So when I moved to Baltimore, I was desperate for friends. I met more people in the first year of living there who would turn into lifelong friends than at any other time in my life, but I … didn’t know that at the time. At the time, it just felt really, really far from Texas and not quite my dream of New York City and so just — lonely. While I was volunteering anywhere and everywhere, I saw an ad for a blind woman who needed a reader.

I called Ellen, we talked for a while, and she agreed that I could help her out. I went over to her condo apartment in downtown Baltimore once a week, to open and read her mail, go over anything else she needed, and then spend some good time talking and gossiping. She was working at the Maryland School for the Blind, and I loved hearing about her stories, and her life.

Mary, me, Ellen, and Carey at a surprise shower for Mary and I at Barb’s house.

In a way that I could never imagine, she had actually made it through much of her life as sighted, holding on to friends’ hands and navigating expected corridors, until she went to college. At college a friend made her let go, and said, “Find your way.” It was terrifying, and Ellen had to admit she couldn’t. She got a cane, bought Braille books, and continued to make her way in the world. She loved to dance; she actually met her husband Ken during the time I was reading to her as they both loved doing an elaborate type of dancing (I can’t remember which kind right now).

She eventually became an advocate for the blind, and the course she helped teach was a real-life course, where students had to achieve all kinds of results, culminating in the creation and clean-up of a dinner party for eight, a feat I can still barely achieve.

One day, after I was done reading her mail and we were just talking, Ellen expressed real bitterness about drivers who park or block the crosswalk. She was usually so equanimous, so I asked her about it. She lit up with fire — she said, “I just cannot allow it to pass, I cannot.” I said, sure she was just internally mad, “what do you do?” and she said, “well, the time I was the angriest I actually took my cane and starting hitting the hood of the car, screaming, ‘this is a crosswalk! a crosswalk!'” I said, “Ellen, weren’t you scared?” And she said, “What were they going to do, hit a blind woman?”

I have so enjoyed this story, and the memory of our friendship, over the years. As I said, she got married (so he read her mail) and I moved to Washington, D.C., so we fell out of touch. But you can bet I’m REALLY careful not to stop in crosswalks. Thanks, Ellen, for teaching me how much we can see without any vision at all.