Blindaversary

It seems like a lifetime ago.  At twenty-two years, I suppose it is a lifetime.  The anniversary almost slipped up on me this year.  But, this uncanny and often irritating ability I have to remember dates and even days of the week they happened—always pops up sooner or later.  This year, September 25^th falls on a Wednesday, just as it did in 1991.

The week before, I’d had a dye test where they photographed the blood vessels in back of my eye after a yellow dye was injected into a vein in one of my arms.  Then I nervously waited for them to call with the results.

They called me at work that Wednesday morning.  “You have diabetic retinopathy.  If you don’t have laser treatments right away you could lose all your vision.” 

Outside my office, my co-workers went about their business.  If someone’s world comes crashing down around them and nobody else hears it, did it really happen?  Apparently so. 

I needed air.  I needed space.  My office was closer to the back of the building.  The next thing I knew, I was standing in the alley, trying to catch my breath.  The intense Austin sun felt like it would cook me alive.

Home.  Just get home.  Now.

I found my way to the front parking lot, got in my truck, and drove to my apartment.

What am I going to do now? 

I had only been there a few months.  My health insurance wasn’t due to start until October 1^st.  Just a couple of months earlier, I discovered my kidneys were failing.  This news was like a hammer driving a nail all the way in.  Any pretense I had that maybe, just maybe I could stay in Austin and make it all work was gone.  After Tampa, Kansas City, and Dallas, I’d finally a place—the place—I wanted to stay.  It was so much like the quirky college town where I grew up but with big city amenities.  My paychecks were increasing.  After laying the groundwork, the accounts I’d opened were really starting to produce sales.  Life was on a steady upswing.  Well, except for failing kidneys.

My parents were anxiously waiting to find out the results of the test.  I called them and we made plans for them to drive to Austin the first weekend in October to help me pack up and move back in with them.  Life as I knew was coming to an end, but at least I wouldn't have to face it alone.  Still, as the oldest kid, I felt guilt at being a burden on them.

Since then, some of my worst nightmares came true.  Some amazing blessings rescued me.  I’ve had to pick myself up and go forward countless times.

When I want to torture myself, I try to imagine what life would have been like if my health hadn’t failed and I’d been able to stay in Austin.  I’ve been back twice—in 1996 and 2001.  Each time, it was so much bigger than before.  From what I hear, it’s much more expensive and resembles Dallas and Houston more than the place I remember.

There are two things I was good at then and, thanks to professional guidance and practice, am even better at now.  Writing and visual art.  There are some gifts that vision loss can dull, but never take completely away as long as there’s some vision left. 

In the months that followed me leaving my job, selling most of my things, and returning to Arkansas, I had plenty of time to sit around my parents’ house and ponder the future.  There was one thing I vowed to do over and over again: surpass the expectations of people who thought I wasn’t capable of much anymore.  I approached my new reality with the same tenacity I’d used to support myself in college and graduate in four years, even after changing majors and watching some of my friends give up. 

I run into trouble when I expect things to be as easy as they are for people who can see fine.  Sometimes it turns to resentment, which is as unproductive and unhealthy as guilt—another emotion that invades my mind when I remember the mistakes I made as a young diabetic in my teens and twenties.

On this day in 1991, the sense of fear and loss had me wondering if I would ever accomplish anything.  I assumed that my skills and abilities would be frozen where they were then, as a 27 year-old who had no idea what he really wanted to do with his life.

Back in 1991, it would have helped me to know that before I was halfway through my forties, it would be the most productive decade of my life (so far).

In 1991 it would have given me such relief to know that by the end of that decade, I would no longer be diabetic.

In 1991 I would have been overjoyed to know that ten years later, after eye hemorrhages, invasive procedures and procedures, I would create a large piece of art like this.  

 Visit Jim's web site JimFairbanks.net

Festivals, Fayetteville, and Roots

The Fayetteville Roots Festival is August 23-26.

It brings in live music, food, vendors, and is a celebration of Ozark Mountain culture.  And no, Ozark Mountain culture isn’t an oxymoron.  One of the great things about Fayetteville is that it embraces the future without abandoning its past.

For the majority of people now living in Northwest Arkansas, the roots don’t run deep yet.  For the most part, that’s a good thing.  It means this area has a healthy economy and people want to retire here or move here because it’s a great place to live.  All you have to do is travel east of Little Rock to see what the other side of that coin looks like.

For some of us, “Fayettevile roots” has a literal meaning.  I was born in the Missouri Ozarks and my parents came back here when I was a few months old.  Some of my early childhood was spent in the River Valley before my family returned here.  I grew up, for the most part, less than a mile from the U of A campus.  It was the 70s and early 80s, when Fayetteville was a notorious party town.  It did not escape my attention, but that's for another post.

My mother was born here.  My parents were married in a church just down the street from where she attended grade school.  They met in the 50s when they both worked on the square.  She worked at a dime store—one of the first handful owned by Sam Walton.  Right after they got married, they lived in some apartments on Meadow Street that, just like their marriage, have withstood the test of time.

My grandfather was a football star at Fayetteville High School in the 1930s.  The school won the state championship all three years he played for FHS.  His name is engraved on the sidewalk at Harmon Field with other winning team members throughout the years.  The “football jock” gene somehow didn’t get passed down to me.

But, my grandmother’s knack for telling a story did.

