What would you want to see if you were about to go blind?

Anytime I stop in a bookstore, whether it is the fancy new Barnes & Noble in Coralville or the musty shelves of downtown's Northside, I keep an eye out for the name "Grant Foy." I'm not sure which section it will be in, whether I'll stumble across it in a magazine rather than a book or whether I'll even see it at all.

Grant was my one of my many college roommates; while certainly among the quietest, he also ranked as the most interesting. He also shared something with many Iowa Citians: a love of writing.

He filled gads of notebooks with observations and thoughts, which I never minded having piled around the dorm room because it put me in a good mood to pound out that next article for the student newspaper.

His writing certainly was in more romantic surroundings - rather than spend hours covering dry meetings as I did, he'd go on hikes to the nearby dam, maybe to a farmer's cornfield on the outskirts of town, occasionally even to the busiest main street bar, pen and notepad in hand, and write.

Sometimes I fancied that trapped inside him was a ghost that desperately needed to speak and so compelled his hand to move across countless empty pages.

Sometimes I doubt I'll ever see Grant's name on a book spine. You see, Grant was not a writer precisely but a diarist (as though a novelist, poet or journalist were the only way one could exist as a writer). Not even that term is entirely accurate, though, because his subject matter wasn't exactly himself but what he saw and thought of it.

***

I can't speak much of what was in his notebooks, for as a fellow writer (though a more utilitarian sort), I respected the privacy of a closed cover. Writing is a work in progress, and to look at any draft but the final one that the author presents is akin to watching your first date dress.

But I could tell by inadvertent glances at Grant's paper that his writing was not the same sentence repeated, and that it sometimes consisted of long paragraphs and other times of a sentence fragment.

Grant didn't write with a career in mind or for money. Nor was he a navel-gazer. Writing can help us better understand ourselves, of course, but like Meriwether Lewis who kept logs while he blazed a trail across knew territory, Grant's words were not principally about personal devils but the journey itself.

For him, writing merely served as a way to make sense of the world, to place contacts in the eyes to eliminate reality's blur. I suspect that's the case with many writers.

Indeed, as Canadian Humorist Stephen Leacock once said.

"Writing is no trouble: You just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."

Grant once told me he used writing as a way of forcing himself to remain aware of the world about him. It's a quality more of us should aspire to. Too often we do find ourselves buried in the mundane dregs of work, school or what passes these days as entertainment.

Upon hearing abstractions, too many of our reactions tend to the extremes of a knee-jerk tirade or an indifferent shrug rather than a careful consideration of the notion itself.

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself," Albert Camus wrote.

His words apply to the unpublished writer, too, for what kind of a society no longer takes time for what is most important?

***

Helen Keller once asked people what they would make sure to see one last time if they knew in only a few hours they would go blind.

An intriguing question. I would want to see my wife's smile, a tassel of corn waving in the breeze and lakewater rippling against a shoreline.

So what would you want to see?

Or hear? Or touch? Or smell?

And do you shrug indifferently each day that these things pass before your eyes, content with the belief you will not go blind in a few hours?

Grant didn't. And though I may never find his name on a bookstore shelf, he's my hero because of it.

(originally published Jan. 16, 2005)