Grandpa McNeill was unlike all the other grandfathers in our town on the west coast of Scotland. My grandpa was blind.

We knew Grandpa was blinded after an accident when he worked on the railways long ago, and that he walked with a white stick. But it didn’t seem to hold him back and he was always cheerful. Besides, Granny was always with him, especially when they went to the local Darby and Joan club to meet with their friends. Sometimes they took my brother and me to entertain the elderly folk by singing to them.

Then one day, Granny suddenly took ill and never returned from hospital. When she died, Grandpa was grieving and alone in his darkness.

I was about six at the time and our small home was already filled with children; the eldest was about to get married but that left five more, the youngest a baby. However, Mum and Dad never hesitated. Grandpa was coming to live with us. We would make enough room to accommodate him. And we did.

Thus began a new stage in my education, for it was Grandpa who had the time and patience to indulge my curiosity and love of learning. He was endlessly fascinating too, for he brought a whole new world into our home that I would otherwise never have known.

Grandpa smoked a pipe. The smell might have bothered Mum now and then, but it brought a new form of playtime to my brother and me.

Along with his tins of “baccy,” Grandpa used pipe cleaners: long, white, fuzzy-covered wire. And Grandpa knew how to entertain us with them. Soon, we were making dolls and figures limited only by imagination and, best of all, no one else at school had them. While Grandpa sat back and enjoyed puffing away on his pipe, we were allowed to reap the benefits of his unhealthy indulgence.

Then there was the world of braille. Grandpa was an expert at reading this language of the blind. Sitting with a book across his knee, he used both hands to finger the raised dots and amazed me with the ability to make sense from these strange hieroglyphics. The pages were buff colored, the dots hardly discernible to the eye, yet they provided a wonderful sensory experience when I brushed my fingers across the page. I longed to be able to read them like Grandpa.

Perhaps this was an early influence in my own love of languages. A prolific reader from an early age, I also delighted in communication, in the pleasure of understanding.

It wasn’t only in reading that those raised dots were of such importance. It was Grandpa who taught me to play dominos, a game he enjoyed with his friends at his club. It was exciting when Grandpa brought out his long wooden domino box and I’d wait with anticipation while he put all the little black rectangles on the table before dividing them between us.

This time the raised dots were white against the black and were perfectly round. It was an ideal way to practice counting. Each domino had a narrow deep line across the center, dividing it into two halves, and the white dots at either end represented a number. As in most games, the number six was significant and a double six meant that person could start the game. It was so much fun, laying the dominos out so that numbers matched. Ordinary dominos have never been the same since, that sensory pleasure of touching the raised dots usually missing.

The most memorable piece of blind person’s equipment was Grandpa’s braille watch—a shiny, silver pocket watch that Grandpa would open whenever he wanted to know the time. There, again, were the raised dots that told him the numbers—and it was my blind and patient Grandpa who taught me to tell the time. He made it fun by encouraging me to touch the numbers on the watch and to listen to it tick. It was more than learning the hours and minutes, it was a complete sensory experience of feeling and hearing time pass.

Then there were the days I walked down the streets and through the parks with Grandpa. Of medium height, with a full head of white hair and wearing his dark spectacles, Grandpa was always smartly dressed and walked down the street with confidence. Head held high and a smile never far away, he tapped, tapped his way along, white stick probing from side to side to ensure no obstacle was waiting to trip him, or to stop him from walking into anyone. Like most blind people, Grandpa’s other senses were acute, and he listened out for traffic, or birds, depending where we were, teaching me to hear where I might have been content with seeing.

One of his favorite places was the small Scottish seaside town where our family often went on holiday.

We sailed across the River Clyde on the ferry boat and Grandpa sat with us on deck, listening to the cry of the seagulls as they followed the boat.

“That’s the souls of lost sailors,” he’d say, as we listened with awe.

Once settled at the holiday home, Grandpa loved to walk along the wide traffic-free promenade by the side of the shore where the pigeons were the main obstacles.

“Stand very still and hold out your hand with the birdseed,” he told my brother and me.

And sure enough, a bird often landed for a moment to snatch some seed.

It was another lesson in patience and touch. We all loved the smell of the sea, the pungent seaweed and the shellfish we could pick from the beach. But it was Grandpa who could identify a bird by its call, or a food by its taste and smell.

The formative years of any child have lasting consequences. It is only in retrospect I appreciate the uniqueness and blessedness of a childhood spent in the close company of the exceptional man that was my grandfather. His blindness was never a major source of anguish to him in all the years I knew him. An inconvenience sometimes, yes, and perhaps he had long come to terms with it before he lived with us.

No one ever wants to lose such an important sense as sight, but to my childish eyes, Grandpa was a special person. Not because he was blind, but in spite of it, allowing us to experience his never-failing hope in being able to do whatever he wished, adapting to his circumstances with patience and a willingness to learn new skills.

Grandpa McNeill opened up my young world to a new way of seeing, hearing, touching and understanding, and he gave me a legacy of possibilities. We truly are limited only by our imagination.

Rosemary Gemmell is a Scottish novelist and freelance writer whose short stories, articles, and occasional poems have been published in UK magazines, the US, and online. She is a member of the Society of Authors, Romantic Novelists’ Association, and Scottish Association of Writers. Scotland greatly inspires some of her writing and she loves to dance!

Header image: Stairs to Light by Alan Bern