On the Lighter Side

Quotes By or About Blind People

If you know of any memorable or inspirational quotes, please send an e-mail message to webmaster@viguide.com.

"A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life." -- Helen Keller

"Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy." -- Robert A. Heinlein

"The blind have one great advantage over the sighted: the blind see the world with their hearts, while the sighted take only enough time to see it with their eyes." -- author unknown

"Blindness is not nearly so terrible a handicap as are those paralyzing demons for which it serves as a metaphor: ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice." -- author unknown

"The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart." -- Helen Keller

Anecdotes Concerning Visual Impairments

Do you require assistance?

My two friends, on blind, one low vision, went with me to a Chinese restaurant. I knew my low vision friend could serve himself and my blind friend would have asked if she needed help. The waitress stared at me and I ignored her after she put down the plates of food. Without asking my friends what they wanted, she dumped spoonfuls of food onto each of their plates and gave me a penetrating icy look, turned abruptly and left! I must have a few demerits on my sighted friend license!

Last weekend I went to dinner with a friend. Both of us are blind (more or less). When the wait person put down my platter she said loudly, "hold on, I have a professional here to tell you where everything is." Another woman took her place at our table. "I can help you. Both my parents are blind. Your chicken is at 3:00, potatoes at 6:00 and cheese sticks at quarter to 10."

My friend said, dryly, "You know, they are using a different method these days. They use the digital clock face."

"Oh!", she said, "I didn't even know that. I'm so far behind."

Misunderstandings

My wife is a teacher of the hearing impaired and she gets the "do you know braille" (Duhhhh!) question time to time. When I get the "Oh you must have such patience" comment I usually respond "We prefer to call them students."

I'm a counselor at a school for the blind. In the same city are two well-known and respected schools for the deaf. The first thing people usually say to me is "do you know sign language?" My response: "Yes, but it doesn't help much."

A couple of years ago, my band was booked to play a dinner party in one of the suburban country clubs. The drummer went out in the afternoon to set up his drums and leave my P.A. equipment. I was scheduled to play the cocktail hour alone: the rest of the band would come for dinner and dancing. The young lady in charge of the party asked when the drummer would be back, and when would we set up the P.A. equipment. Jack told her that he would be back early. He mentioned that the piano player was visually impaired, and that he would be giving me a ride to the job. The young lady's response was, "Oh! He can't see? Well, can he play?

I was teaching a lesson to my class about chipmunks. I had just got to the part where the chipmunk starts climbing trees when my totally blind third grader started to giggle. I asked her what was so funny and she said, "Are chipmunks ANIMALS?" I asked her to explain and she said she thought they were very little people who ran around the bigger ones. When I asked her why she thought that she said, "I hear them sing every year at Christmas!"

A vision teacher friend of mine is Japanese. She had been teaching a certain student for over two years. One day he came to her and said, "My friends keep asking me who that oriental person is who keeps following me around. Do you know who they are talking about?"

During the seventies, one of the blind teacher's aides at the residential school wondered what all the fuss about Vietnam was about. After all, it was only gorillas that were getting killed.

Mobility lessons

I had an unexpected encounter the other day during a mobility lesson:

My student veered into a parking lot and came across a vehicle that was covered with bumper stickers about Jesus and from 12-step programs. As he was trying to reorient himself, the owner of the vehicle appeared and was quite overjoyed, apparently, that someone who is blind discovered his truck. He immediately pointed out, in broken English, the bumper stickers and proceeded to try to save my student. I thanked him and suggested to my student that we proceed with the lesson, hoping that this gentleman would leave. No such luck. He followed us out of the parking lot and down the street! To make matters worse my student, who happens to be bilingual, answered him in Spanish which only encouraged him to continue his pursuit in his native language. The very minimal Spanish I knew fled me in my frustration, so I finally turned to this man and said "Gracias, please leave us alone" with an angry look on my face. It worked. Phew! Next, I figured I'd best explain to my perplexed student what just happened. When I told him that some people believe that belief in Jesus can restore eyesight, my student says, "Ohhhhhh. Maybe that's why my last (classroom) aid used to tell me to go to church." Yikes!

Fortunately, my student is in touch with his vision loss and indicated that he doesn't think that church attendance will restore it. And fortunately he has a new aide who, according to my student, does not suggest church attendance. Still....

I have a story which occurred during an O&M lesson with a female high school student. She had a meeting which commenced right after our lesson, and wanted to know if she could get something to eat toward the end of our lesson. I thought this was a good idea since restaurant experiences cover some of our O&M objectives.

We went into this pizza/Italian restaurant, which has walk-up service and ordered. I ordered a pasta salad, which I received right away, and her order needed to be cooked, so they told her they would call her name.

We found a booth relatively close to the counter and were visiting and drinking our drinks, when two interesting men sat in the booth across us. They were looking at my student every so often, of course noticing she was blind.

When her name was called, my student very aptly and gracefully got up from the booth and walked to the counter where the cook gave her the food on a tray. She is very capable of carrying a tray and using her cane at the same time... she does it daily in a crowded high school cafeteria... so I left her on her own.

