Jed Wolf

Will I ever hear spring again without Cardinals singing “Covid, Covid, Covid?” was the last thing I wrote before I quit trying to write and turned my attention to NPR.

Two months later, “All Things Considered” jumped from the refugee crisis to a gay New York Times columnist whose recent memoir “The Beauty of Dusk,” was about facing life after waking up half blind from the same rare eye stroke I woke up with.

Lucky me, I thought downloading the audio version narrated by Frank Bruni himself, the restaurant critic of the New York Times. I liked his voice well enough but in less than a minute I wondered how long I could stand another lesson in gratitude from the latest darling in Oprah’s Book Club.

I’d given up on self-help decades before and felt naive hoping for something relevant just because he was gay, but with nothing better to do, I braced myself to hear how waking up blind taught him to see.

Unlike Bruni who was raised in a relatively cheery family and came out of the closet at eighteen, my coming out story involved a severe infection in one testicle the size of a navel orange which forced me in tears at age thirty, convinced I had AIDS, to confess in an ER, I’d been seduced by babysitter as a child, received regular blowjobs from a boarding school teacher and had been having anonymous sex in bus stations and public parks ever since.

While Bruni’s mother made lemonade, mine made trouble. My parents had no interest in children yet expected me to be grateful. I finally stopped proving I wasn’t and in their final years, acted like a good son dutifully rubbing lotion on their flakey legs. When I told my frail mother I loved her on her deathbed, the last thing she said was, “do you?” in a final pathetic attempt to prove I was a liar.

While Frank Bruni criticized food, my parents criticized my songwriting which was mostly about them and other caregivers. Though friends and therapists encouraged me to express myself, my shows made audiences weep, so I turned my attention to planting compensatory gardens for dashed hopes. As tourists stopped to take pictures and I yelled from my porch, “That’ll be fifty dollars,” I dreamed of making gardens so dizzyingly beautiful, people might also shed tears.

But now, even with glasses, nothing’s composed. I can’t see in dappled light or enjoy reflections in my pond anymore and I every toilet bowl of shimmering piss I aim at makes me queasy.

Though I looked like I was counting my blessings in between the biopsies, surgeries, and heart attack that followed my eye stroke, it was paradox that closed them when people said I was lucky.

Before hearing that Frank Bruni participated in experimental trials to restore his optic nerve, I’d felt okay about gardening like a cyclops on eleven different medications. Though nothing worked, thanks to his research, I discovered I had a significant chance of total blindness and should embrace my life while being concerned with high altitudes, sudden elevation changes, disturbing dreams, and variations in blood pressure while I still can.

Dave and I were planning a blissful bucket-list flight to Utah – Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon at the end of April to get away from Florida. We live at sea level and haven’t flown in years but now, if I’m able to take pictures, I’ll be nervous about the flight home. I had a hunch my thinking and coordination were affected, but now I’m leery of gardening since learning, due to my lack of depth perception that I’m more likely to poke my good eye out trying not to.

Though I felt less apt to embrace life immediately after “The beauty of Dusk,” it was well written and based on other reviews, I assumed it was helpful for people more like Frank. By the end, I was glad to get to know him and be further educated but when I tried to get on with my life afterwards, I felt bothered.

He hadn’t addressed any of my enduring feelings of emptiness and alienation directly or gotten under my skin so why I was annoyed? His inspirational message didn’t make me feel like more of an ingrate than usual, so why was I so upset? What did I care if he cashed in on our rare condition? I wasn’t jealous. Wondering if the feeling might be envy, I lay down.

Whenever I close my eyes the swirling fog intensifies. It’s always been difficult to meditate but much harder with sinister patterns writhing stage left, but as a seasoned introspector, I dug to find the source of my irritation. I’ve always had trouble sleeping but since “The Beauty of Dusk,” after waking up from nightmares which is supposed to be a relief, would I be afraid to open my right eye from now on? Maybe, but that wasn’t it.

I was pissed about being unable to comfortably read while needing glasses to navigate everything else, and a safety pair for pruning but I was more afraid of wasting any more time listening to NPR and watching Netflix and frustrated by what I was paying attention to, the size of the screen and its resolution, when I realized, searching for glasses to see what was right in front of me in what was left of my world, none of it compared to my fear of writing.