Today I am thinking about how unique a friendship can be.

Mary is eighty years old, lives by herself, and she is blind. Family history told her that her retinas would eventually fail her, so she prepared for this by traveling the world while she could still see it. Now she draws upon her extraordinarily vivid memories of all that she has seen and experienced in her lifetime. She is a fine storyteller, very funny, and just a little bit ribald. Politically she proudly claims herself to be a “yellow-dog Democrat”. It was an admittedly difficult day when she just couldn’t see well enough to man the polls for the Democratic Party on election day. She did it for years and years and years, and loved it. She’ll still argue current politics with much passion and enthusiasm. Don’t bring up the subject of Sarah Palin. Please.

She lives alone, but she is not alone. She is beloved by her grown children and her grandchildren. One son, I’d guess he’s in his forties now, is mentally handicapped but high functioning and has Tourette’s Syndrome. Mary placed him in a sheltered environment in West Texas several years ago in preparation for a time when she couldn’t care for him, and he is very happy there. He travels by bus several times a year to visit his mother, and they have a high old time. Mary says that he loves to clean her apartment, as well as walk to the grocery store, so she is always better off when he leaves than she was when he arrived. But she laughs and says he’s a businessman and he charges her for these services. Any guy needs a little walking-around money.

Her children have begun campaigning to get their mother to give up her apartment and go to live with her Austin son, whom Mary lovingly describes as “my son who knows everything.” Mary, of course, is having none of it. She feels she is doing fine on her own at this time. She has just enough vision left in one eye to enable her to use a very large magnifier coupled with an extremely bright light, and this allows her to read her mail and write checks, etc. She is keeping up with household business. Yes, an occasional piece of paper does get lost if her desk gets too cluttered, but so far nothing really catastrophic has occurred as a result.

Don’t be tempted to picture Mary as a poor little old blind lady. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The woman has a very lively social life, more than I could keep up with. She plays bridge two or three afternoons a week, every week. She is very much into the Dallas cultural life, enjoying many plays around town, as well as the symphony. She doesn’t travel like she used to, but she does make an annual trip alone to upstate New York to visit an old friend. She is part of a group that sings to entertain the residents in nursing homes, and she says, “those older folks really enjoy us!” She used to enjoy going dancing with her boyfriend, but he died a few years ago. She misses him and hasn’t found anyone else she’s interested in, yet.

Mary sometimes relies on friends to get her around town, but she is more likely to opt for the independence of the DART handi-rides system. She knows how it works and buys all the passes she needs. A simple trip to the dentist can take most of a day this way, but Mary gets there and she gets back home. On her own. There is one horror story where she was left standing alone in the dark late at night in front of Dallas’ Meyerson performance hall. Everyone was gone, and her handi-ride did not come. I can’t recall how she got out of that because I am always just too caught up in thinking how terrifying it must have been. But she’s here to tell the story.

I haven’t set eyes on Mary since my retirement party in 2003. After that, we took up the daily scramble puzzle in the newspaper because we both love words. Mary is one very competitive woman, and she wants to WIN. So now she calls me every day to see if I have successfully unscrambled the day’s words. Sometimes I keep up, sometimes I don’t, but she loves the game. I had to set boundaries for her–no calls before noon or after 9:00 PM. So we connect for five minutes or less most days. It’s enough.

A couple of months back I told Mary that I had published a book, and she was very happy and excited for me. She insisted that she wanted to read it, although I knew that would be impossible. Her books now come to her as Books On Tape. But she swore she could read it with her glass and her light. So I sent her a copy. I know she can’t read it, but she’ll never admit it.

So now I’m doing the only thing I can do. I’ve purchased a little digital voice recorder for forty bucks and I’m going to read my book to Mary. The sound quality is not that great, but I know she’ll hear the love in my voice.

Think about it.

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The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling
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