| General Fiction posted March 22, 2024 | Chapters: |
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The origin of an idea
A chapter in the book What We See
What We See - Chapter 24
by Jim Wile
| Background A high school teacher wrongly accused of sexual assault reinvents his life. |
Recap of Chapter 23: Ginnie and Alan pay Tommy’s English teacher, Mrs. Dunbar, a visit to try to set her straight about Tommy’s trouble in her class. After a half-hearted apology for her rude remarks to Tommy, she still maintains that he is just lazy and not trying very hard. Ginnie nearly gets into a shouting match with her until Alan steps in and relates a story of his problem with dyslexia, how a caring teacher recognized this and allowed for it, and what a positive effect it had on him. They left Mrs. Dunbar, who they believe they got through to, and Ginnie thanks Alan for coming, complimenting him on his ability to stay calm and see things through “rose-colored glasses.”
Chapter 24
Two weeks later
It was Halloween, and I closed the shop at 5:30 as usual. I got Archie in until the trick-or-treaters were done and latched his door so he couldn’t go out on his own. I didn’t want him to encounter a bunch of strangers who might be up to no good. I expected that some kids around here might prefer making mischief over trick-or-treating. I will unlatch it later.
He was sitting up on the counter, watching me count the cash in the cash drawer, when we heard a knock on the front door. I went to answer it and found a tall witch and a shorter goblin wearing very realistic, frightening masks. They cackled, “Trick-or-treat.”
I knew who it was. “C’mon in, you two. Let me see if I can scrounge up some candy for you.”
When Ginnie and Tommy came in, they saw Archie sitting on the counter and went over to him. He absolutely freaked, jumped down, and bounded toward his cat door, planning to plow right through, but it was locked, and he simply crashed into it. Stunned for a moment, he turned, reentered the work area, and hid under my work bench.
Ginnie and Tommy both removed their hats and masks and came in to coax him out from under the bench. Tommy pulled him out and set him on the bench, and when they talked to him in their normal voices and without those masks on, he realized who it was and calmed down. He knows and likes our friends, but he just hadn’t recognized them.
They petted him and apologized to him for scaring him so, and soon his puffed-up tail shrank again to its normal size.
I wouldn’t be giving out candy because my house looked like a store with the sign out front, and I figured few would come to a store for trick-or-treating. I put on a jacket and headed over to their house with them, where Ginnie had invited me to have a quick meal before the trick-or-treaters began arriving. Tommy still enjoyed going out, and Ginnie always liked to dress for Halloween to give out the candy.
By around 8:30, it was all over, and Ginnie turned the outside light off. Tommy had returned with a bagful of candy and sat on the living room floor, going through it and scarfing down his favorites. I ate some of the ones he wasn’t fond of. Ginnie had just a little left over from what she’d provided, and she enjoyed a piece or two of that too.
Tommy told us about the speech he gave today in his public speaking class. Each student had to give a three-minute speech on a topic of their choosing in front of the class and had a week to prepare for it. He had spent the previous week preparing, with a lot of help and support from Ginnie.
“My topic was the things I learned this summer doing electrical repairs,” he explained to me. “It went pretty well, but I was really nervous, just waiting for my words to get all jumbled up. I told them I’d learned how to repair a dehumidifier, but it came out dehumdingifier. Everyone laughed when I said that. I was really embarrassed and started to blush. Then one kid called out, ‘It’s dehumidifier, you dope,’ which made the kids laugh even more. My teacher gave the kid the evil eye and pointed at him but didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to interrupt my speech any further, I guess. She told me to go on.
“But then I said, ‘Nope, it was a dehumdingifier, which is a really souped-up, extra powerful dehumidifier that could dry out a real humdinger of a flooded basement in about two hours. Haven’t you ever heard of a dehumdingifier?’ Everybody thought that was pretty clever, and I was able to continue without feeling stupid.
“When I sat down, Callie Lyons, who’s in most of my classes, told me I did a really good job, and she liked my speech. ‘Great comeback too,’ she said about my joke. She’s really nice. I think I might ask her to the Christmas dance in December.”
Ginnie and I looked at each other and smiled.
Ginnie said, “You handled that slipup really well, Tommy. Alan taught you a great trick, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, it was pretty good, alright.”
As I was lying in bed later that night while falling asleep, I thought about Tommy’s great recovery earlier today. That works well when you mispronounce things, but the biggest problem with dyslexia is the inability to make sense of what you’re reading. I thought back to what Ginnie had said a few weeks ago after that dinner, when Tommy told us about making his impromptu reading of the poem in Mrs. Dunbar’s class. Mrs. Dunbar had thought him lazy and was just fooling around for laughs. Ginnie had said that people see what they want to see. And following our meeting with Mrs. Dunbar, she also said she wanted to get some rose-colored glasses like the ones she thought I wore.
