MEMORY LANE—SWEET DECEPTION

By Edwin Cooney

It’s that time of year for me once again. I’m writing this from Batavia, New York where I’m attending the ninety-first alumni reunion of the residential School for the Blind where I was a student from age four until I was twenty years old.

Just do the math and you’ll realize that it took me seventeen instead of thirteen seasons to go from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. You can see that struggle more than genius was my most constant companion. Even so, I look back on those years largely through rose-colored rather than through dark tinted glasses.

Strange as that metaphor may seem coming from someone growing up with blindness, the fact remains that true vision is a gift of the mind and spirit as much as it is the function of eyesight.

During the hours that are to come, I will join approximately fifty former NYSSB students to once again exchange memories of people and events we experienced when we were young. We’ll speak of teachers, houseparents, staff members and occasions long gone. Most of what we recall will be sweet, made still sweeter by memories of those people and occasions that perhaps weren’t so sweet at the time. Most of our memories will be accurate, although filtered by perception rather than authenticated through documentation. What we’ll recall about a teacher or a fellow student, especially one not present for whatever reason, will be tinged by who we are and what we perceive absent the force and personage of the individual being talked about.

We won’t call our reminiscences “history,” but that’s exactly what they are. Past struggles and crises differ from those we may currently be experiencing largely because we’ve survived them. This is true not only for the graduates of the New York State School for the Blind; it is equally true for “we, the people of the United States.”

Since last September’s financial crisis, Americans have feared, with good reason, the onset of an economic depression. Yet, if you have the chance to talk to many people who lived through the 1930s, there’s pride in their voices even as they recall deprivation and struggle — after all, they survived closed banks, ravished farms, low wages, lost jobs and home foreclosures. True, their pathway to prosperity may well have been World War II, but to hear them talk of those times, you often get the impression that they’d do it all over again if they really had to.

Hence, like boys and girls who passed through the crucible of blindness some forty to sixty plus years ago, Americans feel sure that they made it largely because of experiences and principles well-established which only need to be applied once again to insure safe passage through the crises that will come.

Therein lies the sweet deception of wonderful weekends such as the one I’m experiencing. Many of my fellow alumni are under the illusion that the world for today’s children who live with blindness would be best served if our alma mater could be what it once was. Unfortunately, our world is gone. Parents of blind children today want to educate their children at or near home. Granted that local schools aren’t always up to the task of giving children with blindness what they might need, today’s accessible technology can and often does make up the difference.

Likewise, America’s memory of its glorious past can be quite deceiving. The truth is we didn’t make it through the depression applying lessons already learned. New challenges are invariably different enough from crises gone by to require different strategies. However, in anticipation of possible hard times ahead, we first look to past strategies before realizing what tomorrow demands.

Thus this sweetly deceptive weekend. For approximately seventy-two hours, almost everything those of us who are attending this reunion think, feel or hope for stems from our youth. For about three days, in our minds if not in our hearts, we possess the energy and idealism of yesteryear.

If only we could bottle that energy and idealism, problem solving would be so much easier. Ah! But there’s the catch. Even with all our energy, idealism and determination, we can’t be sure that we will be able to master today’s crises—after all, unlike yesterday’s challenges, we have yet to survive them.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY