Dr. Paul Richardson. You gently reached inside my mind and heart and helped me understand how I would relate to people for the rest of my life. Your classes in Sociology gave me reason to ponder what I might do to help reduce tension between people with very different ideas about how they need things to be.

Time will tell how well I have done my job. Without your mentoring, however, I would have never made that choice.

So, Dr. Richardson, I will do my best to relate to others as I would hope they relate to me. Perhaps I'll just continue to remember the wisdom and friendship you shared with me. That will take me a long long way. I'm very glad I had the chance to tell you how much you had changed my life. Today, I only wish you knew how much that really was.

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Episode Notes

I was in college long before we had some of the technology we have today. My days were often long and filled with tasks that seem almost impossible to complete. It often took me much longer to finish what I needed to do than it took my sighted colleagues. Even now, I still use many of the skills and solutions I developed back then

Today's technology has taken away some of the trauma involved in finishing an important task. I wonder though, if it has also taken away some of the grit needed to do the harder things in life. What I do know, is that I was able to hone some of these skills in a very warm and welcoming place called Lynchburg College. It was a very happy place to spend four years of my life, and there is one more college episode to go after this one.

Enjoy.

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There aren't any show notes for this episode. You'll be like I was, totally unprepared for what comes.

But, change can still happen, even when things are hard.

Your comments are very welcome.

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How can one small 13-year-old be full of so much wisdom, compassion, curiosity, radiance, and love?

Her name was Jeanine. Her time on this earth was so very short, but she left it, and all who knew her, in a better place because she lived among us.

Because of our friendship, I am still, and always will be, a child at heart.

I miss her still.

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When I was growing up, the absence of today's technology made it necessary for me to be more dependent on other people for many things. That gave me an insight into dependence that I never expected to discover. In short, many of my friends and acquaintances had similar problems, and they were not blind.

Enjoy.

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When I enrolled in college, I was studying to be a minister. This is the story of that journey and how a very special gift of love gave me the freedom to think more open-mindedly about the very narrow path I was on. That gift also allowed me to respect the varied paths taken by others that caused them, and eventually me, to understand and accept the fact that we may not all end up in the same place, and yet...

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Here are some stories about my early college experience as the only blind student on campus. This was quite a jump from my life at the school for the blind. Given my fear of what I might find at a very good undergraduate college, was this a jump from the frying pan into the fire?

It's also a story of an everlasting friendship with the very first student I met when I arrived, as well as a story of a teacher who changed my college experience and my life forever.

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My parents knew that no school in our area could teach a child who was blind. They also knew they couldn't educate me themselves. So, they had to do the unthinkable. They had to send me away to school before I turned 5 years old.

For me, spending my first 4 years as an only child, and then suddenly being placed in a dorm with about 80 other students of all ages, was not a life I was expecting. Back then, I didn't know what coping skills were. I had a lot to learn. Fortunately, my parents had taught me how to do exactly that. The question was, could I do it?

The school didn't give me a great academic education. There were people there, however, who taught me much about who I was on the inside.

This episode touches on some of the failures and triumphs I experienced along the way.

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As a very young child, you can only know your own condition. If you can't see, you don't quickly grasp the fact that others have something you don't have. It's even harder if you have light perception, because then people tell you that you can see. But, can you? This is the complicated story about how my parents who knew nothing about blindness, and I, who knew nothing about sight struggled to finally understand and deal with the situation.

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In this story, my grandfather and I walk through my grandparents' apple orchard. In part, this is a sound painting of events that took place in the orchard each time I was there. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words. How many words does it take to describe a special sound, a special time, and the partly unwanted life-changing wisdom I learned among the apples? I kept being drawn back to that place. It wasn't just to hear the sounds. It was also to search for what I remembered and longed to change. I dedicate this episode to my grandfather: a man who was wise even beyond his many years. I wish you had known him. Perhaps when you finish this story, you will have some idea of the man who was my grandfather and also my friend.

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