Blinded by the Light

Author’s Note:  A very special congratulations goes out today to Ken “The Rocket ” Roffe and all his “Windy City” teammates.  They are the 2013 Men’s Senior Baseball League Mountain Division World Series Champions.  The six day national tournament was held in Arizona, and for anyone who still plays hardball, this is a very big deal. Way to go, guys!

But great baseball news aside, today is my least favorite day of the year.  It’s the end of Daylight Savings Time.  I simply hate it.  And not because it signals that Old Man Winter is lurking just around the corner.

For the record, I love winter in Colorado.  You can play on the snow there and it’s always sunny.  They have as many VFR flying days there as they do in San Diego. That’s why the Air Force Academy is based in Colorado Springs.

But I do hate the gloom and the unvarying grayness of the days here in Chicago*** and the fact that you have to be under electric light all the time.

(***When I lived in Aspen, my brother Kenny and I used to play “Guess What Shade Gray Chicago Is Today?”  I had lots of choices- from gunmetal to battleship to charcoal to pewter. And I was always right- because from November until April, Chicago is grayer than I am.)

But most of all, I really hate the fact that once the dark sets in at four in the afternoon, I’m trapped.

That’s because I’m night blind.

I can’t see a thing when the dimmers go on. I turn all Mr. Magoo when the lights are low.

This makes driving after four p.m. in the wintertime impossible for me.  I can’t see the lanes, I am completely disoriented and the headlights of the on-coming cars blind me for minutes- not seconds.

My eye doctor tried to explain this condition- called “nyctalopia”-  to me once.  It’s usually hereditary and it has something to do with a vitamin A deficiency or something.

I’ve tried glasses, SUNglasses, eating more food with vitamin A in them, carrots.  But nothing has ever worked.  From as far back as I remember, it’s been Wait Until Dark for me once D.S.T. is cancelled.

If you’re among the lucky majority and your eyes expand and contract in the presence/absence of light, you have no idea what a pain in the neck this can be.

My ex never believed in it, for example.  He just thought it was my shabby way of getting out of picking up the pizza after five in the wintertime.

But one night, despite my protests, he made me follow him on some kind of errand that involved two cars.  He led the way, and all was well, until he saw from his rearview mirror that not only had I passed up our driveway on the return trip back, I had passed up our street.

He had to turn around and chase me, frantically honking and yelling as I blithely kept driving east on Hill Road.  I would have probably ended up in Lake Michigan if he hadn’t caught up with me.

He never asked me to drive anywhere after dark again.  He was convinced.

But that was many years after the problem had first made itself known to me.

I remember one poly sci class that I was taking at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. I lived on a farm in Reisterstown, and that’s quite a stretch from school, so I commuted by car every day.

My professor wanted to show the class one of his favorite movies (mine, too) Born Yesterday, and he scheduled a movie-viewing lab for eight that night.

I had no problem getting to the campus.  But when I came out, it was almost ten-thirty and I couldn’t seem to find my car in the parking lot.

Or the parking lot.

That should have been my first hint that the ride home was going to a white-knuckler.

I don’t remember how I found my way back home on that forty minute terrorfest.

But I was shaken up by all the near-misses with semi trailers and last-minute swerves to get off the right exit.  And this was a route I had traveled every day for years.  I should have been able to do it with my eyes closed.

Which was exactly the way it felt to me.

(Kids, do not try this at home but to simulate me behind the wheel in December at around six thirty p.m., just get out on Edens Highway and shut your eyes for a good three or four minutes at a time.  Makes driving kind of interesting, doesn’t it?)

And I don’t have to be driving for this condition to mess me up.

If I happen to come into a movie theater as the house lights dim, I can’t see the seats. Forget that the exits have big, red lights or the stairways all have those little airplane emergency lighting gizmos to mark their way.  They don’t help at all.

I inevitably end up in someone’s lap because, in the semi-darkness, it looks like an empty seat to me.

Men and women alike seem to take umbrage when I plop down on top of them.  They are not amused.  And I have to grovel my apologies and grope my way to another seat- hopefully unmanned this time.

But this embarrassment pales in comparison to a high school memory.

Andy Teton- a friend of mine from New Trier- had a house near the Wilmette Beach.  As sophisticated, jaded and oh-so-brainy high school seniors, it was our habit to go for a Friday night stroll on the dunes and discuss Life.

(Life mostly being how cool Emma Peel looked in her black leather catsuit on that night’s latest episode of the The Avengers.)

One night, as we strolled along the sand, Andy espied an unusual driftwood formation and thought it would make a very good resting place for two world-weary sophisticates like us.

I concurred and we made our way over to it and sat down.

It was not driftwood.

It was two people behaving even more sophisticatedly than us- copulating wildly on the Wilmette Beach.

Did we scare the be-jesus out of them!

(Matched only by the sight and sounds of their moans, groans, and then startled exclamations, as the guy disengaged himself, got up with no pants on and started chasing us across the sand.)

We ran for our senior year lives.

And when, breathless and panting, we reached the safety of Andy’s house, he turned to me and said,”Well, let’s just hope he wasn’t using the withdrawal method.”

Miner’s cap anybody?

Let there be light.

And soon.