Then, for some reason, my thoughts shifted to Archie earlier and how he freaked when he saw some scary-looking creatures enter the store, but settled down after he heard their voices and realized who it was.
All of these things kept swirling around in my head: See what they want to see. See things with rose-colored glasses on. Hear familiar voices and then understand what you thought you saw instead.
And then a lightbulb flashed, and a wild idea took form. What if a dyslexic could hear what everyone else sees? Then he wouldn’t misinterpret what he was seeing. What if I were to invent a pair of glasses that would enable you to see a written image and then have it translated into words and fed to a speaker embedded in the frame, which would speak them softly to you so that you could hear the correct version of what you were seeing?
I came fully awake then and sat up in bed. Would such a thing be possible? I’d never heard of anything like this. I had read about something called text-to-speech that had been invented fairly recently. It involved reading a string of text already converted to its corresponding code into a computer, where a program could then use a speech synthesizer—another fairly recent discovery—that could convert the text strings into computerized sounds. Some of these were so realistic-sounding that toy companies, since the late 70s, have been using voice synthesizer chips in dolls that could respond to you with a human-sounding voice.
But the text they used was already coded onto the chip. These glasses would have to look at some text and convert that to the code needed to synthesize it into sound. How to do that?
I’d also heard of something called digital images. I remember seeing the first digital image ever produced. It was a picture of the inventor’s baby—very grainy-looking, but definitely recognizable. I think that was made in the late 50s. I even remember reading in Popular Electronics about a digital camera called the Cromemco Cyclops invented in the mid-70s that created digital images.
My invention then would require a digital camera of some sort to take a digital image of the text, which would be the input string to the voice synthesizer, which would turn that text string into its equivalent sound and send it to a miniature speaker that could play the sound to the wearer—all this in just a pair of glasses! A daunting task, to be sure.
Possible? I don’t know yet, but it seemed like a worthwhile tool in the battle against dyslexia. It would be a way to defeat the mistranslation caused by the brain’s scrambling the message of the written word. What an invention this would be!
Archie jumped up on the bed right then and was surprised when I reached down, picked him up with one hand behind his arms and one in front of his legs and stretched him out over my head. “Arch, you gave me a great idea when you freaked out tonight. What a clever boy.” Then I lowered him down and buzzed his belly before setting him back on the bed. I petted him a few times, then he took his place beside my legs, and we both went to sleep.
 Recognized |
When I began writing this story, I had no idea this invention actually exists today. I had told my brother about the story, and he said he thought there was something like it. I hadn't found it when I first started researching it, but further research revealed that a device called the OrCam MyEye was invented in 2010, which does exactly what this device does. A video of the OrCam MyEye can be found at:
https://cdn.commercev3.net/www.maxiaids.com/downloads/media/OrCam%20MyEye%20IntroEN.mp4
And here I thought I had invented it for the story! Just goes to show you that it's easy enough to conceive of an invention, but another thing entirely to actually make one that works. Let's see if Alan can do it in 1986.
CHARACTERS
Alan Phelps: The narrator of the story. He is a 28-year-old high school physics and natural science teacher in Grantham, Indiana in 1985.
Archie: David's orange tabby cat
Tommy Boardman: Alan's 12-year-old next door neighbor. He is dyslexic like Alan.
Ginnie Boardman: Tommy's mother. She is 30 years old and is an ICU nurse.
Artie Intintoli: Tommy's friend who also lives on Loser St.
Ida Beeman: Alan's first customer. She is a nice old lady who lives on Loser Street.
Mrs. Dunbar: Tommy's 7th grade English teacher.
Callie Lyons: A nice girl in Tommy's class at school.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. https://cdn.commercev3.net/www.maxiaids.com/downloads/media/OrCam%20MyEye%20IntroEN.mp4
And here I thought I had invented it for the story! Just goes to show you that it's easy enough to conceive of an invention, but another thing entirely to actually make one that works. Let's see if Alan can do it in 1986.
CHARACTERS
Alan Phelps: The narrator of the story. He is a 28-year-old high school physics and natural science teacher in Grantham, Indiana in 1985.
Archie: David's orange tabby cat
Tommy Boardman: Alan's 12-year-old next door neighbor. He is dyslexic like Alan.
Ginnie Boardman: Tommy's mother. She is 30 years old and is an ICU nurse.
Artie Intintoli: Tommy's friend who also lives on Loser St.
Ida Beeman: Alan's first customer. She is a nice old lady who lives on Loser Street.
Mrs. Dunbar: Tommy's 7th grade English teacher.
Callie Lyons: A nice girl in Tommy's class at school.
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