January 4, 2011, Dear Louis Braille, I'm writing to send you a birthday greeting.
Tomorrow is your two-hundred-and-second birthday, which means that braille, the code you invented that allows people who are blind to read and write and communicate, must be about 187 years old, since you were only 15 when you invented the code! Dear Louis, that just blows me away!
When I was 15, I was busy pretending that I
could see just fine. My nose was quite literally buried deep inside every book I read; I was spending three or four more hours getting my tenth-grade homework done than my fully-sighted classmates, and I was in a "math basics" class (for dummies) because the guidance counselor at the high school I was attending said none of the math teachers could figure out how to teach geometry to "someone like me!" I would have been so much better off, dear Louis, had I known the braille code or about your life's work of making braille the accepted literacy code for people who are blind worldwide and going forward in time.
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