As my student approached our booth, one of the men in the opposing booth who appeared very agitated, jumped out of his seat and snatched the tray from her hands, almost dumping a steaming bowl of baked ziti in her abdomen, telling her "I'll take that, are you sitting with HIM??!!," placing the tray on the booth table, and glaring a hole through me, probably for not offering to help the "helpless blind person".

Of course, this all happened so fast that neither of us really had time to react either appropriately or inappropriately! Afterward, my student asked me why this guy did what he did without asking her first. She asked me if I thought she looked like she was having difficulty, which she didn't. I told her I guess it is just one of those things that you have to learn to "roll with the punches" on, just like people insisting you need help across the street, or when store workers approach us doing escalator lessons and suggest we take the elevator!

If the situation presents itself right, unlike this situation, I like to talk to my students about how to use it as a "teachable moment" to the public, many who are ignorant to the blind community, rather than get hostile about the occurrence, which leaves another bad impression of blind people as being angry, ungrateful, etc.

...Then there's the story of the beautiful female O&M instructor waiting on a corner for her client to finish a route. Another woman walks up to her and says "Honey, go find your own corner, this one's mine!" A puzzling statement initially, until she learned she was a prostitute...the second lady, that is.

Keene, New Hampshire, is in the record books as having the widest Main Street. We use generic walk signs with an audible signal. Since the signals are designed for normally wide streets, we usually get only halfway across the street when the signal changes, so we have to be on our toes. One day, I heard the walk signal, listened carefully for traffic and crossed the street. When I got to the other side, I realized that the signal I heard wasn't the walk signal, but a transformer on the telephone pole. Boy, am I glad I always listen for traffic when the signal goes off!

We sometimes take too much for granted. We took a group of our resource/self-contained students out to a local grocery store for some shopping experiences. One of my low vision students walked up to the entrance and straight into a glass door! He wasn't hurt but was REALLY annoyed. He turned around and asked us why on earth this particular grocery store had a door, when he knew that all the other grocery stores in town had "no doors". We thought about that for a minute (stunned) and then realized that most of the stores had automatic doors that opened long before he cleared the doorway. In his mind, he never connected the rubber mat underfoot in the doorway with the opening in the store. Needless to say, we corrected his misconception and used the experience to refine his cane skills!

I remember YEARS ago, goin' on an O&M session with one of my students and her instructor. My student was born without any sight at all, due to RLF (yeah, I know this dates me). I was impressed with how well she got around the neighborhood and how she crossed streets so independently. She would push the button on the streetlight pole and knew just when to go and when not to go. I was tryin' to look like a knowledgeable teacher and so I asked my student to describe a traffic light and how it works. She then proceeded to tell me and her O&M instructor that it was a big steel wall that came down and stopped the traffic. I was dumbfounded!!!! I asked why she thought that (the O&M person was open-mouthed-stunned) and she told me because a steel wall was all she could think that could hold back moving cars. After my shock wore off, I asked her how they made left turns???? She said there was an openin' for that!!!!

SHEEESH!! I had no idea that she would imagine such a thing and certainly her mobility instructor was surprised too. It was then that I began to wonder about what other misconceptions my students might have about everyday things that we with sight take for granted!!! It was a great learnin' experience for all of us.

Prosthetics

My husband and I are the parents of four sons. Our youngest is 8 years old and totally blind. He has had both eyes removed due to complications of ROP. He wears prosthetics and has even swallowed a few. We tell people we are praying for "hind sight" as we wait to retrieve the missing prosthetic.

Several years ago, when I did my student teaching at a school for the blind, there was a little boy in the third or fourth grade. He was congenitally blind as the result of ROP, (known to some of us as RLF.) Due to some medical complications, this kid had to have bilateral enucleation. A houseparent or teacher explained to him that, after the surgery, he would get "new eyes." However, this little fellow equated "new eyes" with vision. Another student, perhaps a little older and certainly much wiser, explained to him that, although his ocular prosthetics would feel much better, they wouldn't work either.

Sitting in ceramics class, I thought it would be just another ordinary day. I was very bored, and this being my first class for the day, I wasn't as alert as I should have been. For an activity we were required to do in this class, we had to blow up a balloon. I never thought my artificial eyes would cause excitement, but that day they did.

As I was blowing up the balloon, my eyes popped right out and on to the table. I simply sat there for a minute as people started freaking out. Most of them didn't know I had artificial eyes, and it stunned them to see someone's eyes pop out. I asked if someone could retrieve my eyes for me, but they looked so realistic that not a single person wanted to touch them. So I had one of the girls next to me guide my hand to where they were and I returned them to where they belonged, in my eye sockets. Needless to say, that was something I will never forget.

Low Vision

I once asked a store dummy for directions. That is one problem with low vision: you don't see the details!

