One of my annual rituals is a trip to the eye doctor for a checkup. I come from fairly long-lived stock, my blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate are low enough to cause the occasional raised eyebrow in medical professionals. But my mother developed glaucoma when she was in her 40s; my father had a cataract removed when he was in his 80s–just before he began to go blind from macular degeneration. So I take my eyes seriously.

When I was a kid I sometimes played blind, fascinated by Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and eager to try on a soul-trying hardship (so long as I could give it up when called for dinner). You want to believe that you could not only survive, but survive with grace, heroically conquer something like loss of sight. I no longer believe in my ability to be a hero; I would doubtless cope, but not without some spectacular dark nights of the soul.

Which is just another reason to be in awe of my father. Dad will be 95 in June. His current plans include making it to 100 (”At which point I’ll be out of money and you damned kids can support me,” he says). When he was in his mid-80s he went in to have a cataract operation and found, instead, that he had quite advanced “wet” macular degeneration. The wet kind (the kind where blood vessels have been bleeding into the macula, eroding its surface) is the harder to treat, and regeneration is unlikely. Dad did not spend much of his energy repining; instead he’s been aggressive about pursuing care and treatment, and exploring his new world. This is perhaps doubly impressive because he’s been an artist and designer all his life. In fact, in the 50s he was involved in the design and creation of the Perception Research Lab at Princeton; even after the lab was shut down (new department head with other research priorities) he continued to lecture and write about perception. Thus, when his eyesight started to go, Dad was able to speak the language of the eye-doctors. Woe betide the opthalmologist who tries to condescend to my father.

And in keeping with his relentless got-lemons-make-lemonade approach to life, my father has become a writer, and most of what he writes has to do with vision. He has identified some visual phenomena that his doctors didn’t know: macular degeneration erodes your sight from the center out–hold your fists in front of your face and that approximates what happens. You retain peripheral vision, but the center is gone. But rather than that central area being black, Dad’s brain often “fills in” that space, extrapolating from the peripheral data. He’s co-writing an article with his opthalmologist; he spear-heads the annual “Lo-Vision Expo” of visual-assistance aids at the retirement community where he lives.

The guy’s a mensch.

And not surprisingly, he really cares about eyes. As I said, he’ll be 95 in June. What do you give the guy who has pretty much everything he wants or needs, and can’t see it? Eyesight.

Not for him, alas. But this year both of the girls are giving a cataract operation in Dad’s name to someone who would otherwise be blind. For $50 you can give a complete stranger the world, and the eyes to see it. Even if Dad can’t see the gift, I’m pretty certain he’ll love it.

Jack Williamson died a year-and-a-half ago (November 10th, 2006 at the age of 98) but if he’d made it to today, he would be a century old.

May I propose a toast.

His niece, Betty says, “Jack would probably either have a gin and tonic or a tall buttermilk….”

Here’s some of the previous posts we did here about Jack.

And These Are Just the Novels

A Sky Thick With Stars

Laura J. Mixon on the Jack Williamson Memorial Service

Legacy

The House That Jack Built

An Undeserved Honor

<Raises glass> To Jack.