Eyes and Balls
2016 02 06
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A friend and I, talking about our respective sports loves - she's football and I'm baseball, ascribed it to the fact that you love what you grow up being used to seeing. That's true, in a lot of ways. She grew up watching football with her father, going to Tiger Cats games and the like; and I grew up watching baseball with my grandfather, and classic Dodgers/Yankees grudge match world series. I don't watch baseball much anymore - I don't have cable (nor even a TV), watching the games online can be flakey at best, and the strikes kind of did a number on me years ago that I never quite got past. I've only ever been to one major league game, where the Red Sox beat the pants off the Blue Jays 14 - 1. I swear, as a visually impaired woman I'm sure I could have played outfield better that day than the guy who was doing it.
Here's the thing ... I can still watch games if I want, but unless I watch them on TV it goes right by me. That's the one beauty, though, of watching baseball on TV - they always make it very clear where the ball is at any given time. With hockey, football, and basketball, to my eyes it's merely bunches of men going back and forth across various colours of surface. I can't see the detail. It's all lost on me. It just sort of hit me yesterday, when I thought maybe I should watch some of the online Coal Bowl games (it's a basketball tournament in Cape Breton that, as it happens, some of my cousin's children are playing in), even though I've never had a love of basketball, just to see what's going on - to keep in touch with what my family is doing and all that. But, there we are, all the detail of what's going on would be lost on me, so it's more groups of men running back and forth across a surface.
I used to think all the time about what I was missing in life, but not really in a participatory way. It was more of a can't-drive-a-car, can't-be-a-doctor, can't-operate-machinery sort of thinking. Today, though, I think about all the things I've missed because I can't see the detail. No animals-in-the-forest-watching, no people-watching, no shared sports experiences, no eye contact games with men. People have accused me of being rude because I don't look around when I hear someone who shouts after me without using my name, nor do I look at honking cars. No point. I can't see the people in the car, and unless you're within a couple of feet of me, I won't see you standing across the road shouting at me. Rather, I might see you, I just won't know it's you.
So, I spent a lot of my life not bothering with certain things, because there was no point in learning them - there was no point in learning the details of a sport I could never actually enjoy - either as a participant or a spectator. I never learned the details of most sports for that reason. I never bothered flirting with people for the same reason. At times, not being able to participate has been incredibly frustrating. It hasn't stopped me from having adventures and enjoying my life - but a lot of my pursuits are solitary, individual, and late-blooming.
Oddly, one of the things I enjoy most - making art - is only augmented by bad vision, rather than being hampered by it. Do I live the life of a photo-realist? Hell no; but I wouldn't want to. I'm a surrealist, an abstractionist, I like art made from accidents, and bad vision only helps. I prefer abstract art to representational art. I never much got into landscapes, unless it looked like a Dali-esque nightmare. I don't care for portraits either. I get more feeling out of abstract works - from colours, shapes, patterns - maybe because that's sometimes all I see of the world. It was great when I was taking a lot of photographs, because I did what I called abstract photography sometimes. It was never about taking pictures of Things, it was about taking pictures of their shapes and the way they fitted in to what was around them.
My life is a piece of melon on a buffet fruit tray. One time I took a couple of cubes off a tray because I thought they were cheese, because from my eye-level looking down at a buffet table is just a sea of colours. My friend Diane spent a week in Cuba walking behind me at the resort's buffet line whispering in my ear about what was on the dishes in front of me. It's why I like buffets that label the food trays - at eye level. Makes life a little less gastronomically surprising.
I've missed out on a lot, which I suppose was my point - and it was sad, and sometimes still is; but I haven't missed out on everything, and that's good.
Incidentally, I hate melons - but I ate the cubes just the same, because I was too embarrassed not to.