Tim Cumings

As I commute home each night (the “T” Red Line to Alewife, the bus to Winchester) I often reflect on my life and consider myself a very lucky person. I have a great job as a Customer Service Representative with Boston Edison, a job I got through the Carroll Center. And I enjoy a full schedule of healthy outdoor activities that nurture me as a whole person, not just as a blind person.

Most of this I credit to the terrific staff and volunteers at The Carroll Center. They taught me the adaptive and occupational skills I needed. But, just as importantly, they taught me the physical skills that exercise my body as well as my mind and that provide me with hours and hours of pleasure.

It’s been a long road to achieving this fullness in my life and, as any blind person can tell you, success begins with family. I was one of the lucky ones—my family understood how to get me started on the road to independence. While sending me to public school, they made sure I could read and write Braille, so I began to learn this difficult code at the age of six.

When I turned eight, I was lucky again that my parents contacted The Carroll Center to request mobility training. I was given a white cane and learned to go up and down stairs on my own, move about my house and, eventually, achieve full independence as a blind traveler.

My lucky streak ran out in 1985 when I graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor’s Degree, and the grim realization set in that as educated and capable as I was, it was going to be tough to get a job. For the first time in my life, I had real doubts about myself and my ability to operate successfully in a sighted world. The 70% unemployment rate among blind people seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

The Carroll Center’s teachers were there for me again, just as they had been when I was a child. In 1986, I enrolled in the Center’s introductory computer program, intending to add this knowledge to the communications skills I had acquired at B.U. I learned to use a special “talking” computer that translates digital information into synthesized speech – a real breakthrough for sightless people! This new skill was the key to my getting a job at Boston Edison.

When I’m not working, I take part in The Carroll Center’s Outdoor Enrichment Program, where sighted athletes are paired with blind men and women in a year-round program of outdoor sports and activities. Skiing in the Winter, canoeing and sailing in the Spring and Summer, and hiking whenever weather permits. I can’t begin to express how much these activities have enriched my life.

Thomas H. “Tim” Cumings