Princeton Day School - Link Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

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The Reality of Dreams Earl was dreaming of his childhood days again. He was playing with a hermit crab by the ocean, and the wet., gleaming animal huddled in the back of its beautiful house. The ocean was a blue never seen be- fore in his dreams and the white foam capped each wave like the snow on a mountain. The colors were so real and vivid that they made his eyes hurt. The gol- den was sprinkled with white gleamers by the sun, and the sun itself hit the water and was transformed into reddish tints. Suddenly, the alarm went off, and Earl was brought back to the black world he had known for so long now. He had ceased to be bitter that his dreams made him forget his situation, and brought back the wonderful sights, only to end in the void of blindness. Now he treasured the dreams - they were precious for they brought the only means of escape from a dark and senseless world. He turned the alarm off and found his clothes. He dressed mechanically, fotmd the eggs, and put on the radio. I-Ie ate slowly, listening closely to the broad- cast. I-Ie liked the radio because it meant that he was inferior to no one since no one else could see the newscaster either. An announcement came on that there had just been a chain crash on the turnpike. Earl got up very deliberately, turned off the voice, and wondered if any had become blind. He had be- come blind in a chain crash. He could still remember the terror of the car driving into the car ahead of him, the gleaming silver fender coming closer and closer, and waking up blind. He pushed the thought out of his mind and walked out of the apartment. Earl's braille class was at 10:00 o'clock, so he had an hour before he had to be there. To kill the time, he went to the public library, where he got a braille book out. He loved to read because the descriptions sometimes made him remember something that he thought he had forgotten, such as the way bricks are laid or the exact color of a cat's tongue - things like that. Many times Earl would spend the whole day reading braille. He was very good at it, and besides, it was another escape out of his siglitless world. He could see the colors so vivid and startling, and the lovely features of the earth so well in his mind that at times he thought he was really there in the book, and the blindness was a dream or fantasy, it would end as soon as the alarm went off. Earl put down his book and sighed. He thought it was about time to leave, asked, and found he was right. He had acquired a very good sense of time. Earl had a watch without a glass case, so he could feel the time but had found he really didn't need it since his own instinct was enough. As he came down the steps he tripped and fell down. He was helped up by an old lady judging from her voice and wrinkled hands. Earl felt a little tinge of guilt about having an old lady help him. After all, it was supposed to be he who helped her. Besides this, he had found it a little bit degrading. He stopped outside and found it drizzling a little. He tried to imagine what it looked like, the silver water falling and the people scurrying like cats away from it. He crossed the street daydreaming a little and a car screeched in front of him. He went on mumbling a thank you. Earl hated cars. After all, they had taken ' i ht. awayi-Iglfirizilly came to the Blind Research Institute. There they read and talked about a lot of things. One of the students asked the teacher what she looked like. 137 She said she had red hair, grey eves, and a small nose. Earl imagined her to be extremely beautiful, especially the red hair which he thought must be really attractive. He had known hair which he con- sidered to be very dull, After the class the teacher whose name was Mrs. Fletcher asked to see Earl for a minute. He ap- proached the desk and she asked him to sit down. She said that a man called Doctor Douglas had talked to her and it seemed that he was performing a series of experiments to cure severed nerve endings with a new chemical he had found. He was looking for an ex- ceptional student who would be willing to undergo the operation. The choice is entirely up to you, she said, but I must warn you that the experiments are very new and if something goes wrong it may damage the condition of the brain. Earl walked out of the room stunned. He now had the choice between seeing the wonderful sights of life and colors or brain damage. The decision was too big for him. He went to be undecided. He wanted so des- perately to see, but he would not forfeit any part of his thinking because if the experiment did not succeed he would remain blind and would not even have con- trolled thinking to help him through the world and that was the only thing he could depend on. That night he dreamed he was in a forest where pink and lavender birds fluttered on the boughs of trees and the dew and the soft brown earth filled him with rapture. He ran through mounds of yellow and mauve leaves and the sim filtered through silver spider webs. The earth was so big and he was so little, and all of it was his, all his. The alarm went off. He had made up his mind. That morning he told Mrs. Fletcher he would undergo the operation. The next week was spent dreaming except these dreams were held at all hours of the day. He would think how his mother looked now, he would go and see his old house, and was his apartment really thc way he imagined it? The day finally came. He lay on the wheeler bed, all the doctors had wished him luck, Mrs. Fletcher was there and it seemed as though the whole world was on his side. The next moment he found himself awake and he could see! But the white was not the brilliant white of his dreams, it was flat. And the blues and greens and yellows, they were all muted. Mrs. Fletcher spoke and she was short and plain and worst of all her hair was not red, it was rusty brown, not the bright and beautiful red he had imagined. It was all muted. He fell asleep and dreamt the beautiful dreams he had built his life around. F-Ieriol Burtle VIII First Prize Middle School Prose john Leyzorek VIII won honorable mention for his story, Arcturusian Revenge in the Middle School Prose contest. Black by Clarissa Roberts VI and The Magic Flea by Billy Plapinger VII tied for honorable mention in poetry. Acknowledgments The editorial board of the LINK wishes to thank the following people most warmly for the time and thought they gave to judging the literary contest: Professor Carlos Baker, Mr. john Davies. Miss Sally Holben, Mr. john Howarth, Mrs. Elliot Illava, Professor E. Dudley 1. johnson, Mr. john McPhee. Mr. George Packard, Mr. Peter Sears, Mr. Brian Swann.

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