That’s how a guy at the hotel sports bar, talking to Michael, referred to people who can see.

Well, this sightling learned a lot last week.

CBA is usually a somewhat overwhelming experience, but I have to say that the convergence of over 3,000 blind people at our hotel for the national convention of the National Federation of the Blind dwarfed the now routine sight of Christians hawking their wares.

Have you ever been surrounded by not just hundreds, but thousands of blind folks? It was really one of the more fascinating experiences of my recent life. Learned a lot, gained a lot of food for thought.

They came with canes, they came with dogs, they came with companions, and the hotel was clearly prepared. The staff was extremely attentive, with everyone from bellmen to cleaning staff obviously trained to help out when needed, to lend an arm, to assist with the elevators and room numbers. All of the hotel restaurants had menus in braille, but not enough, for Michael observed one waitress reading an entire menu aloud to one patron. Wait staff had been taught to announce to customers “Your coke is on your left, the rolls are on your left,” and so on. There was a “dog relief” area on the back patio. The lower half of the glassed-in elevators had been covered in fabric, I learned, for the sake of the dogs – apparently watching thirty or more floors whiz past would distract or upset them.

And everywhere you went, you could hear the tap-tap-tap of the canes. The conventioneers came in all shapes and sizes – three redneck (for lack of a better term – sorry) blind people from Arkansas whooping it up in the elevator, gaggles of blind teenage girls in low-slung jeans and tank tops, all races, married couples, some small children with their canes, blind smokers congregating outside the hotel like smokers huddle together outside of any buildings anywhere and everywhere these days.

Makes you think.

I will confess something here, and I certainly hope it won’t be taken the wrong way. What I’m going to say isn’t intended as a joke, although it has become one between Michael and me. It’s a really honest question, borne of curiosity.

Being a naturally empathetic person, I’m always wondering what it would be like to be in another person’s shoes. The issue of blindness has also intrigued me. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because when I was small, my parents were very good friends with another faculty couple who had a then teen-aged daughter who was blind. I remember my mother carefully explaining to me that she had been born without eyes. I wasn’t scared, just interested…as intrigued as I was by that family’s Danish Modern furniture and cutlery, which I remember with exceptional clarity almost forty years later. Both Holly and her home’s interior design made a lasting impression on me.

It also may be because particularly in the last years of her life, blindness was a great fear of my mother’s. She never lost her sight, but her eyes did weaken, and that was enough to frighten her a bit, for the loss of the comfort and pleasure of reading at that point would have been too much.

So perhaps because of that, I have taken to wondering how my own life would change if I were to lose my sight. What would I do differently, I’d wonder? Well, I do like to travel (up to a point)…but if I were blind, would I still travel? I really don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it was simply an honest question about myself. I wondered…what would be the point of traveling if I couldn’t see?

I know it sounds like a bad joke, even a tasteless one, but that’s not the spirit of my musings. It’s a chance to meditate on what life is to me and what I make of it, as well as the other dimensions of sense and experience aside from sight. I have even mulled over a piece of fiction with the travels of a blind person as a center point.

So anyway, Michael knows all of this of course, and as we stood there in the lobby, surrounded by hundreds of blind travelers, he turned to me and remarked, “It’s like God has answered your question on a pretty massive scale, isn’t it?”

Indeed.

As I noted before, I found the confluence of events – Christians and the blind – fascinating. I had to wonder – if Benny Hinn or Ernest Angley were here, would they walk amid the conventioneers, trying to heal them? Did the Christians gathered feel any compunction to approach the blind and offer their prayers? Or is that all ancient history for innumerable reasons?

I return to inspiration for fiction – if I were to write something about the encounter between these two worlds, it would be rooted in the ancient metaphorical uses for the concept of blindness. For centuries, we have found blindness a comfortable and useful image for explaining faith and the lack of it. But just as in the modern disabled communities there are questions about whether blindness, deafness and so on should be understood anymore as “disabilities” or as just different ways of being with their own gifts (for example, in some elements of the deaf community, you sometimes find hostility towards those who would seek to improve their hearing, or towards parents who use newer technologies like cochlear implants to give their deaf children hearing)….so it is today that lack of faith is…not anything special or expressive of any real loss. It is simply just one way to be, beyond judgment and to suggest otherwise is an invasion of privacy. In my fictional take, the Christian finds the physically blind person uninterested in healing, just as the one without any faith in God he encounters out in the world is polite but unconvinced that he lacks anything…

But aside from all that, I returned from this encounter humbled. No romantic idealizations here, but honestly, you can’t help admire the courage it takes to go to a new place, literally feel your way around without your sight to depend on. Astonishing.