Hello Darkness, My Old Friend Read online

  Perspectives

  “Light emerged from darkness in Genesis, in the creation of the heavens and the earth. Light also emerged from darkness in the life of Sandy Greenberg. This memoir reveals a triumph of the human spirit. It is the story of a man brought from blindness to richness, from darkness to light, through his passion and his accomplishments, and from a deep commitment from those who loved him. This book renews life in us all.”

  —Richard Axel, 2004 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

  “Sandy plays the hand he got and tries to make the world a better place. He has aspirations and hope. Sandy is a role model for all of us.”

  —Michael Bloomberg

  “When blindness is vanquished, and it will be, we will have Sandy Greenberg and his story to thank.”

  —Senator Chris Coons

  “There is no greater measure of character than viewing one’s personal setbacks as a call to serve others. Sandy and Sue soared above their personal challenges and dedicated their lives to making a positive change in the world. We’re confident that this magnificent book will be one of the most inspirational you will ever read.”

  —Elizabeth and Bob Dole

  “An inspirational story of resilience, determination, achievement and, mostly, of the power of friendship and love. I could not stop reading this extraordinary book about an extraordinary journey.”

  —Susan Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic

  “An inspiring must-read for anyone facing challenges in life, as a guide to beating the odds and making your impact on the world.”

  —Vice President Al Gore

  “A majestic book, authored by the most ‘haimish’ of men. This should be required reading for every young person with a dream of helping their community.”

  —Senator Ron Wyden

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  Hello Darkness, My Old Friend:

  How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life

  © 2020 by Sanford D. Greenberg

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-497-7

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-498-4

  Cover art by Jason Heuer

  Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

  Afterword by Margaret Atwood © O.W. Toad Ltd 2020

  This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  Distributed by Simon and Schuster

  For Sue, the one who has always been there

  Contents

  Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Introduction by Art Garfunkel

  Part 1: Day & Night

  1. Stranger on a Train

  2. Survival Skills

  3. Brighter Days

  4. The Seduction of the Mind

  5. My Shadow Education

  6. Shots Across the Bow

  7. “Son, You Are Going to Be Blind Tomorrow”

  Part 2: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters

  8. Lights Out

  9. A Walk on the Wild Side

  10. The Blind Senior

  11. Tough Love

  12. Moving Forward

  13. Paying Back

  Part 3: Tikkun Olam

  14. The Start of Something Big

  15. The Beauty of Small Things

  16. Road Tripping

  17. My Blindness Balance Sheet: Debits

  18. My Blindness Balance Sheet: Assets

  19. Speak, Memory

  20. No Man Is an Island

  21. A Promise That Cannot Be Broken

  22. Old Friends Sat on the Park Bench Like Bookends

  23. My Big Party

  Epilogue: To End Blindness Forever

  The Final Word by Margaret Atwood

  Acknowledgments

  End Notes

  Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and the half-light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet:

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  —William Butler Yeats

  Foreword

  Supreme Court of the United States

  Washington, DC

  A few days after the 2010–2011 Court term ended, my good neighbor at Watergate South, Sandy Greenberg, visited me in chambers. He had done so the year before, just to see how I was faring at work after the death of my husband. He is that kind of caring man. But this time he came to convey a request. Sandy had composed a volume reflecting on his life’s extraordinary course. He asked if I would read the manuscript and perhaps write a brief foreword. I spent every spare hour the next week reading Sandy’s remembrances. Often his memories brought smiles; other times they left me near to tears. From the first page to the last, I was captivated by his bright mind, ready wit, and indomitable spirit.

  A snapshot of Sandy in 1958 at age seventeen: brainy, athletic, president of his Buffalo, New York, high-school senior class and of the school’s student council, trumpet player, a tall and all-around good fellow. That year, he entered Columbia College on full scholarship. There he thrived on learning, made lasting friendships, and experienced the city’s many wonders. In steady correspondence, he described his adventures to the love of his life since sixth grade, Sue Roseno, his beloved wife and soul mate now for a half century.

  At age nineteen, midway through his third year at Columbia, Sandy became blind. Initial despair over his total loss of sight gave way, in small time, to a fierce determination not to be seen, or to live his life, as a blind man. He played the part well. Sandy would have no dog, or even a cane. “If you were to see me in the hallway of the Watergate,” he observed, “you would not know I am blind.” Quite so. I had been told, when we bought an apartment at the Watergate in 1980, two doors up from Sandy and Sue’s, that his vision was poor. He could see shapes but not faces; he wore thick glasses to magnify things. I believed what I was told.

