Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [17]
My parents set up house in an apartment on the south side of Chicago. My aunt Ruth and uncle Sam, my dad’s wartime buddy, lived in a nearby apartment. Next door to Ruth and Sam lived my mom’s brother, Abe, and his wife, Shirley. We were a tight family. We still are.
Dad and Uncle Abe pioneered a television repair business together back when TVs were rare and expensive. Because people invested $200 to $300 in their television sets back then ($1,500 to $3,000 in today’s dollars), they were willing to spend money to keep them working. It wasn’t a bad way to make a living.
My brother, Ellery, was born in 1948. Two years later, I was born on February 24, 1950, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cook County, Chicago. I was two months early and weighed just two pounds, thirteen ounces. My mother always said I was rushing it, in a big hurry to get into the world.
The day I was born, Chicago was buried under a tremendous snowstorm, so my mom gifted me with a special, commemorative name: Michael Blizzard Hingson.
A blizzard usually means heavy snow and high winds, but the word can also refer to whiteout conditions. Snow and ice reflect incoming light, and objects, landmarks, and shadows are no longer discernible. Land and sky blend, and the horizon disappears into a white nothingness. True whiteouts can render a person temporarily blind. Unfortunately, my blindness would not be temporary.
When I was born, my uncle Abe and aunt Shirley braved the storm and visited the hospital when I was just two days old. “The storm was bad,” my aunt told me. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you.”
Babies were kept behind glass in those days. “The nurse picked you up and held you so we could see,” Aunt Shirley said. “You were very, very small. You looked like a little chicken with a large head. They kept you in the incubator so your lungs could develop, and you were in the hospital for two to three months.
“When you came home,” she continued, “the family thought maybe you had a cataract because one eye looked a little glassy. I went with Sarah to every possible doctor you could imagine to see what could be done.”
Meanwhile, I gained weight and seemed normal in every other way.
One day, however, Aunt Shirley noticed something unusual. She was babysitting me while my parents and my brother, Ellery, were on a trip to California. “The second morning I was there,” she said, “I changed your diaper and got you all fixed up. I made you some Pablum for breakfast, took you in my arms, and we sat down at the table. There were three large windows nearby with venetian blinds. The sun was coming in so bright I picked you up again and stood up to close the blinds. The sun shone on your face, right into your eyes, and you didn’t blink. The light didn’t bother you at all.”
Aunt Shirley finished feeding me then put me in the crib. But she was horrified by what had happened. Could Michael be blind? She ran next door to tell my aunt Ruthie, and when my parents returned, she told them too. When I was six months old, the doctor finally made his diagnosis. I was blind, and it was irreversible. My parents announced the news to the family, and everyone cried. Briefly. Then they moved on.
From the beginning I was treated no differently than my brother. I also had my cousins around to keep me humble. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sam had two boys, Steve and Robin. Uncle Abe and Aunt Shirley had two girls, Holly and Dava. The cousins all played together in the yard behind the apartment house, and I was allowed out with them, even when I was quite young. My parents trusted us, and we were allowed to explore the neighborhood without a grown-up in attendance. With Ellery and the cousins, I regularly headed to the candy store, where I always picked out penny pretzel sticks and orange soda pop. Sometimes I held on to someone’s hand in that absentminded way kids do. Other