one year I tried playing on a soccer team, I was so bad the team mom had to run alongside me in games to help me out. For future reference, do not try and toss me something most people can catch, things like keys, pens, or remote controls. I also had to take a separate and more complicated driving test to get my license, although I sometimes think I should not be allowed to drive at all based on previous minor but very annoying car accidents that I do not wish to discuss.

I am the girl with the blind eye. If anything happens to my good eye, I would be the girl with the cane and seeing-eye dog. I had fright a year ago when my right eye was infected and I was quite blind for three days. Although reading books is such a big part of my life, I do not think it would be the end of the world if I became blind; thank the Lord for Louis Braille. I just hope no one would ever try to pull a Wait Until Dark. Never mess with a blind Audrey Hepburn or Hannah Petrak.