APH 150th Anniversary Essay Contest
First Place Winner: Grades 9-12
Josh Pearson
LIFE WITHOUT APH
The alarm clock was set to ring at 5:00 on the dot. I had finished the last chapter of my book and was settling down into bed for the night. Before climbing into bed, I stuck a new Braille label on one of my new CD's. Thank God for APH, I told myself. Thank God that they made such wonderful products for me to use. But until I had my nightmare, I wouldn't know just how useful those products really were. Have you ever had one of those nights when you just lay there, trying to sleep? That was how it was with me that night. When at last I did drop off to sleep, I was pitched headlong into a dream of terror. But this was no dream of psychotic killers or mad birds trying to eat me, this was a dream where my entire world of independence had been shattered. Here's the dream in its entirety:
I awoke early and stepped out of bed. The first thing I noticed was that my Bookport and Scholar, which I use on a daily basis, were not on the shelf where I normally store them. In fact, searching my room, I found that they weren't anywhere to be found. This wasn't good, as I had to read "Lord of the Flies" for English today and had a test in Algebra which required the use of the Graph-it program on the Scholar. Things were only made worse when I realized that I'd overslept by an hour. I bolted up to the kitchen and wolfed down breakfast. My mom gave me a lecture on the merits of not being tardy as we drove to school. Looking closely at my backpack, I found that the sticky dots and letters that I used to make diagrams for Biology were in shreds. My dog had savagely mutilated my tools of learning. As I contemplated a funeral for the great dots and sticky letters, the thought crossed my mind that I would not be able to make any kind of graphs for Biology today. I would not be able to label anything, either. To my horror, I found my Braille labeler snapped in half in my locker. It must have gotten stuck in the door!!
Thinking that the day couldn't get worse, I walked into my paraprofessional's office to explain about the horrors of my day. The dark power that seemed to be bent on destroying my life struck again, for my paraprofessional tearfully explained that the school had been vandalized last night. The only things the crooks had seized were the graphic tools needed to make pictures for Health, the maps and tactile drawings used in History class, a few Slate and Styluses, some textured paper, and all of the APH-produced Braille books from my English class.
Amidst all the sadness and horror at finding my necessary tools to get me through school demolished or stolen, I knew that there was one thing I could do right. That was to write graphs on graph paper for Geometry. Walking down the stairs! Math, I tripped and all of the graph paper I carried fell from my grasping hands. It sailed through the air like leaves tossed about in a summer breeze, and sailed out the window and landed with a wet THWUMP in the pond that abutted the school building. Practically crying now, I headed for lunch, knowing that they couldn't take my meal from me, though everything else lay in shambles. However, the worst was yet to come. For when I entered the lunchroom, a friend alerted me to what was going on the balcony overhead. The two Perkins Braillers had been taken hostage from my classrooms. As one of the students holding them raised his high over his head, my stomach gave a lurch. This was the last vestige of independence I had left to my name, and that was now to be shattered upon the cafeteria floor. The Brailler sailed over the balcony and plummeted down, down, down... CRASH!! The Brailler struck the floor of the lunchroom and shattered, keys and bars and knobs flying everywhere. As I bent over the pitiful remains of my Perkins Brailler, weeping for the loss of such a noble tool and helpful invention, I failed to notice to the second Brailler fly down from the balcony. When I did, it was only because the heavy object had struck my head. As the pain overtook me and I found myself collapsing, I heard the Brailler shatter on the ground like the first one had. I swooned.
Sitting bolt-upright in bed, I began to panic. What if all of these wonderful products were gone? What if my life was ruined because of the theft or destruction of APH products? Frantically, I searched my room and found everything in its place: Bookport and Scholar lay atop the shelf, my labels and graphing tools lay in my backpack, nestled snug between several APH-produced books for English. Breathing a sigh of relief, I crawled back into bed. What would life be like without APH? A horrible nightmare, where we cannot be independent, where all of the tools which help us through school and access the curriculum are nonexistent. Thank God for APH and all of their fabulous inventions and achievements in making the lives of the blind better. No words can describe the satisfaction that my day at school was only a horrid dream.