EXCERPT FROM HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND
Certain dates in one’s life are never forgotten. One for me
is Monday, February 13, 1961—the day of the scheduled
appointment with Dr. Sugar in Detroit.My mother and I took the train from Buffalo to Detroit,
checked into the Detroit Statler Hotel, then went directly to
Dr. Sugar’s office. It was late in the afternoon. The doctor’s
other patients had left, and we were ushered into his office
immediately.The venetian blinds were open, the sun of a cold winter day
streaming in. Dr. Sugar measured my eye pressure usingwhat he explained was an electronic tonograph machine. When he discovered that the
pressure in my eyes was so high that it could not even register precisely on the machine, he
was outraged. “Why did they wait so long?” he shouted. “Why did they wait so long?”
It did not occur to me until later to think about who the “they” were and what it was “they”
waited so long to do. Because I couldn’t see, I could not read my mother’s face. But I can
imagine her expression was just as confused as mine.
Dr. Sugar then guided me from the examination table to a small, round metal stool. My
mother sat in a wooden chair to my right while Dr. Sugar stood above me and put his
ophthalmoscope to my eyes. His brow was touching my brow. This man had the hairiest,
bushiest eyebrows I’d ever seen. Though, of course, I could only feel them. And then he
pulled away—I could feel him do this, like a ripping apart. Very slowly he stood upright,
paused for a moment, and said flatly, not in the direction of my mother or me in particular,
maybe just to himself:
“Well, son, you are going to be blind tomorrow.”
It was a strange thing to hear someone say. Strange that he used the old-fashioned colloqui-
alism “son,” and without really directing the remark to me. But oddest of all was to hear a
person say, in all seriousness, that someone is simply going to be blind. He did not explain
how this person was going to be blind, just that he was. And maybe odder still was that the
person—the “son”—was me.
“...It can be done, because Sanford Greenberg did it...”
—MARGARET ATWOOD, AUTHOR, POET