Prepping for College and for Life

brailleBy Bill Fullerton

This fictionalized memoir is based on the author’s personal experience. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent.

Back when he’d been a kid, Mark Cahill’s mother often took him along when she and her sister went shopping. One of the familiar sights on these trips was an old, legless, blind man peddling pencils at a downtown street corner. That the man was blind hadn’t impressed Mark nearly as much as had the small, wheeled cart he used to get around.

Still, except for a few old folks with failing eyesight, the man with the cart was the only blind person Mark had known prior to his being blinded in Vietnam. That lack of experience meant he faced the loss of sight with no preconceived opinions about being blind. It wasn’t until two years later, in the spring of ’71, when he reported to a blind rehab center for something called a college prep course, that he began to understand what it meant to be blind. The techniques and tools he learned were interesting, but what surprised him most was the wide variety of people in training. Continue reading

The Barefoot Boy

barefoot1A cautionary tale…

By Bill Fullerton

Over on a web site for the blind I often infest, someone said the first day of May, in addition to being May Day and Beltane, had also been something called ‘Barefoot Day’. To this I felt compelled to reply as follows, sort of:

As for that info about May 1st also being ‘Barefoot Day’, well, let’s just say I’ve been there, done that, stepped in sticker beds, into piles of chicken shit (being three at the time I reportedly called it “chicky doo-doo”), and onto sweet gum balls (like small mace heads) plus the occasional bit of hot paving tar, broken glass shards, the odd rusty can or nail, not to mention a sharp, pointed rock or two hiding in some weeds.

That’s why, having somehow managed to reach the prime of my mid-dotage, except for my bed and bath, I always wear shoes.

Of course, I’m sure none of the cultured, sophisticated Select Stories readers ever had any similar childhood/hippie/absent-minded barefooting experiences, right?

Now here’s what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story,” about a close encounter of the worst kind between my bare foot and a pile of chicken manure. Continue reading