Leva's laughter rippled through the phone last week as she told the story. Simpson and his brother have been blind since birth. The mother's grousing trumpeted triumph, not exasperation.
Lack of vision hasn't meant lack of gumption for David Simpson. Now 55, he retired from Verizon in November 2003, after 21 years in mainframe database design. For a quarter-century, he has sung baritone with the Mendelssohn Club, a prominent choral force in Philadelphia, and in December he made his acting debut with the city's Amaryllis Theatre.
"He's really serious about living," said Leva, also awed by the fact that Simpson has to "describe things he has never seen."
"I have not allowed myself to get old," Simpson said at his Glenside home.
A burly man, just over 6 feet with a silver-streaked braid that trails off at the shoulder blades, he dominated his small study. He was seated in an office chair that swiveled, and his fingers skipped up and down the traditional keyboard on his lap, commanding a computerized voice that rapidly fired off the contents of his computer as he searched for poems to share.
Occasionally, he swiveled around to the braille keyboard at his left to help out. A Casio keyboard sat at his right elbow.
"I decided later in life that I really wanted to write, and kind of by accident," Simpson was saying. An engaging man, he tells his life in anecdotes. This one was about an old girlfriend taking a night course at Temple University, the Voice Within. Her experience took him to the Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.
That was 1993. Within two years, the man who had considered himself "not good enough" to be an English major as an undergraduate at Bucknell University dropped to part time at Verizon and entered New York University to earn a master's in creative writing.
"I just took a sleeping bag up there and slept on classmates' floors," Simpson said. "I was 43 . . . 'old enough to be my father,' " one classmate told him.
