she is sitting home one evening, alone, her son at his grandmothers, her husband at work, not to be home for another 10 hrs. she decide to go online with her webtv, check her email, then go to her favorite chatrooms to say hey now and hello to her online friends and family. it started out an enjoyable evening in the chatrooms, lots of her friends are online. Chatting with friends she soon realizes her melancholy mood has changed to a happy cheerful one. some time passes and she is getting ready to go to another chat room, to meet with others to dicuss homepage building and offer and recieve tips. just then, a message, "the connection to your internet service provider has been broken" she cliks on the button to redial. now she sees "phone line is in use or dissconnected" she must have messages in her voice mail box. she dials the number to her voice messaging system and finds that the two new messages that have not been heard, were just clicks, hang ups. irritated she goes back to the webtv and again clicks on the box to redial, this time she is successful, she gets back online only to get "the chat service is not working" she tries again, still not able to get onto the chat server, she goes to another one and visits for a couple minute with some other friends, she then transfers back to the other chat server and goes to the chat room to discuss homepage help, she is late but others are their needing assistance, she tells them how to link pages together. she is going to go back and talk to her friends in the chatroom when again "chat service is not working" she goes to the other server and is playing a trivia game with her friends when "the service to your internet service provider has been broken", clicking on the button to redial she gets the message "phone line is in use or dissconected" going to dial up the voice messaging service she finds that the phone line is dead! she waits a minute and tries again, the line is still dead! suddenly the lights go out in the house, it is dark now and she is alone. she sits in the dark stillness and is startled by a loud noise at the outside door. is someone banging on it, opening it? she begins to feel that familiar lump in her stomach, as she quietly goes over and grabs the rifle and the flashlight and goes to see who is at the door. she thinks about the dead phone line, about the electricity going out when it is not windy or stormy out. she quickly pulls open the door with rifle ready clicks on the flashlight, not knowing what to expect who will be there.... dawg, it is her dog, wanting to come in. she goes to bed, the power is off for quite a long time. she awakens sometime later to sounds at the door again, the power is still off, dawg barks, she lay listening in the dark. "hi honey, i'm home"! she is glad to hear the familiar voice....

Shannon, who was my best friend in elementary school was always trying to imagine what color looked like. Because she had lost her sight, she would ask me to try and describe it to her. I am sure I always failed to even come close to charactrizing color as I saw it, perhaps because I had always seen it. One time I closed my eyes tightly and turned my face toward the sun. I could see shapes and patches the shade of red and bright flashes of white light every so often. I told Shannon to do the same, wondering if she could see the abstract shapes and shades just as I was observing them with my eyes tightly shut. I will never know if she could see in her dark world., the abstract shapes and shades of color that I saw. Shannon never told me. Perhaps she knew it would upset me to fail her, just as it was always disconcerting to her not to be able to know what color looked like. Shannon had not been born blind. She lost her sight when she was very young. But she could not remember ever being able to see. I don't know what caused her blindness, nor do I know if she was ever able to see again. I wonder if doctors were ever able to restore her sight. I moved from the town we lived in at the end of my elementary schooling. Shannon likewise moved to another town, where she could go to a school for the blind. I never heard from or about her again. Shannon was in my Girl Scout troop. She always did everything we did. From regular meetings to camp trips, she always did her part, pitching tents, washing dishes, selling cookies, and sharing ideas. She never let her sighlessness keep her from joining us. On campouts Shannon always found her way around the camp right away and in the evenings and at night she always aided the rest of us in finding our way. She was our eyes in the dark. I recall one morning near the end of the school year Shannon took my hand and told me to close my eyes. She spent the day showing me how she saw things. I had to keep my eyes closed the whole time. Shannon read our lessons out loud while I followed her with my fingers in her braille books. She taught me to count my steps from place to place, constantly having to tell me how many steps to take, keeping me safe from desks, chairs, doorways, steps and other hazards. Shannon showed me how to see the water in the drinking fountain, so that I would not get a shower when I got a drink. She taught me how to keep from spillling the contents of my thermos all over the table at lunch time. She even had me playing hopskotch and jump rope without falling over my own feet. I was taught to listen as we walked so that we wouldn't run into people in front of us in the hallways, or walk into doors being opened. I saw in my mind a lot of what I heard, because I already knew it from sight. But what did Shannon see? I always wondered this, but I could never know. By participating, I learned a little about how Shannon saw, how she listened, how she counted her steps from place to place, how she saw with her fingers what I saw with my eyes. I will never forget Shannon or the impact she had on my early school years. I became more aware of the problems of the blind and handicapped, how they were treated so differently, often unfairly, by other people. I will always hope that maybe in some way I helped shannon expand her sight of the world. maybe someday everyone will stop to look at the world through someone elses eyes.