Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found by Rebecca Alexander, Sascha Alper Read Free Book Online Page B

that I could outrun my opponent and that I was in complete control of the ball. The goalie would see me coming and get ready, focus with all she had, but I knew I was going to get it in. Not necessarily because I was the best, but because I wanted it the most.
    I’d been playing soccer my whole life, and I knew I was good, despite my disabilities. What I hadn’t realized was that going from a small private school to a large high school would show me just how little the pond I’d been swimming in had been. So when I arrived for the first day of soccer tryouts in high school, I was confident, until I realized what “good” really meant. I suddenly became keenly aware of all of the things the other players could do that I couldn’t—juggle a soccer ball, see the entire field as they dribbled the ball down it, and play just as aggressively when theafternoon sun was replaced by the evening dusk and it became more difficult to follow the ball.
    Needless to say, I didn’t make the varsity soccer team. I knew I wasn’t as quick or skilled as the girls on the varsity team, but I still held out hope that somehow one of the coaches would see that, considering my visual limitations, I was a damn good player, and that that might make a difference. So I played junior varsity for my freshman and sophomore years of high school before I quit altogether. I was too embarrassed to be a junior in high school and still on the JV soccer team. Hadn’t those years given me enough time and practice to become worthy of playing on the varsity team? Why couldn’t I just try a little harder, be a little better, scan the field just a little faster? I was still giving it everything I had, but it wasn’t enough.
    Despite the fact that I was now excelling in school, I wanted to do more, be more, than I was right now, to find a way to fill the void that losing so much, and knowing I would lose so much more, had left in me. For the first time, too, I started to see beyond my own little world. Maybe I had a better understanding of the impermanence of things than many of my peers did. My world had changed so quickly—my eyes, the divorce, Polly, a new school away from my brothers—that I understood at a young age that there were many things that I wasn’t going to be able to control, that were out of everyone’s control. I couldn’t change what was wrong with me, but I started to think about something that my father had taught me, that sometimes the best way to help yourself is by helping others.
    As early as I can remember, my father instilled in us the importance of giving back to the community and to the world. There is a Hebrew word,
“
tzedakah,
” that translates as “righteousness” or “justice.” It is generally used synonymously with “charity,”but what it really means is a balancing of the scales—that charity is not an act of pity, or mercy, or even necessarily goodness, but of justice. You give back to make the world a better, fairer place—when you have an abundance, you share with those who have less. This was always an idea that resonated very strongly with me, though I have always had a much easier time giving help than accepting it.
    My father led by example. Not only was he a leader and activist in our community, but he would put everything on the line for something he believed in. In 1984, a man named Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death for the brutal murder of four members of a white family. Cooper had just escaped from a minimum-security prison where he had been serving time for a nonviolent crime. He was found and charged, though the evidence was scant and many believed the trial was a sham, and spent the next twenty years on death row. During those two decades, Cooper, who always maintained his innocence, became an accomplished painter, writer, and speaker, and gained a huge following of people, organizations, and celebrities who believed that he was innocent, and, as the day of his execution grew nearer, the