High Contrast Foliage
by James Oliver Smith Jr
Sitting on the bench at 31st St and Franklin Ave, waiting for the 8 bus, I marvel at the sunshine: bright, incandescent yellow, angled low from the south. It highlights newly fallen leaves from nearby maples, basswoods, hackberries and the mulberry tree extending above my head, still and glistening from the nighttime rain. The leaves on the sidewalk are huddled together in thick clumps, a scrum of nature’s flight from the warmth that has started its own migration to the south, following birds, the sun and long days.
Each leaf seems to be suckling on the effervescence of an October morning. For a moment, in this light, with the high contrast canary flash of dead leaves soon to be buried in urban compost bins I am deluded into thinking my vision has turned back to that golden realm of crisp, clear acuity. It's a fleeting experience, because the moment that sensation arrives I move my one partially functioning eye to the intersection signals, the signs on the restaurant on the opposing corner and the architect's office across the street. Reality creeps back into my compromised visual cognition. It's as distorted, incomprehensible and confusing as it was just before that moment of perceived clarity.
I reprimand myself for, once again, falling for that trick of high contrast juxtaposition of daylight, strongly defined shadows, edges and well understand patterns. Forty five years of full-featured stereoscopic vision, combined with a bonus of an extra fifteen years of reasonably normal monocular vision has given me a good sense of how things should look. I've become all too aware of how well my visual cognitive self can create the perfect image I want to see.
I stare at the white cane held vertically between my hands. Its tip rests on the sidewalk. I navigate the tip to the leaves resting peacefully in their morning nest of fresh rain and traces of mud. A twinge of nostalgia settles in and I reminisce of autumns past, the season when I'm driven to reflect on all my 62 years, years when vision was a loyal companion across ten states, forty five moves, two marriages and several careers. I can replay videos in full color and sound. Even the smells, tastes and tactile experiences are embedded, but the images were the key to tying memories together. The world was normal and routine.
I look in the direction of the Franklin Ave bridge over the Mississippi and watch the obscure figures I know are cars, trucks, cyclists and pedestrians. A cyclist slips by. Her body somehow manages to move without head, arms and limbs. Only a torso with a skirt flapping in the wind sits, balanced, on a dark frame. The wheels flicker in and out of visibility. At times it appears to be a frame and torso floating in air, sliding smoothly over asphalt and cement. I've become used to these broken scenes, images of the impossible, signs of a brain that just can't make sense of the data coming back from the retina that is doing its job to gather light and package it for further processing in the brain, where the fiction we call vision takes place.
The 8 bus will soon appear and I'll be on my way to the Pow Wow Grounds coffee shop on 15th and Franklin for a day of writing, but not before I've had to remind myself of how fragile my sense of normalcy is. I've become obsessed with these glimpses of perceived visual clarity. They form a divide between the sighted "me" and the vision impaired "me", but not the blind "me", at least not yet. I've known for twenty six years there was no cure for pigmentary glaucoma; just delay tactics. This has been the mantra I throw out to others as an explanation for why there are so many signs of my exit from the world of the fully, normally sighted.
The first big sign was the elimination of cycling from my life after running into the back of a parked truck on Como Avenue in 1994. I snapped the handle bar, bruised my thigh and was quick to blame everything but my vision: my attention, my helmet, the truck itself. That was eight years after my initial diagnosis. There were no discernible effects of pigmentary glaucoma at that time. The ointments I used initially and my first laser surgeries had more of an impact on me than my pigmentary glaucoma had. Both eyes seemed to be working fine. When Fall arrived, all of the trees were fully absorbed by my stereoscopic vision and appreciated. But I gave up my bicycle anyway. There was something about my vision that seemed to be deficient, but I couldn’t quantify it to myself or anyone else. It was easy to give up cycling since it was a pastime that had no bearing on my professional, family or artistic life. I could still shuttle my children to their events and videotape their activities. I could still work and I could still write and play my bass trombone.
