I was sitting at a table outside Macy’s when the elderly Japanese woman bumped into my table. She was carrying a Starbucks coffee cup in one hand and her cane in the other. Having worked for many years in the disability services office at UH Mānoa, I felt comfortable asking her if she needed some kind of assistance.
“Can you please find me an empty seat,” she said.
There were no unoccupied tables, so I asked her if she had any objections to sitting with me, the chair opposite mine being empty.
She did not, so I helped her into the seat.
I drink my coffee in this area because I find it a good place to write. I like the noise of the shopping center because it’s a kind of white noise. The buzz of the crowd helps me to concentrate.
The moment I sat the woman down, however, I realized that my writing for the day was done, at least for the time she would be sitting with me.
After thanking me and collapsing her telescoping cane, the woman introduced herself as Sally Morikami. “And you are?” she asked.
“Lanning Lee. It’s like Planning without the P,” I said.
“Oh, that’s a very unusual name. How did you get it.”
I explained how it was the name of a character in a series of novels by Upton Sinclair. My mother loved them, I told her, and had won the name battle with my dad. He’d wanted Jeffery.
“It’s a beautiful name,” she said, “and that Planning without the P makes it so easy to remember.”
“Yes,” I said and thanked her. I’d heard it all before. My name can eat up quite a bit of conversation time.
“So what brings you to Ala Moana today?” Sally asked.
At this point, I closed my laptop. “I always come here to write,” I said.
“Oh, so you’re a writer?” she asked, as if I’d not said that.
I explained how, now that I was retired, I did what I’d wanted to do for most of my adult life, which was to write full-time.”
“And what do you write?”
“Poetry and fiction,” I said, “and I’ve written two memoirs as well.”
“That’s terrific, Lanning. I wish I could write. Being blind, you know, I have lots of stories I could tell about my disability and how I interact with the world and how it, well, interacts with me.”
“I believe it,” I said. “My boss at my last job was blind. She had so many stories. Almost all of them were funny, too. That surprised me.”
The old woman sat silent for a moment. Then, “Maybe for her, it’s a bit like having been in combat,” she said. “It’s like my father. He fought in World War Two, saw so much violence and death, but the only stories he would tell would be the funny ones. He didn’t want to talk about all the terrible things he’d experienced.”
I’d never thought about it that way. What she said made me cringe a little. The idea that my old boss had experienced terrible things because of her blindness had sort of never entered my mind. Suddenly I felt very guilty about that.
“Has it been like that for you?” I asked.
She smiled, then took a sip of her coffee. “Well, I’ve had my dark moments.”
I was curious, but how much should you pry into things so personal? I decided to say nothing.
She smiled again. “I suppose you’re wondering what kinds of experiences I’ve had, right?”
I nodded, then realized she’d not be able to see me do that. “Well, ah, yes.”
Thinking about my boss, I wondered if she had any of the same kinds of experiences. I said, “Are you willing to share one with me.”
She sipped her coffee. “How dark a story would you like to hear?”
This gave me pause. How dark a story might she have to tell? I opened up my laptop again. “Well, I guess I’d like to hear anything you’re willing to share.”
This time she laughed out loud. “Oh, yes, the writer. Are you ready to take notes?”
I laughed too, typing in my password to bring my laptop out of sleep mode.
“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m always looking for a good story.”
“Okay,” Sally said. “How about this one? Let me ask you, was your boss blind from birth?”
“No. She has retinitis pigmentosa. She gradually went blind as a child.”
“Ah, yes, then she has residual memories,” Sally said. “I do, too. They’re both a blessing and a curse. You are happy sometimes because you can picture something well enough, and at other times this saddens you because you know you can no longer enjoy seeing what you once saw.”
I asked, “So you were sighted?”
“Yes, I lost my vision as a child as well. Just before I turned twelve. It was sudden, though.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Was it an accident?”
Sally took a long sip of her coffee. “Yes and no. Some might see it that way. Others not.”
“I see,” I said. “That’s interesting. Do you see it as an accident?”
“Well, maybe.” She was silent for a long moment. “Oh, I guess I’m not telling you a story about being blind though.”
“That’s okay, Sally. If you want to tell me about what happened, please do.”
She laughed. “Okay, Lanning the writer, you asked for it,”
Wow. My fingers were itching to get typing.
“You’re retired, so you must be old enough to remember wrestling here in Hawai‘i, right?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I used to go watch it at Civic Auditorium and then at HIC. I even went to the TV studio on Saturdays a couple of times. I was a huge fan.”
“Me too,” said Sally. “I loved the good guys, and I loved hating the bad guys. I didn’t like it when the good guys switched sides, though, like when Nick Bockwinkel became a bad guy. I didn’t like that.”
“I remember that well,” I said. “I was kind of bummed out by that, too. He was one of my heroes.”
