![]() And I reach back with both hands, and yeah, she dropped her teddy bear. And I thought, well I'm running, I'm pinballing around this parking lot with a baby on my back like a Geiger counter.Īnd then it occurs to me. So I said, "actually, let's go this way."Īnd she got really upset. So I said, "let's just go this way, punkin." And I started to run, and she got really upset. Or if I would just run into the bear, and that would be ironic. Now I didn't know if I should run, or if that would startle the bear to charge us. So I reached behind me, and I grabbed her hand, and she was pointing right behind us. Now I can feel she's upset and she's sort of leaning. And now Tess is watching one from the comfort of my back. The security guards just tell us which entrances and exits to avoid and they even just lock down the daycare and let the kids bust out the Goldfish crackers and watch the bears from the windows like some demented drive-in movie. And this is the mountains, and the bears love our dumpsters. She said "bear."Īnd I turned, 'cause I can still see some smears, so I looked for a big black one.Īnd I said, "There? Like we're going over there?"Īnd she's "bear, bear." And she's getting more upset, very clearly. And I say this just so you can understand my legitimate panic when from her backpack she said to me one of her few words. And she'd be in one of those NASCAR roll cage backpack things, which are great for blind fathers.Īnd we'd make our way across campus, and it's beautiful. And I work at a university, and we'd walk across campus together in the morning. There's times when I would walk her to the daycare in the morning. So the miscommunications piled up, and they were mostly just little heartbreaks, but sometimes they were dangerous. And so she just can't understand why I've hugged another child And I chase after the sound of her, and I'm sorry about the babies. And Tess is crying "Papa, Papa!" as if the word itself hurts, on the other side of the room. But she cried on the other side of the room.Īnd suddenly, I feel this body and it's not familiar. So her body slams into mine and she wraps herself in a monkey hug, and I tell her how much I've missed her. ![]() And nothing ruins our sweet moment like me stomping on babies. Because it's best that I wait, because the floor is dotted with babies between us. ![]() And she sees me, and I squat down and I open my arms, and I wait for the hug. And "Papa, Papa!" she screams as I walk in. And another part of me just felt really angry at NERF.Īnother time I picked up Tess at a daycare. And only then did I learn how I was rejecting my kid all day. Yeah, my wife did see this happen later on. So I'm just saying things like, "what's wrong, punkin?" And like, "hey, why don't you go get your ball or something?" She wants to know why didn't I kick it back to her? Why didn't I want to play with her? And she began to cry. You see my problem.Īnd it rolled by, yes, and I ignored it. One day I'm standing in the hallway of our house and Tess either kicked or rolled this foam soccer ball to me. So the miscommunications began to pile up between us. ![]() I'd say to her, "Papa sees what you see when you close your eyes, but mine are open." Which makes no sense. The trouble is, a two-year-old can't imagine what it's like to be another person, let alone imagine an entirely different physical reality like blindness. And I'm not saying I was excited to tell her, I'm saying I couldn't wait to tell her in a way that she could actually grasp the basic concept of blindness. I couldn't wait to tell my daughter that I'm a blind guy. We have a really nice show for you today.įrom WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. But the rest of the show consisted of these great stories from David Sedaris and David Rakoff, and Tig Notaro, and others. Some of the stuff on that show- in fact, a lot of the stuff on that show- was way too visual to put on the radio. As people on the radio, usually we are invisible, but today we are bringing you excerpts from the show that we did on stage in front of people last week in New York City, and then beamed into movie theaters all across the United States and Canada and Australia. I'm talking, in a very literal way, about me and the other people doing stories on today's radio program. And today on our radio show, we have all kinds of stories of people trying to take things that are normally invisible to them and make them visible. To state the obvious, sometimes it is just a lot easier to see things.
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