  A half-dozen years passed before I learned the harsh truth. In 1986, I heard Sandy say to a throng of well-wishers: “I am blind.” The occasion was his induction as a Fellow of Brandeis University at a celebration in DC.1 Sandy could, at last, publicly acknowledge his blindness, for he had proved, time and again, that he had developed “other ways to see the world.” Ideas and images generated in his mind sparked inventions—prime among them, a speech-compression machine that speeds up the reproduction of words from recordings without garbling any sounds. His agile mind also planned a succession of well-designed, impressively profitable business enterprises.

  Sandy’s reflections have a main theme. Though robbed of his sight (owing to the repeated misdiagnosis of an ophthalmologist in his hometown), he considers himself “the luckiest man in the world.” How can that be, the reader, early on, is likely to ask. Sandy writes of his handholds: his family, heritage, friends, education at Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford; his White House Fellowship, which fostered collegial relationships with persons of importance in government, commerce, and the arts; his service on the National Science Board and numerous other governing bodies; his three children and now four grandchildren; and
, above all else, his partnership in life with Sue, whose love and support sustain him in all things.

  Yet something more, he relates, accounts for his good life, something sighted people cannot possess with the same intensity. Sandy calls it his “informed life within the mind,” a mind in which thoughts proliferate and assemble “undisturbed by the constant flow of visual sense images.” That special facility has helped him to experience the joys of being alive and to contribute abundantly to the well-being of others.

  From a hospital bed in Detroit in February 1961, his sightless eyes moist with medication, Sanford D. Greenberg “made a deal with God.” If the Lord got him “out of this hole,” Sandy vowed, he would do all he could “to prevent others from going through grief like this in the future.” He has carried through on that promise, directing prodigious energy to the development of technology for optic-nerve regeneration. To the same end, his steady hand is at the helm of the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. These endeavors and multiple other pro bono initiatives are cause for the “Big Party” Sandy hosts in a dreamspiel he imagines and records with élan in a chapter of this book.

  Sandy will play the fine trumpet Sue gave him, and his Columbia College classmate and lifelong buddy Arthur Garfunkel will sing. An ancient Greek chorus will chant and carry on. Everybody who is anybody will be there, including saints, sinners, and lawgivers, scientists and statesmen, philosophers and artists, entertainers and captains of commerce. My husband and I, careful readers will note, are enjoying the party. In my own extension of Sandy’s dream, I have my choice of people to toast: Eleanor Roosevelt, George Gershwin, Ella Fitzgerald, and other favorites by the score. Bypassing the luminaries in the huge room, I raise my glass to Sanford D. Greenberg, who chose life in all its vibrancy. L’chaim, Sandy, to you and to Sue. You have presented a spectacular show. May there be encores galore.

  —Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Introduction

  Even this we will be pleased to recall—all God’s gifts of life, shining from birth to death. Chai—to life! To all of it. To blindness and exaltation.

  I knew him first on the steps of Hamilton Hall. We were coming out of our humanities class at Columbia College. It was 1959. I had seen him playing basketball that year—a powerful center, a bull. Now coming out of Professor Goethal’s class, the powerful man was beside me, shoulder to shoulder, six feet two. I felt his duality, tender and mighty. He spoke with a gentle resonance. We had just been stirred by Achilles, star of The Iliad. Could such arête, such heroic dimension, relate to our future? He loved that I treated all of life as precious. I stopped to glory in the beauty of light as it lit up a patch of green, green grass. The nation wasn’t funky yet. Punk had not been born. It was love of the moment to moment. We were Appreciators. Destiny sketched, character exchanged, we cast our fate as roommates.

  This was our town, this friendship of ours. We are the ones who can’t look at everything hard enough. What is it all but luminous? In tiniest increments, in our junior year, glaucoma set in. So I read to him. It was the natural thing to do. Follow the heart through even this. Tears blur the vision, sweet indecision to be or curl up back in the womb. We had our room, “four-o-six,” we prayed at the window, your hair was shiny brown.

  To slip from the shore and swim in the widening stream of our history once more starlit in the mystery of the mutual love we store against the night…

  The man behind the pen who writes this book is a Man. I was so deeply touched to read Sandy’s treatment of me in this magnificent book. I blush to find myself within his dimension. My friend is my gold standard of decency. I try to be his cantor, the tallis that embraces him.

  —Art Garfunkel

  PART 1

  Day

  & Night

  1

  Stranger on a Train

  I boarded the train and put my suitcase in front of me. It was freezing in the city. I felt cold air wafting into the car like a ghostly presence and pulled my jacket tight around myself. A horn blew, and the train pulled out smoothly, as if on air. It would be an eight-hour ride from New York north to Albany, then west to Syracuse and Rochester, and finally on to Buffalo at the eastern end of Lake Erie.

