Cockeyed
Page 22
The moment is as good as any to show how blindness is a verb, a blinding, which may be only that. My blindness is without a defined ending. I am a blinding man. Unfinished. Maybe perpetual.
At the time of my backyard goofing, in 1983, I could see a lot. I had healthy eyes, and to this day they leave a phantom sensation of what it was like to live inside a seeing body. I saw my father’s moustache poking out from under the camera, his tree-like forearms and chest. I recall the ease of my eyes gathering in the periphery, taking in the weight of my father’s body as he leaned back a bit on his left foot in his brown sandals and summer denim cutoffs. The deck below him was painted brown, as was our house’s wooden siding, white shutters framing each window, a barbecue under tarp beneath one of the windows. The light and colour flanked further down. Without moving my eyes, I could take in the edge of the lawn below the deck, and the oily, brown railroad ties that divided the thick green lawn from the concrete patio. Above it all my father stood and asked us to say cheese. One piece at a time, I try to rebuild the memory of what I once saw in a single flash of light.
Now, when I look at any picture from my past, a frightening exchange of time happens. What I saw in my life with good eyes, I can no longer remember without blinding it, cutting memories up into the confetti of my present condition. As the disease eats away at my retina, as it eats into the future, it is also eating its way back through my mind’s eye and all it saw, full and well, in the past. When I was ten, I saw my father with his camera. Now I remember him that day as if, back then, I was this man who is on the edge of total blindness.
I dream in tunnel vision, I think. I remember in tunnel vision, I think. The question remains, when my tunnel vision goes, as it will very soon, what will I remember seeing? How will I remember?
All I can do is write it down and keep writing. How else can I hold this picture, this life, or this face together? The view from here is of a boy with a softball, ready to let it go. His is an ironic gift from the past, as if the young me is aiming at the old, saying, “Here, buddy, let me help you with that.” I wanted to let the ball fly at my lens, whatever was left of it.
My hope is that one day soon I’ll puzzle over another ten-year-old boy. Or maybe it will be a girl. Tracy and I would be thrilled either way. Because I’m thinking about my father taking a picture of his son, let’s just say, for fun, that it’s a boy. I’ve got an image in mind, I think.
When the time is right, I’ll show him this photograph of me and my softball and let him find some of his young face in my own. In our family, only Tracy will play baseball with our son, and only Tracy will take the family photos. To him I will tell all the stories, of things I’ve seen and things I’ve never seen.
Then, one day, my son will ask me the inevitable question, “How long have you been blind?”
I’ll try to recall what I’ve seen in my life and try to remember exactly when the images stopped visiting me. I worry that I already know the answer, though.
“I’ve been blind,” I’ll have to say, “for as long as I can remember.”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following friends, family, readers, editors, writers, and strangers for helping me realize this book, and its blindness, as my own:
Lane Bergeson and the Utne Reader; George Bowering; Mark Cochrane; Wayde Compton; Brad Cran; Michael Davidson; Jennifer, Perry, and Jack Gray; Joanne Hoedemaker; John Hull; Bobby Ixnay; Gillian Jerome; Reg Johanson; Georgina Kleege; Erin Knighton, the Coma Girl; Mykol Knighton, who fixed my pants; Rory Knighton, missed; my parents, Miles and Kathie, who never, ever flinch; the tooth and cure of Jim Knipfel; Jason Le Heup; Ashok Mathur, for the test run at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design; Don McKellar, who read the first and unforgivably long draft; Stan Persky, for our metaphysical car pool; Paul Pigat, for the riffs between; Helen and Tony Rawa; Eden Robbins; Gary Ross and Saturday Night Magazine; the sentences of Oliver Sacks; the revelatory horror of Jose Saramago; Slickity Jim’s Chat and Chew, for the soup and space; Scott Smith; George Stanley; Anne Stone; Sharon Thesen and the Capilano Review; Will Trump, my first teacher in blindness; Michael Turner; Peter Van Garderen; Karina Vernon; Alana Wilcox and the folks at Coach House Books; my colleagues at Capilano College, who, for some reason, hired me when my fly was down; the generous and forgiving people at blind camp; and that guy at the pub who told me I needed to take responsibility for bumping into him. Consider it done.
I owe a unique debt, a large tab, to Brian Fawcett at Dooneyscafe.com, whose encouragement and curiosity coaxed this book, sentence by sentence, and who first edited me into an understanding of my blindness.
For her spirited advocacy of my writing, not just my story, I am extremely grateful to my agent, Denise Bukowski, and all the folks at The Bukowski Agency.
To my editors, Lisa Kaufman at PublicAffairs and Diane Turbide at Penguin, my awe and thanks for finding rabbits in my hat. My gratitude extends to all the people at both presses for putting their shoulders to this thing.
Much gratitude remains, and I give it all to Tracy Rawa, for her love, patience, friendship, strength, humour, and unrivalled bullshit detection.
PUBLICAFFAIRs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
I. F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless, and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential,best-selling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and was the longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B.Schnapper,who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983 Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
Copyright © 2006 by Ryan Knighton
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,
a member of the Perseus Books Group.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knighton, Ryan.
Cockeyed : a memoir / Ryan Knighton.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-586-48586-3
1. Knighton, Ryan—Health. 2. Retinitis pigmentosa—Patients—Biography. 3. Blind—Biography. I. Title.
RE661.R45K64 2006
362.197’7350092—dc22
[B]
2005058697