I'm a parent with low vision. One day I made my kids some chicken salad sandwiches. We sat down to eat and my son took a bite and said "Mom, what kind of sandwiches are these?" I said "chicken salad." He said "No, they aren't. They're noodle sandwiches." The chicken salad and egg noodles were the same color and I was in a hurry and didn't double-check.

The first year we lived in our house, we had a terrible problem with ants. They were driving me crazy, especially since I didn't see them until they were 'in my face.' One morning I saw an ant on the counter and in my frustration, I took off my shoe and smashed it. My son asked me what I was doing. I said "I'm killing the ?^%* ants!" He said, "That's not an ant, it's a spot." I answered "Well, now it's a dead spot."

Eye pressing

One of our friends was taking a Master's course with a blind woman. Our friend asked the woman why she liked pressing her eyes even in adulthood. The woman answered, "Well, it's a little like sex, I guess!"

After repeating this conversation to our in-laws, my father-in-law turned to his blind grandson (eight months old, at the time) and said, "You'd better stop or you'll go blind!" (You all know what people used to say about that, right?) We died laughing.

Keeping a Sense of Humor

I have a student who on Halloween one year decided to be a pirate. On the
same day, he went on a field trip. Instead of wearing one patch on his eye as
most pirates do , he wore two and this totally freaked out many people as he
walked around the museum where his class went for the field trip.

This same child woke up one morning screaming at the top of his lungs. When his Mother
came tearing into his room, he declared, "Mom, Mom... I can't see!!!" A sense
of humor is most beneficial.

Jokes (Clean)

Passover

A Jewish man took his Passover lunch to eat outside in the park. He sat down on a bench and began eating. A little while later, a blind man came by and sat down next to him. Feeling neighborly, the Jewish man passed a sheet of matzo to the blind man. The blind man ran his fingers over the matzo for a few minutes, looked puzzled, and finally exclaimed, "Who wrote this shit?"

This blind guy walks into a store with his dog guide on a leash. All of a sudden he starts to swing the dog around by the leash over his head. The store manager comes over and says to him "What are you doing?" The blind guy replies "Oh, I'm just having a look around."

Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon (textual description of a newspaper cartoon):

Grimm is a goofy-looking caricature of a yellow dog drawn as a big circle with spindly legs, large elliptical dotted eyes, a red round nose that almost expunges a round snout that's two-thirds the diameter of his torso. There are seven panels. In the first he is accompanied by a goofy- looking clipped poodle with a red hair ribbon.

First panel --city street scene:
POODLE: "Look out for that CURB, GRIMM!"

Second panel --another city street scene:
POODLE: "Careful, there's an OPEN MANHOLE!"

Third panel
POODLE: "STOP, don't cross the street till the LIGHT CHANGES!"

Fourth panel
POODLE: "WATCH OUT, A BUS IS COMING!"

Fifth panel
POODLE: "DON'T SLIP ON THAT BANANA PEEL!"

Sixth panel --Grimm looks up at poodle standing on front porch
GRIMM: "Goodnight, Margaret."

Last panel --Grimm alone, mouth open, eyelids taut, walking in opposite direction
GRIMM: "Last time I date a SEEING EYE DOG!"

Stevie Wonder and Jack Nicklaus are in a bar. Nicklaus turns to Wonder and says, "How is the singing career going?"

Stevie Wonder says, "Not too bad, the latest album has gone into the top 10, so all in all I think it is pretty good. By the way how is the golf."

Nicklaus replies: "Not too bad, I am not winning as much as I used to but I'm still making a bit of money. I have some problems with my swing but I think I've got that right now."

"I always find that when my swing goes wrong I need to stop playing for a while and think about it, then the next time I play it seems to be all right," says Stevie.

"You play golf!?" asks Jack. Stevie says, "Yes, I have been playing for years."

"But I thought you were blind; how can you play golf if you are blind?" Jack asks.

" I get my caddie to stand in the middle of the fairway and he calls to me. I listen for the sound of his voice and play the ball towards him, then when I get to where the ball lands the caddie moves to the green or further down the fairway and again I play the ball towards his voice," explains Stevie.

"But how do you putt?" Nicklaus wondered.

"Well," says Stevie, "I get my caddie to lean down in front of the hole and call to me with his head on the ground and I just play the ball to the sound of his voice."

Nicklaus says, "What is your handicap?"

"Well, I play off scratch," Stevie assures Jack. Nicklaus is incredulous and says to Stevie, "We must play a game sometime."

Wonder replies, "Well, people don't take me seriously so I only play for money, and I never play for less than $100,000 a hole."

Nicklaus thinks it over and says, "OK, I'm up for that. When would you like to play?"

"I don't care - any night next week is OK with me."

I've been on so many blind dates, I should get a free dog! --Wendy Liebman (comedian)

Go to the top of this page

On the Lighter Side

Table of Contents

Quotes By or About Blind People

Anecdotes Concerning Visual Impairments

Do you require assistance?

Misunderstandings

Mobility lessons

Prosthetics

Low Vision

Eye pressing

Keeping a Sense of Humor

Jokes (Clean)

Passover