The albino and the cripple

They make an ugly couple. As the world see them, that is.

He is albino and mostly blind, not allowed to drive a car or operate heavy machinery, I assume, but that is all right because he is gleefully content to be a custodial foreman. Every task done from moving chairs and tables in classrooms to making sure bathrooms are clean and light bulbs are replaced in offices is done with excellence and celerity. (Always loved that word; thought I’d apply it to him.) One of my administrator peers once asked – he thought rhetorically – “Why do we have a supervisor of cleanliness who is mostly blind?” I don’t know the answer to that; it doesn’t make sense to me either. No justifiable reason, besides the fact that everything was always clean, and light always brightened each room one walked into.

Tim is like that, too. He brightens the room and is never a dark soul.

His wife has muscular dystrophy, is in a wheelchair when she’s not in bed and has something going on with her face that has distorted the way she looks, like Picasso got a hold of some real flesh and started fiddling around before he realized it wasn’t a canvass.

Apparently, as Tim told me the other day, her disease is progressing fairly quickly. She has good days and bad days, but it never gets better. When I see her, she always smiles.

The near-blind albino and the cripple. Not a pretty sight. At least in the world’s eyes. But there is One who sees into them and smiles.

The light is on, and it is shining.