I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a boxcar in a freight yard in Atlantic City, and1on my head. Now, I am 32. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again. But a disaster can do strange things to people.
At the time, I was bewildered and afraid, but I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me, a potential, which I didn't see. And they made me want to fight it out with2.
The hardest3I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker for the rest of my life. When I say believe in myself I am not talking about4the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is5of it, but I mean something bigger than that: a confidence that I am a real, 6person; that somewhere there is a special place7 I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this confidence. It had to8the most elementary things. I can still remember once, when a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was laughing at me, and I was9 "I can't use this." I said. "Take it with you "he encouraged me, "and roll it around."
The words10in my head: "Roll it around, roll it around." By rolling the ball, I could11 where it went. This gave me an idea-how to achieve a goal I had thought12playing baseball.
At Philadelphia's over brook School for the Blind, I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it groundball.
All my life, I have 13ahead of me a series of goals, and then tried to reach them one at a time. I would14sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress.
I believe in life now. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the lass of them made me more15what I had left.