Sally said, “And it was terrible when Gentleman Jim Hady fell on his back from the loge seats to the floor below at HIC. I always wondered if that played a part in the heart attack he had after his tag team match at Schofield Barracks.”
“Yes,” I said, remembering watching that fall on TV. Hady had seemed to recover, but he was hospitalized later. Then he’d died after that match at Schofield. “That was a real tragedy. I don’t think folks realize that even though wrestling is fake, it’s physical stuff. They’re terrific athletes, but it’s easy to get hurt. I’m amazed that more wrestlers don’t have severe injuries.”
“But I digress,” Sally said. “Here’s what I wanted to tell you about my going blind.”
Again my fingers hovered over the keyboard. You never do know where the next good story is coming from.
“Do you remember the long-time referee, Wally Tatsumi?”
“Oh yeahhhhh,” I said, mimicking the famous yell of the wrestler known as the Missing Link.
Sally laughed. “That’s the Missing Link, right?”
“Oh yeahhhhh,” I repeated.
We both laughed.
“Well, one year Lord Blears was interviewing all the wrestlers. They were going on summer break. Kind of like TV shows back then. Except no reruns for wrestling. And after he’d talked to all the wrestlers, he asked Wally what he was going to do over the summer break. Were you watching that time? Do you remember what Wally said?”
“Maybe,” I answered. “I vaguely remember it had something to do with some kind of training, didn’t it?”
“Right, Lanning. Very seriously Wally said, ‘I’m going to train my eyes to see through the back of my head’.”
I burst out laughing. “Yes, I remember that. Because he wasn’t joking. He was super serious about it. I do remember it.”
“Well,” Sally continued, “I was only eleven at the time, and I thought, ‘Wow, if Wally Tatsumi says he can do that, then maybe you really can train your eyes to see through the back of your head’.”
I looked at Sally. Like Wally, she wasn’t joking either. “So you, uh, tried to do it?” I asked.
“Yes, I did. I tried and tried and tried. I kept thinking, ‘How does Wally train?’ I tried to turn my eyes as far to the sides as I could. I strained muscles I was trying so hard. When it was too painful to do the sides, I tried making myself as cross-eyed as I could thinking maybe I could turn them that way. Kind of inside out, you know? I had headaches all the time. I was hurting my eyesight. Things began to get fuzzy, cloudy. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy. I was obsessed, Lanning.”
This amazed me. Could Sally have lost her eyesight by overstraining her eyeballs? Was that even possible?
“Anyway, I popped some blood vessels. My eyes looked terrible. I had really blurry vision. My mom got scared and took me to the doctor. He sent us to an ophthalmologist.”
Oh my God, I thought. What a horrible story. To lose your eyesight over something Wally Tatsumi had obviously, in adult hindsight, totally made up. How appalling. I’m amazed at what we believe when we’re kids. It’s a wonder adults aren’t all running around with some kind of disability.
“I told him what I was doing,” Sally went on, “And he said I had to stop right away, that I could do serious damage if I kept it up.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry to hear this,” I said. “How terrible for you.”
Of course, I did think she was saying that overstraining her eyes had been the cause of her blindness.
“But I couldn’t stop, Lanning. It had become a mania for me. I was convinced I would see through the back of my head if I only tried hard enough.”
This story was so tragic. I mean how could anyone, myself included, write it? Use it? If anything, I should probably help Sally write it. Talk about your cautionary tale.
I said, “So you kept doing it?”
“Oh yeahhhhh,” said Sally, laughing.
Her Missing Link impersonation was a little bit funny. I laughed along, guiltily, of course.
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
“Sorry already?” Sally said. “Wait until you hear what I did?”
Wow, I thought, this is not possible. Don’t tell me, Lady, that you finally turned your eyes around. Maybe Sally was a little bit crazy.
“So what I did, Lanning, because I was so frustrated, I took a spoon and dug out my eyes. I said, ‘What the heck? That’s the fastest way to turn them around’.”
I sat speechless. Sally took a long swig of her coffee, tipping the bottom up to finish it off. What do you say after you hear that?
“Well,” said Sally, “I’m off.”
And with that, she rose and extended her cane to begin walking away.
I stood too, a polite gesture that she couldn’t see.
“Are you going to write about that?” Sally asked, smiling.
“I, uh, I can’t imagine that I would, Sally. I am so very sorry. It’s, it’s so . . .”
“Funny?” she said, laughing more than I could imagine possible.
I said nothing.
“I tell you what, Planning without the P, let’s see who can write that story faster, you or me.”
And she turned and walked away.
What did she mean by that? Was it even true? Did she make up different tales each time she told how she lost her eyesight? Or did she always tell the same one?
I sat down and opened a new Word document.
* * *
Note: This is my rough draft for Monday 01.08.24
Lanning Lee 