When I was a kid, she told me countless stories of what the area was like in the early 20^th century.  My favorite is about the Saturday her family rode in from Farmington after a rain.  Most people came to town to do their trading on Saturday.  It was the 1920s, before the square was paved.  Their wagon got stuck in the mud.  It’s pretty hard to imagine now.  It was hard to imagine back in the 70s when she told me that story.

These stories about my family and this area made one thing cliear: the two are intertwined, as impossible to separate from each other as vines of stubborn kudzu.

For me, going to the farmer’s market on the square to buy fresh, locally-grown produce feels like it’s in my DNA.  I’m a consumer.  Two generatons of my family were the producers and sold it to general stores downtown.  I can find a high point in town, look across the hills, and know they haven’t changed at all since since members of my family first saw them in the mid-1800s—no matter how much the buildings on them have.

The university has definitely helped make this town what it is today.  Enrollment jumped in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers reached college age.  They helped make Dickson Street “funky” and cool.  After that, the city’s reputation was sealed.  Artsy, eclectic, creative, progressive, laid-back, fun, quirky Fayetteville was the perfect place for an artistically-inclined kid like me to grow up.  It had plenty of opportunities and was an accepting place for me to return to after losing part of my vision.  It’s always been fertile ground for the mind of the writer I was destined to become.

I love hearing newcomers say things like, “I didn’t know this was such a great place!” 

I just smile and say, “Yes, it is.”

But, it has been a great place for a long time.  Even my great-grandparents knew that.

 

The Newcomers Field Guide to Hill Folk, a humorous look at Northwest Arkansas, is now available in print AND ebook.  You don't have to be a newcomer to like it.  You might even recognize people you know.

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Art Filtered Through My Eyes

It sounds like the setup of an off-color joke (of which I am a fan).  “A legally blind guy goes to an art museum and . . .”   

A couple of months ago, Alice Walton spent part of her Wal Mart fortune to open Crystal Bridges, a world-class art museum in Bentonville, just a few miles up the road from where I live.  She’s been collecting works by American artists for quite some time and went on a bit of a shopping spree in recent years when she decided Northwest Arkansas deserved an affordable (in this case FREE) place for common folk to be exposed to culture.  This irritated some of the snobs in big cities who said, “We can’t lose our fine art to Arkensaw.”

Others were bothered by the Wal Mart connection.  Don’t worry.  This isn’t a political, class warfare rant.  Though I must say, I love the irony of the Wal Mart fortune buying the portrait of George Washington that appears on the dollar bill.  I’ll never look at my money quite the same way after yesterday.  The fact that it’s in one of the poorest states in the nation makes it that much sweeter.

From the time I was old enough to hold a crayon in my hand it was obvious I had a gift and interest in art.  I wasn’t a jock or particularly good-looking, but I could draw better than the other kids.  Adults told me to treasure that gift.  Later, like most adults, I had to pay bills, which left no time for creativity.  But I majored in Advertising in college, so I was able to take art classes for that.

In the months before and in the year after my kidneys failed, I once again had the time for art.  To my surprise, the skill came back like it had only been a few weeks instead of several years.  Even with reduced eyesight, I could still do it.  In 2001 I was living in Little Rock and took some classes at the Arkansas Arts Center.  My ability actually improved.

Now my vision is worse than it was then, but I still like to look at great art, valuable or not, so I was happy for the opportunity to see it without having to leave hillbilly country to do it.  With all this fine art in our midst, people are going to have to recalculate the relationship between hillbillies and art.

I took my cane and was glad I did.  There were some sculptures in pedestals, small items in glass cases, and some big, fragile pieces of modern art assembled on platforms about a foot off the ground.  It would have been embarrassing, and possibly expensive, to have stumbled onto one of them.  Maybe I could have passed it off as performance art, but I didn’t want to take the chance.  I’m sure I must have confused some of the other visitors who thought I was totally blind.  Anyone who watched long enough would have seen me squint and bend or lean closer for a better look.  I wore a pair of small binoculars around my neck, which I sometimes used to see smaller details.

One nice thing about Crystal Bridges is that people can walk right up to the art as long as they’re eighteen inches from it.  Most of the time, that was close enough for me.  Paintings with only dark colors were problematic.  Those with bold contrasts between light and dark were my favorites. 

As for the lighting, it was pretty good throughout most of the museum.  I’m a big fan of natural light in most situations, but on this sunny day, it was too much glare in rooms that relied heavily on it.  No one else seemed to have a problem, though.  Maybe the next time I go (and there will be a next time) it will be an overcast day and it will make a difference.

The museum’s architecture is part of the experience, but I was out of luck there.  The architect’s scale model was in one area, so I got an idea of how interesting it looks from the outside.  It was in one of the areas where glare bothered me most.  From what I’ve been told and heard on the news, it blends in with the Ozark terrain and makes use of the natural beauty of its surroundings.  It’s fine art, Ozark Mountain style.  That’s how we expect—make that demand--things to be done in this neck of the woods.  You can make improvements on what’s here, but you’d better honor what’s already here. 

With the help of someone reading the small cards to the right of each piece, and the overhead menu at the restaurant, my day at Crystal Bridges was complete.  Sure, my eyes got tired and I realized how out of shape my legs are after walking for over four hours, but I was still able to enjoy it.  As long as I have enough vision to distinguish between light and dark, I’ll do everything I can to look at what artists have created.

That means you don’t have any excuse not to.

A legally blind guy went to an art museum and . . . he was very grateful for the experience.