Jerry, who’s blind

Jerry was probably more of a college acquaintance than friend of mine, being closer to our mutual friend John.  Like John, Jerry was a math major, and like John and myself, Jerry was a Go player.

Jerry was blind, and I mean completely and totally blind.  He had had some degenerative disease around age five which required the removal of both his eyes.  He just had eye sockets.  He didn’t wear dark glasses or anything, he just figured he looks how he looks and if seeing people had a problem with it, that was their problem.

His parents enrolled him in the Perkins School for the Blind.  Apparently the first thing they do with the kids is put them at the edge of a large playing field and ask them to run.  Very few blind kids will run.  Jerry was one who did.  It turns out this changed the way the school approached his education.

 I was walking down one of the streets just outside of the college campus and Jerry came up behind me, moving fast, late for class.  He never used a cane, but had a kind of defensive gate and moved quickly and precisely.  As he passed me I watched him avoid the other people on the sidewalk, and then, without slowing down, veer right through the center of the archway and onto the main campus.

Wow.

John said he was walking with Jerry once and Jerry asked him, “what’s that big square object over there?”  It was a truck parked where there usually wasn’t one. Did I mention Jerry didn’t have any eyes?

Go is a game played on a 19×19 grid with black and white stones.  Jerry wanted to play and someone made him a metal Go set with holes for the grid and pegs for the stones.  The tops of the pegs had two different textures so Jerry could tell them apart.  He would run his hand over the board, “seeing” the position, and then place a peg for his move.

I played with him a few times, and I was talking about it with his friend John.  I mentioned that Jerry took a long time making his moves.  John replied, “That’s not because he’s blind.  He knows the board as well as you do.  It’s because he’s Jerry.”