I am a product support coordinator at Learning Ally, formerly Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Essentially, I teach people with visual impairments or learning disabilities and their parents and teachers how to operate all kinds of accessible technology which helps them to read their books. The aspects of the job which frustrate me are the repetition over the course of a day and the fact that there is not a lot of writing involved. My ideal job would involve word-smithing. The aspect of the job I love is the education when it happens. Usually, I’m the teacher, but sometimes I learn, too.
Some of the learning comes from members who are more technology-savvy than I am. These people do exist, though they are fewer and farther between than some of the other members think. (We deal with those who consider themselves experts but who just aren’t, and we have to gently burst their bubbles). But listening carefully opens us to the real experts, and from these people, I gratefully learn and apply the knowledge to other situations when I can.
Then there are those who impart the life lessons, and such was Dr. Robert Russell, who died on April Fools’ Day while I had flashes forward to the early elementary school years when my son will actually appreciate this holiday. I don’t remember when I met Dr. Russell, but I very quickly found out that there were a few things which set him apart. First, he wanted to order books so that he could both teach and learn from them. There are those who order books merely to talk to someone, and there are those who read for obligation. So to talk to someone who read for pleasure and who communicated that pleasure to others was rare indeed. Secondly, he was friendly without being perverted—in a department whose majority is female, a lot of commiseration occurs about “creepy” male callers. This combination of love of literature and kindness prompted me to do something I have never done with members, to talk about my life outside of work. Many members know I’m blind, but not many know my creative aspirations. I admitted them to the blind booklover, and for the next few years, as long as he remembered, he would always ask what I was reading and why I was still at my current job. As tempted as I was, I did not use the recession as an excuse; I just told him I was still looking. This has been mostly true, though for about a year or so between the MFA and the M.Ed., I actually floundered in nothingness. When I told his son, Richard, about how his father always encouraged me to move on to a new job after his death, Richard wrote back that I had a fine career already, helping his father.
I remember at one point, Dr. Russell told me an acquaintance was interested in turning his book into a play or a movie, and that was when I knew it was a book I must read.
To Catch an Angel was beautiful but heart wrenching. To read about this hero who, like Abraham Nemeth, strived so diligently to work among the sighted with almost no legislation to support him, was humbling. Yet I found that his admonitions to “get a new job” had a sadder side to them, which Richard’s reply made me recollect. After he had finished his doctorate, while he looked for a college job, Dr. Russell had to work in a sheltered workshop for a year. Of this he wrote: “After all these years-after Hamilton, Yale, two years of teaching, and Oxford-to have to go back into a shelter! Since I had left the Institute I had been in open competition with sighted people, and now, when it really mattered, when I had a wife to look after and a whole new life to build, I was being forced back inch by inch, day by day, into the world from which I thought I had broken free.
“Worst of all was being reminded of the shame-not the shame of defeat, but the deep and insidious shame of blindness. Being forced back into the workshop was to be reminded all over again of my inadequacy, all over again to clench my fists in impotent rage, to feel all over again the hot tears scald my cheeks. It was this shame I had yearned to escape from while I was at the Institute, and which the system of segregation so tragically reinforced. It was this of which my life during the last ten years had been so blessedly free-exorcised by friendship and love. To go into the workshop was to go back into the system with all it implied. But I had no choice.”
Moments like these in the book made me wonder whether Dr. Russell felt that a really meaningful job meant escaping helping the blind people I helped. He eventually did get two college jobs teaching literature to sighted students–he held the latter for over 35 years. This strikes me as particularly victorious, since he triumphed before legislation caught up with him. But for him, victory meant escaping working for the blind. And ideally, many of those who are blind should work among the sighted, contributing equally to the sighted world. I also remember that the digital technology we were using was often a struggle for him. When he called about books, always ordering them on the tech line rather than the main line, he was in his element. When he was operating the technology, he was gracious toward us but also seemed to feel a little ashamed. As I got to know him longer, I could feel his memory slipping. I didn’t let on, but with quiet foreboding, I felt the end coming. Perhaps, when he called us, he sometimes felt “blind.”
I wonder if every blind person has chafed, at some time or other, against the possibility of working within the blindness field. I certainly did. I only came to realize I belonged in it when my teaching favored those with disabilities, and my writing struggled to puzzle out what I felt blindness meant. I am fortunate that my first jobs have not been in sheltered workshops, where the final goal was putting pieces together. I work with real people, helping them to the best of my ability. So for me, blindness is not my reason for striving to move onward, however slowly. As I explained to Dr. Russell’s son in a reply, I want to escape the administrative and repetetive aspects of the job, though I know all jobs contain a certain amount of repetition and administration. As he completed that long year of piecework, Dr. Russell put in a regiment of reading to keep his mind agile, and this is what I have continued to do throughout my studies. And he eventually did find a career he truly loved. I thank Dr. Russell for giving me the key to flight from a job I like to, I hope, others I will love.
Catching Flight: a Tribute to Robert Russell
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