My life as I slowly slip-slide into becoming a different kind of reader -- Garbo

At age 63, I've reached that place in life where I can't physically read unless I put on reading glasses. Not dollar-store cheapies either; I mean +6.0, a lens strength readers. They make the whole world swimmy when I look up from the printed page. 

This loss of the ability to read print has been a gentle smooth coast downhill, like if one's car tires are on ice and there's a slowly-dawning realization that the vehicle is very slowly slithering down a slope and the passenger door is going to nestle against the plastic trash can in a couple minutes. It's obvkious what's coming and there's time to prepare but one can't do anything about it. But because the event is so gradual, it's much less stressful than, say, having another smack into the rear bumper with a jolt. 

My vision's always been terrible: the world looks to me as though I am viewing it through a misted-over windshield. Forunately there is one "clean spot" in the center left of my visual field. If I turn my head right, I have a way to sort of see.

 When I was younger,  when reading I could hold a book close to my face (or my face close to a book) and see the text through the small "porthole." But not now; I assume it's because of the combination of middle-aged eyes and aging cranial nerves. The two have tag-teamed me, and now I always need help to read anything except giant headlines.  A jillion pairs of reading glasses float around the house, and there are magnifying glasses stashed in the kitchen, my basement workshop, and other  spots for Doing Things. 

The issue is not that I can no longer read; it's just a matter of reading differently. Yesterday, when thinking about writing this post, I started thinking of all the stages I've lived though with reading print. I decided that choosing books to represent each stage might be an easy way to organize my personal history into a short summary. 

I figured out how to read before I started school. Never again since that moment have I felt so powerful as in that magic moment when my brain gears turned perfectly and just like that I knew how reading worked. 

I was turning the pages of The Cat in the Hat and murmuring the words of the story to myself, remembering them from being read to, and suddenly, it all came together. I had the powah!!! I yelled "I can READ! I can READ! The letters are the sounds and they make the words and the words make the sentences!" 

I would love to report I was surrounded by celebrating family all dancing around the house over the joy of this accomplishment but my people were television-watching people, not reading people. Their indifference didn't dent my happiness much. I totally remember that long-ago joy and the thrill of knowing that now I had a skill no one could take and that I now had access to everything that had words on it.  

During this magical time, no one realized that I was nearly blind. Literally no one, including me. Because I'm smart and observant, I have noticed by this time that other people seem to have access to mysterious information I don't have, but I have not yet realized that others can see and I can't. 

Another childhood joy: being read to by my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Weidermeyer. When the class came in from afternoon recess, we were given the gift of read-loud time if we were quiet and would sit at our desks nicely. Mrs. Weidermeyer read us some of the Little House books and also a couple from the Boxcar Children series. 

Fourth grade is the year that the eye doctor has figured out that I can't see and while that the main issue -- which is neurological -- can't be fixed but that I am also nearsighted and I get glasses which let me see that trees have individual branches and leaves, like in the movies, and not just green blobs at the top as in children's drawings

A year or so after I've gotten my new glasses,  my grandparents have given me a big red book. This cool gift contains both of Rudyard King's Jungle Books and the collected stories including "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi."

 

I was in fifth or sixth grade when I went through my Kipling phase. I remember lying on the floor of my bedroom in the summertime and reading this red book because I was tired of dealing with other kids. It must have been one of those crummy days when I found others neither smart nor imaginative. Blah. 

By this young age, I have already learned the comfort of re-reading favorite books.  I would get to the end of the Jungle Books volume -- it must have been 600, 700 pages, something like that -- and then start again from the beginning.  My brain needed detail and order and plot, and the lack of surprises was comforting.  [Note: This is before Disney did its thing.]

When I was a child, I was happy that I could travel via book. I  I appreciated it so much. I don't know if you've ever been to Indiana, but in the 1960s the Hoosier State was nothing to look at. The state looked like a clump of factories some industrial coal-fire-belching god had banged down right in the middle of farmland, hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans. 

Farm commodity prices on the radio. People were all the same and they liked it that way. I was not like them, and they didn't like it that way. I needed to go somewhere if only in my mind. In Lassie Come-Home, I followed a determined dog's path for hundreds of miles through Great Britain, from the Scottish coast way northeast of Glasgow all the way down to Yorkshire in England. 

At this time, I was still able to read in bed. I'd lie on my side, head on pillow with open book in between,  my cheek against the the page I wasn't reading. I don't remember now what I did when I needed to move to the facing page. Turn over on my other side, move the book over, or. . .? Trying to picture myself and I can't. 

