What to Do When You Forget Your Anniversary and You’re Blind
Plus, Caveman Sy and his good buddy Garg
Find the podcast episode where I read this post here.
This is not a story about a man who forgot his anniversary. I mean, it is, but it doesn’t fit the genre. The narrators of Man-forgot-anniversary stories are doofuses who have to strain like Olympic weightlifters to remember facts about their wives, like favorite flowers or middle names. Their audience is their fellow doofy men, who chuckle doofily, reassuring the narrator that no one will ever hold a man to a standard. Their wives, meanwhile, seethe.
No, this is definitely not one of those stories. For two reasons. First, my wife, Gabrielle, also forgot our anniversary. And second, it is actually, as you will come to see, a story about me being awesome.
To be fair, Gabrielle and I had celebrated our anniversary a few days earlier. It fell on a Wednesday, so we went to dinner the weekend before. Then work, and parenting, and life drove it so far out of our heads that we only remembered the morning of when her mom sent us a “happy anniversary” text. I looked at my phone.
“Oh, it’s our anniversary,” I said in mild surprise.
“Apparently,” replied Gabrielle.
We moved on, and I dropped our daughter off at daycare. But then I had a problem. Gabrielle and I were both working at home. So it would be natural for me to pick up a gift on the way back. But I only had so much time, and finding something new out in the world as a blind person can be hard to do spontaneously.
From my perspective, you, sighted people, can do whatever you please without the slightest forethought. You spend your lives whimsically skipping about, the universe obediently fulfilling your every stray want. Like if you need, for instance, a box of emergency anniversary chocolates, you just turn your head back and forth while you walk down the street. That’s really all there is to it. You scan the storefronts for a place that looks like it might have chocolates. Then you go in the store, and do it again. Point your face in a couple directions, and you know the rough location of every item in the place’s inventory. Do you ever stop and think how magical that is? Of course you don’t.
And what I just described is, somehow, the least efficient way you would do this. You could simply search on your phone for a place selling chocolates, never worrying about websites that aren’t accessible to screen reading software. Giving no thought to information conveyed via pictures. Not once asking yourself if the internet will present you with a map that you will ask AI about only to be told with certainty that your destination is 300 miles from your current position in the middle of the ocean.
Truthfully, you probably wouldn’t even do that amount of “work.” You likely already know where in your neighborhood to go from all that easy, passive observation of your surroundings you’re always doing.
So what are my options? I could ask someone on the street. Sometimes I’ll get someone who is friendly and has time. This can be good, as long as they aren’t too ready to help. Hyper helpful people want to assist more than they want to accurately assess if they can. Their excitement about helping someone in need plows them right through obstacles like the fact that they have no relevant knowledge to contribute to my situation. They will enthusiastically talk about any store that springs to mind. Stores that may not be remotely close by. Stores that may not have chocolates. Stores that may not exist.
Other people will completely ignore my request for help. This is annoying, but better than hyper-helpfulness. It also beats the people who stop to help strictly out of obligation. Those people have the demeanor of someone dealing with a smashed cockroach on the floor of their home. They have to address it, but they have a visceral desire to get it over with.
Searching online occasionally works, but there are the problems noted above. Plus, inevitably, some new AI will intrude to provide random, useless information about chocolate and, depending on the company, a fake genocide against White South Africans.
So I was walking from the daycare to the subway, wondering how much energy finding a gift would take, when suddenly, my nostrils flared. A pleasant scent. My brain registered it was something important before I recognized it. A couple more-intentional sniffs. Flowers!
But where were they? I walked a few steps forward, and sniffed again. The smell was gone. I walked back to where I started. Another sniff. Still gone. Where did it go? I stood, puzzled. But then, an assist from mother nature. A breeze from behind me and to my right. There was the scent again! I turned and walked upwind.
About 15 feet later, my white cane hit a table. I drew closer and turned the cane vertical. It brushed something, and I heard the telltale crinkle of plastic paper. I breathed in a noseful of delightful florid aromas. This was too good.
Next: find someone to help. I moved left and felt the edge of the table with my cane. I couldn’t feel anything beyond it, and everything further left sounded like uninterrupted, bare wall.
“What on earth is the sound of ‘uninterrupted bare wall?’” you ask.
It’s like silence but closer and heavier. Does that make sense?
“It does not,” you respond.
So, nothing to the left. To my right, there was a short gap, and then another flower table. In the gap I heard an entrance to a covered outdoor area.
“You heard what?” you ask, more insistently.
Yeah, like there was obviously ambient noise flowing through an opening, but not the kind of ambient noise that comes from a door to a fully enclosed space.
“WHAT?!”
Someone standing in the door made a noise. So I asked a careful question.
“Hi, I’m blind, and I’m looking for someone who works here, but I don’t want to assume. Are you shopping, or do you work here?”
The good news was she worked there. The bad news was she understood none of the nuance in my question because she spoke almost no English at all. Language barriers are hard. I cannot resort to the usual sighted-person method of overcoming them: pointing and making rudimentary noises like a caveman.
Incidentally, I don’t know how blind cavemen did it. They were probably the ones who invented language out of sheer frustration.
Caveman Sy: Look, this thing you’re doing with your arm and your finger? We’re calling that pointing. Stop pointing. Stop it. No more point! Okay, Garg?
Garg: Me like point! Me not like talk!
Sy (slowly): But me need you talk. Me no see.
Garg (under his breath): Me club you…
Sy: No, Garg. What do we say about clubbing?
Garg (grudgingly): Me club when me not process anger…
Sy: So what should you do?
Garg (thoughtfully): … Find healthy outlet. Oh, me paint cave wall! And me stop point for me friend Sy.
Sy (hugging Garg): Thanks, buddy.
The woman and I got on roughly the same page about the color and type of flower I wanted using the barest amount of human language. She didn’t try to communicate the price, so I just let her charge my card. I felt a vibration in my pocket and had my screen reader speak the notification from my bank to see if what I paid seemed reasonable for the amount of flowers now in my hand. It did.
Feeling good about myself, I stopped at the spot around the corner from our apartment with the bagels Gabrielle likes, and grabbed some coffee too. We’re regulars. The cashier looked at the bouquet and asked, “Is it her birthday?”
“No, it’s our anniversary,” I said with self-satisfaction.
“Aw, that’s great!” she said. I could hear a big smile.
“Yes,” I thought, “I deserve this praise.”
Then I seamlessly performed the sort of complicated maneuver blind people do all the time without thinking. I put my cane under my right arm, switched the flowers from my left to right hand, slipped the handles of the coffee and bagel bag over my free left wrist, switched the flowers back to my left hand, grabbed the cane with my right, and exited holding my left elbow up to keep the coffee cups in the bag level.
As I walked home, I conceded to myself that luck had, partially, gotten me here. The smell, the gust of wind, the commitment of the flower saleswoman. But I had taken advantage of the situation, and improvised some frankly impressive sensory perception. So how would I tell the story to Gabrielle?
I opened the apartment door.
“How was the journey?” she asked.
“I AM A BLIND CHAMPION!”