Paul HostovskyBRAILLE SUNRISEYou can read a braille book when it's closed in your lap. You can't read a print book when it's closed in your lap. But you can read a closed braille book by simply slipping your hand inside and feeling the dots with your finger, the book closed with your hand inside it, reading. Slipping my hand inside a closed braille book when I'm on a crowded subway, say, clandestinely reading a few paragraphs without anyone around me knowing what I'm doing, feels a little like slipping my hand inside the blouse of my girlfriend, on a crowded subway, say, and copping a feel without anyone seeing because they're all reading or sleeping or looking out a window. Then the smile in her eyes, as the whorl of my index finger furtively finds her nipple–pausing over it like a favorite passage–would be as indecipherable as the dots on this braille page are to the sighted. And that's what I love about braille. It's a secret code, invented for that purpose–to keep secrets– by a French military man, Charles Barbier, who was unable to sell the idea to the French military, so he tried giving it away for free to the school for the blind in Paris where Louis Braille was a student in 1819. But the school wasn't interested either. Or rather, the school's director, the vainglorious Sebastien Guillie, wasn't interested. And he refused to adopt Barbier's method of raised dots. But the blind children were interested. They got their hands on the dots and they loved them! They said the dots were much better than the cumbersome system of embossed letters that the school was using at the time. And so shortly thereafter, when Guillie was fired for scandalously slipping his hand inside the blouse of one of the music teachers, the new director, Dr. Pignier, not only embraced Barbier's method of raised dots, he also encouraged the young Louis Braille to refine it and improve it and eventually to develop it into the current system of literacy that bears his name and is used by blind people all over the world. And that's why, today, you can read a braille book when it's closed in your lap, or when it's closed in someone else's lap, someone who happens to be sitting next to you, like your girlfriend; your girlfriend who is reading a braille book closed in her lap on a crowded subway, say, and she comes across a passage that makes her smile. And she wants to share it with you. So she leans over, she leans in close so you can smell her fresh clean scent and hear her sweet high laughter in your ear, saying: "Hey, honey, check this out." And she takes your hand in her hand and guides it over to her lap, and you slip your hand inside the book in her lap and you read what she was just reading. And nobody sees you doing this because they're all reading or sleeping or just looking out of windows. And soon a smile begins to rise on your face like a sunrise, so now you're both sitting there smiling over the same passage in the same braille book closed in her lap with your hand and her hand inside it.
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