At some point I outgrew "Lassie" and I craved science fiction, stories of mad science, and comic books like "Tales from the Tomb." Episodes of "Twilight Zone" on TV had given me a taste for deeper explorations of weirdness, which were not any more available to me in 1960s Indianapolis than things like art, music that wasn't by Conway Twitty or Tammy Wynette, or world culture of any kind. I was lucky that Frank Edwards paperbacks were easily found at rummage sales.  All these unexplained events; I've never forgotten the already-historic incident where some guy just disappeared from his front lawn during a children's birthday party. He vanished, and people spread out and thumped the ground with poles, trying to find a hidden mouth of a cave or a soggy sinkhole. Nope, the dude was just gone. 

By this age -- I was twelve or thirteen -- I'd begun to notice that reading made me tired after just a few pages. Of course I was reading cheap paperbacks with blurry text sunk into pulpy paper discolored by natural acids over time. But still, reading seemed more difficult than it had been before. 

By the time I am in high school, I'm someone who's usually unwilling to read in front of my classmates. To read, I have to hold the book close to the little clear spot in front of my left eye and it looks weird. The other kids are often cruel. Ever been to Indiana? (Oh, I asked you that before, didn't I? Well, in the Hoosier State if a farm animal is born defective you shoot it before it can start eating grain  or fodder without giving you return on your investment. People disapproved of disabilities and you were made to feel grateful you'd been allowed to live even though you weren't going to be of any use. 

But there was one period in my young life where I would allow others to see me read with my book really close to my face. I must have been a sophomore or junior and we'd have something called Independent Reading which was study hall but with books.  There was no tormenting or bullying . You got kicked out instantly if you did anything but read. For once in my life, I felt sure no one would ask me how many fingers they were holding up, or ask me why I didn't get better glasses, or playfully smash my book into my glasses/face while inquiring whether or not I thought I had the book close enough. 

In Independent Reading, you had to sign out a book from a closet "library" inside the room and then take your selection and sit at your desk and read for an hour. I browsed through the battered paperbacks and then chose The Hobbit. I'd  never heard of J. R. R. Tolkien but I picked the book because the plot summary seemed to involve creepy underground doings in hidden caves or something like that. Remember, I was that kid who'd read all those Frank Edwards books. 

At the age of sixteen, I was old enough to have a work permit so I got a job in a fast-food place shoveling French fries into paper bags and I used the money to buy books at B. Dalton's at the shopping mall. At this difficult time in my world, there is a huge ongoing medical crisis within my household and everybody's falling apart. I'm parenting myself and my middle sister while my youngest sister is in and out of the hospital. 

Also, I am tall and skinny and nearsighted and I am being forced to play basketball at school for which I have the body but not the temperament. And to add to my stress level, I have a boyfriend but sometimes at night I dream I go on dates with girls and this worries me terribly. 

I have no idea whatsoever how to cope with any of this, so I have taken to watching every horror movie I can find on late night television. And when I go to B. Dalton with french-fry money, I buy books like The Pictorial History of Horror Movies.  It occurs to me now that movie books full of large pictures were also helpful in letting my young self avoid the fact that reading print was still making me feel fatigued after just a few minutes of reading. 

Since this blog post is about real life, of course things in my personal world just get worse and worse for a while. My high school classmates had gone off to college but my move to Bloomington, where Indiana University is, had been delayed. There have been lots of complications with everyone about everything. During my senior year in high school, I had left home and gone into the foster care system, and then I aged out at eighteen and got a job as an au pair. Eventually I moved back into my parents' home and then begun to feel panikcy and stuck. I wondered if I would have to stay there forever until the whole damn place fell in on us like the House of Usher. 

During this time, once again I've found solace in books. I  use my au pair money in conjunction with my excellent bartering skills and I trade in used books to buy other used books. This happens at a  somewhat gloomy and decidedly overfull hippie book-trading place off East Washington somewhere. To get there and bang, I ride a bicycle, helmetless, and I carry books in a shopping bag hung over the right-hand handlebar grip because I am young and an idiot. Miraculously I do not die, but instead gather a cool stockpile of interesting-looking books. For my holiday gift that year I request a glass-front bookcase  I receive a put-it-together model from Service Merchandise. The sliding glass panels tilt outward periodically and I remember the whole thing kind of going trapezoidal. But at the time I  liked it and I filled it with intellectual-looking stuff I'd gotten at the book trader. These book choices were to prove to myself that I would someday go to college. Conveniently, keeping those cheap gilt-stamped volumes in their faux-leather slipcases also kept me from dealing with the fact that it was a struggle to read. 

So I did, eventually, go off to college. But I only completed one semester because I'd had zero counseling or emotional support and all the events of the past five years were too much to process. I needed less stress. So I got various nonchallenging jobs and did those for seven or eight years. During that time, most of the books I bought were practical. I was doing low-wage work and my hobbies included repairing everything I owned since I couldn't pay anyone to fix stuff and I couldn't buy replacements. How-to manuals were something I only read a couple pages at a time, naturally, again allowing me not to think about the difficulty of reading print. 

