The first thing you see is the shirt collar. One peak of the collar is sticking out over the pullover, while the other one is tucked in underneath the pullover. If you look closely one trouser leg will often be hitched up over the top of the bootleg, and the overcoat will be buttoned up wrongly, the first button having been put into the second buttonhole, so the whole coat is hanging lopsided off the shoulders, and the hem is six inches lower on the left than on the right.
You then notice the bed head hairstyle, all spikey and out of control at the back, and the egg yolk on the chin, and the bristles of hair on the adam's apple that the razor has missed. Then there is the Stevie Wonder waving of the head from side to side as though they are being wafted by some huge invisible giant fan.
They walk with hesitant steps and for the partially sighted a shadow on the ground can be a unexpected hole. The trouble with being blind is that you can not see how scary you look. You have no way of knowing that you have egg on your face, and that your chaotic nervous movements to avoid falling into holes or stumbling up steps that aren't there, are viewed by the outside world as some sort of psychotic mental aberation manifesting itself as schitzoid dancing while being unkempt and badly dressed.
But sit a blind man down in the back of your taxi and you might learn that Eliel Saarinen moved to America when he was fitfy and made a new career for himself. After being a huge success in Finland he experianced failure after failure, always coming second in any design competitions. The classic Samuel Beckett line 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' could have been applied to him. But in the end Saarinen did succeed and went on to found the Cranbrook college in the USA.
Never judge a book by its cover or a blind man by the way he buttons his coat.
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