  My mind turned in on itself. A door had closed between my present and my future—a future that until recently had been laid out rather clearly. It was still daytime, but for me it was actually dark, my vision visited by clouds and what looked like swirling snow. This was deeply troubling: my vision still had not come back to normal, as it had done fairly promptly in the past months. I held the suitcase up in front of me like a shield. I used to scoop my little sister into that suitcase. Silently, I began to cry.

  A man came up and asked if he might take the seat facing me, although the car was nearly empty. I wanted to say no, but I said yes. I had been brought up to be polite to my elders, and I could tell from his voice that he was perhaps twenty or thirty years older than I. He sat down and let out a sigh and began fiddling with his things. After a while, he asked why I was crying.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. “Are you ill?”

  “No. Well. I mean, sort of.”

  “I’m an orthopedic surgeon. I was in the city for a convention.”

  “Oh, it’s just a problem with my eyes. An allergy.”

  “Ah. Well, I did notice they were a little runny. Teary.”

  Embarrassed and a little alarmed, I wiped at my eyes.

  “This convention,” the doctor continued, “you’ve never seen so many bone guys in one place. Orthopedic doctors have a bad reputation. They say we’re butchers. But that’s not it at all. Yes, some of it is blunt work. But with technology, it’s becoming more delicate. It’s not just fixing broken bones, you know.”

  I did not want to ask him if he knew anything about fixing broken eyes—in fact, I did not believe my eyes were broken. But they were obviously in some real peril. (In fact, they were dying.)

  He went on. “My wife doesn’t like it when I leave. She gets terribly worried.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sue.”

  “That’s a nice name. Does she live in Buffalo or New York City?”

  “She lives in Buffalo. With her parents.”

  “Is she in school?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s nice. It must be hard, though, to be away from your sweetie.”

  I thought of all the letters we had written to each other. “Yes,” I said, “it is hard.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Your eyes look red, a little swollen.” I sensed the doctor moving in closer to examine my face. I felt ugly and ashamed. Without thinking, I pushed my suitcase out with a knee to put more distance between us.

  The train was now going through the countryside up along the Hudson River toward Albany. We were outside of time. The country air would have been refreshing, but the windows were closed. The land, what I could see of it, was mottled with snow and seemed to stretch forever.

  The doctor took out a sandwich: peanut butter and jelly. A small carton of whole milk. A sugar cookie. I smelled all these things, and even though I was still confident that my problem would be fixed, I wondered anyway if I would become a better smeller, and a better thinker. I had just left college halfway through my junior year, without finishing my examinations. My grades would be shot, but perhaps there would be some sort of dispensation since my eye problem would certainly prove to be a legitimate medical condition. Though, of course, a treatable one. I would have to get a physician’s note.

  I was worried about my mother and my family, too. My father had passed away when I was such a young boy that I had had to become the head of the family. Though my mother remarried, I felt—I knew—that everyone in the family looked up to me, and I was
well aware that I was supposed to be strong. But this most recent episode was a chink in my armor. I hadn’t yet told my mother how bad things were, but when I got home, I would have to. Perhaps I would simply tell her straight out that I had temporarily lost my vision but that things seemed to be coming back to normal. Or so I hoped would be the case.

  “I would offer you some of my lunch,” the doctor said as the train rolled on, “but I’m not sure you would accept it.”

  “No, no thank you,” I said. I did not ask the doctor why he thought I would not accept it.

  “Do you have something to eat? A snack? A candy bar? I think you could buy one if you want. They sell them on the train.” I was aware of that, but I did not want to get up and bang myself going through the aisles. My vision was still quite muddy. My soul was muddy as well. I found this extreme physical caution disgraceful.

  “I don’t like to see a young man go hungry,” the doctor said.

  “I’m not hungry, sir. I’m okay, actually. Thank you.”

  “Still …”

  “Really, it’s fine.”

  The doctor broke off half of his cookie. “Here,” he said, “take half. I can’t bear to see you not eat.”

  “No, really,” I said. I felt as if there was a twig in my throat.

  “Honestly,” said the doctor. “I have a son. It would upset me terribly if he were hungry and not eating on a train. It’s such a long ride. And I can see that you’ve left in haste.”

  “I’m fine, sir. I’m okay.”

  “Please,” the doctor said, and in this last request there was desperation.

  I did not answer, but he leaned forward, with half the cookie in his surgeon’s hands. I sensed this and was unable to stop myself from leaning forward a bit, too, my long legs pressed up against my suitcase. I opened my mouth, and the doctor placed the cookie partway on my teeth. I took a bite; the sweetness seemed almost unbearable. My stomach was completely empty, and the sugar in the cookie, once I swallowed, hit me with force. I felt as if I had run a long distance and was now at home, relaxed, muscles feeling sore but good.