Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson Read Free Book Online Page A

every possible doctor you could imagine to see what could be done.”
    Meanwhile, I gained weight and seemed normal in every other way.
    One day, however, Aunt Shirley noticed something unusual. She was babysitting me while my parents and my brother, Ellery, were on a trip to California. “The second morning I was there,” she said, “I changed your diaper and got you all fixed up. I made you some Pablum for breakfast, took you in my arms, and we sat down at the table. There were three large windows nearby with venetian blinds. The sun was coming in so bright I picked you up again and stood up to close the blinds. The sun shone on your face, right into your eyes, and you didn’t blink. The light didn’t bother you at all.”
    Aunt Shirley finished feeding me then put me in the crib. But she was horrified by what had happened. Could Michael be blind? She ran next door to tell my aunt Ruthie, and when my parents returned, she told them too. When I was six months old, the doctor finally made his diagnosis. I was blind, and it was irreversible. My parents announced the news to the family, and everyone cried. Briefly. Then they moved on.
    From the beginning I was treated no differently than my brother. I also had my cousins around to keep me humble. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sam had two boys, Steve and Robin. Uncle Abe and Aunt Shirley had two girls, Holly and Dava. The cousins all played together in the yard behind the apartment house, and I was allowed out with them, even when I was quite young. My parents trusted us, and we were allowed to explore the neighborhood without a grown-up in attendance. With Ellery and the cousins, I regularly headed to the candy store, where I always picked out penny pretzel sticks and orange soda pop. Sometimes I held on to someone’s hand in that absentminded way kids do. Other times I followed behind. Once in a while, I led. I couldn’t always find my way safely without help, but my cousins didn’t make a big deal about it, and neither did I.
    “I always knew you were blind,” said my cousin Dava Wayman, “but I never thought of you being any different. You were doing everything my other cousins did. You were treated like any other kid. Nothing held you back.”
    My big brother, Ellery, used to chase me around the apartment, not taking much pity on my youth or size. He remembers strategically placing my beloved pedal car in my path then chasing me until I ran into it.
    Once in a while I got to ride along on TV repair service calls with my dad, and I loved visiting the shop. One day I put my hand inside a live TV and got the shock of my life. My dad used the experience to give me my first lesson in basic electricity: never use both hands to touch a live circuit. Always keep one hand in your pocket so as not to become a ground for the current. After that, I was safe around open, running televisions.
    When my parents enrolled me in kindergarten at Perry School in 1954, they decided they wanted me to learn Braille so I could learn to read and write. Back then public schools didn’t offer specialized classes, but my parents, along with a group of other parents of prematurely born blind children, pushed hard for it, and the school ended up hiring a Braille teacher. I began to learn Braille, starting with the alphabet. I practiced writing on a Braille writer, a special device something like a manual typewriter that produces Braille characters on paper. I picked it up quickly, and by the end of the school year, I could read and write Braille at a good, basic level.
    After kindergarten, we packed up and moved to Palmdale, California, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles, out in the Antelope Valley. My parents had yearned to live in the Golden State, and my dad found an engineering job at Plant 42, a government facility later operated by Lockheed Martin.
    But at my new school in California, I was the only blind kid, and for several years I had no Braille teacher. I was at the mercy of my teachers