Tommy

They tied my arms down so I wouldn't touch my eyes.

I was two years old. The medical reasoning was sound, I'm told. A fresh surgical site where a right eye used to be is not something you leave a toddler unsupervised with. I understand that now. At the time, I was two, and someone had tied my arms to a bed, and my understanding of the situation was limited to the basic facts as I experienced them, which were bad.

Both arms out from the body, wrists secured to the sides of a high-sided hospital bed, spread wide in what I can only describe as a full crucifix position. The bed had wooden rails painted institutional white. The room had other children in it, other beds, other small bodies held in place by the tidy logic of post-surgical care. The room smelled like a place that had been cleaned aggressively and then left with something wrong underneath.

The surgery was for retinoblastoma. A tumor in the retina of my right eye. The doctors removed the eye. I was two, so the decision-making process, the conversation in the office, and the specific sentence my parents heard, none of that is mine to tell. What I have is the outcome. More than two months in that bed, in that position.

At two years old, two months is a twelfth of everything you have ever known. I spent it alone.

The hospital kept the family away. The logic was this: when my parents came to visit, I would see them and immediately understand they were going to leave again, and I would scream and reach and do what small children do, and the screaming and reaching were not good for recovery. So the doctors told my family to stop coming. And my family, who were trusting people in 1962 and believed that medical professionals knew the shape of things better than they did, stopped coming.

I am not going to editorialize about this. Everyone believed they were doing the right thing. The downstream consequences of removing all human contact from a two-year-old for two months did not announce themselves immediately. They showed up later. That is not this part of the story.

This part is the bed, and the ceiling.

There was a water stain in the upper left corner of the ceiling, roughly oval. I spent a considerable amount of time studying it. When your arms are tied down and you are two years old, you study what is available.

You learn to exist inside whatever space your own mind makes. You stop asking, because asking has not been producing results.

---

They untied me for meals.

That was the arrangement. Twice a day, sometimes three times, a nurse would come and undo the wrist restraints. I knew them by their shoes, not their faces. One pair made a soft, deliberate sound on the linoleum, like someone being careful about something. Another pair squeaked with every other step in a rhythm that I could predict from halfway down the hall. I don't know their names. I knew their shoes, and I knew that when I heard certain shoes coming, my arms were about to be free, and that was enough to matter.

They would walk me out to a small table just outside the kitchen. The table was low, sized for children, and it sat two. The food was not interesting. This was Philadelphia, 1962, and the ambitions of a hospital kitchen were limited. There was oatmeal. There was whatever came before oatmeal on the rotation.

The other chair belonged to Tommy.

I don't know Tommy's last name. I never knew it. He was close to my age, somewhere in that early window where children run on instinct and short words and the social filter that teaches you not to stare hasn't developed yet. Mine certainly hadn't. I stared directly and without apology, the way two-year-olds do, which is to say the way scientists do, if scientists had no training and no notebook and were mainly just absorbing.

Tommy had no arms. Tommy had no legs.

He sat at that table and he ate his food with a matter-of-fact efficiency that I found, even then, legitimately impressive. I will not get into the mechanics of how he managed this. He managed. He did it without complaint, without any apparent awareness that his situation warranted complaint, without even the posture of someone who had considered the question and decided against it.

He just ate his food.

Something took root at that table. I couldn't have named it then, and honestly it took me decades to find the right words for it. But whatever it was, it settled somewhere inside me and never left.

I kept watching him.

Every meal at the same table and chair. Just me and Tommy. He didn't seem to notice or didn't care, and at two years old the distinction didn't matter to me. What mattered was that he was there, and he was consistent, and consistency was something I had developed strong feelings about by then.

Here is what I noticed, across however many meals we shared: Tommy was not performing. That is the thing I keep coming back to, sixty years later, sitting in a quiet house at two in the morning with a cup of coffee that has gone cold. He was not being brave for an audience. There was no audience. There was me, and I was two, and I was staring at him with one eye and the bandaged socket of the other, and I was not exactly an inspiring crowd. He ate because he was hungry. He sat straight because that was how he sat. Whatever the opposite of self-pity is, Tommy had it the way some people have a good metabolism. It wasn't work. It was just him.

I did not have words for this. I want to be honest about that. I was not sitting there constructing a philosophy. Something quieter happened, and it stayed.

They released me eventually. The more than two months ended the way long things end: all at once, and then it was over. My parents were there. My mother's face. My father's coat. The smell of a car, which is nothing like the smell of a hospital, and this was a relief so physical I think I felt it in my back teeth. The ceiling I had memorized was replaced by a different ceiling. The nurses I knew by their shoes were replaced by my sister Tina's voice at the door and the specific sounds of a house that had not been maintained with industrial cleaner.

I did not see Tommy again after the last meal. There was no goodbye. He was at the table one day, and then I was somewhere else, and that was how it ended. I have wondered about him for the better part of six decades. I hope the world gave him what he deserved. I hope it gave him more than that, frankly, because what he deserved and what the world tends to provide are two different ledgers that rarely balance.

---

A few months after I came home, they fitted me with a glass eye.

It wasn't glass, technically. Acrylic, custom-made, hand-painted by a specialist whose entire professional life was devoted to a craft that never comes up at dinner parties. The ocularist, they're called. The one who fitted mine worked out of a small office that smelled like paint and something antiseptic underneath the paint, and he had the focused stillness of a man who understood that his margin for error was a human face. He matched the iris. He matched the veining. He painted in the specific quality of the white, which is not actually white, because nothing about the human eye is actually the color you think it is up close.

The goal was for people not to notice.

People noticed. Children especially, because children have a precise instrument for locating the thing that is not quite right, and once they find it, they treat it like a loose thread. The prosthetic tracked with my left eye but arrived a beat late, like a translation that's technically accurate but loses the timing. A second musician who knows the song cold but has never played with this particular band before.

I was sitting in that office while the ocularist worked, and I was not yet three years old, and I was trying to hold still, which is not a thing that children do naturally or well.

And Tommy walked into the room.

Not literally. He was back in that hospital, at that table, or somewhere in the world, living whatever life the world had given him. But he walked in the way he always walks in, without announcement, just present. Me sitting there, arms free, both legs, one good eye and one that was almost right, about to walk out of an office and back into a life. Tommy at his table, eating his breakfast, getting on with it.

You do not get to feel sorry for yourself. That is the rule, and it has never once failed to hold.

The ocularist set the prosthetic in place. It was not perfect. It was never going to be perfect. Nothing is, not really, once you see the seam where the original and the repair meet. Most people are kind enough not to look. The ones who aren't kind enough are also, in their way, useful.

Tommy ate his breakfast. He asked for nothing. He just got on with it.

I have been trying to get on with it ever since.