 At the age of 27, I went back to college and enrolled in twelve hours of coursework, including Introduction to Philosophy. This class, of course,  involved quite a lot of reading. I ignored the problem for the first third of the syllabus. Then I couldn't ignore it any more.  During the week we were doing some essays by George Berkeley that I admitted to myself how hard I was struggling to get through just a three-page excerpt which we were reading during class, on which we'd later take a pop quiz. 

I was used to struggle, and I pushed myself to get through the reading and quiz. Then when I got home, I looked around inside my little house and noticed that there was an open book draped over every chair arm and sitting on a couple of the sofa cushions. 

It was a breakthrough moment. Sort of like being an alcoholic in denial and then seeing fourteen beer bottles on your kitchen counter, plus another dozen in the trash. I knew wsithout a doubt that I had been sitting down with a book at one spot or another, and that after reading two or three pages, I had to have been always thinking of something I suddenly had to do. I'd used these excuses to I walk away from the abandoned books because I couldn't read comfortably. And I hadn't been able to read comfortably for a long time. 

From that point, I sought some help on campus and I had assessments and then technological solutions first entered my life. This intervention was really important because in college I had decided to be a English Lit major and to do more than the minimum to get the B.A. I had signed up to write an honors thesis about Jane Austen's longest book.  Lotsa pages in Mansfield Park. 

I would never have been able to complete the honors thesis if I hadn't had access to 1980s low-vision technology: a CCTV system which pointed a camera down at the book. The material to be read sat on a sliding tray. The camera stayed still and I moved the book back and forth under the camera lens while reading the magnified text on a big screen. It took a little practice but I learned to do it.  The set-up was a bit like this one. 

The same assessment which helped me get the reading machine also got me connected up with the Talking Books program through my local library, which partnered with the Library of Congress. 

In the 1980s, the big Telex tape players were rechargeable and weighed a ton -- you could easily have knocked a burglar unconscious with one. The players could work with both regular audio tapes and the special Talking Book cassettes which were recorded on four sides. You listened to Sides 1 and 2, then flipped a switch and Side 1 became Side 3 and Side 2 became Side 4.  The tapes were labeled by the starting tracks and so sorting them back correctly into the shipping container involved counting Side 1, Side 5, Side 9, Side 13. . .Omnibus volumes, something like The Complete Sherlock Holmes, were sent in extra-large mailers, two or three at a time, each filled with many cassettes on double spindles. 

In those days, you either had the librarian choose from genres you liked -- romances, Westerns, mysteries, and so on -- or you chose from a paper catalog and were put on waiting lists for popular titles which meant you waited for months for some of the books. I filled in the gaps with newly-available Books on Tape, which became popular when cars switched from eight-track players to cassette players and people could listen to audiobooks while commuting. 

By this time in my life, I was settled down with a family and pretty busy with working and parenting. I did little physical reading except for the occasional self-help books and writing-research materials for a book set in Nebraska. Little did I know how the Digital Age would change my life. 

There are all these measures we use in this world of new tech, all about the doubling of computer power and storage and how quickly new platforms replace the previous ones. The arrival of the digital Talking Book player signaled the start of constant changes and upgrades to my reading life. At first, we users  still ordered books from the paper catalog, but the digital machines were much smaller and much lighter, had more features. A long book no longer required stacks of cassettes; instead, there was a flat cartridge with a USB jack built into the end, and this cartridge was a bit smaller than a single cassette. 

Then there was a Library of Congress website where we could download book files. No more waiting for months to read whatever sighted people were reading! We could pay $15 for a special blank cartridge and cable, and we could put three or four books onto one cartridge and move between them on a virtual bookshelf. 

I thought that blank cartridge was hot stuff in 2008 but holy cow, in 2020 I have a number of thumb drives which each hold dozens of  Talking Book files. I think nothing of putting 50+ books on a single flash drive. 

The Library of Congress book site (called BARD) has a tremendous catalog. It's  a far cry from the paucity of first offerings in the old days  -- the King James Bible, Reader's Digest, Max Brand and Barbara Cartland.  These days I'm often a little surprised when I look for a title and BARD doesn't have it. 

So here I am at 63, a reader through listening, carrying a lightweight player into which is plugged  a thumb drive filled with fifty or more books,  wherever I go in the house. Sure, it's a bit of a bummer that I just tried picking up a random book on my desk to see if I could make out the text with just the naked eye. Nope. But I don't need to do that. I have a pair of +6.0 reading specs sitting right here. I popped them onto my face and voila! when I picked up the random book again, I could READ! I could READ! Just like that joyous day when all the words in The Cat in the Hat organized themselves so nicely before my eyes. 

Garbo