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Okay. I'm not that old. I started kindergarten in 1984. Okay, so I am old. Insofar as I could tell, my parents had four options: half-day kindergarten, no kindergarten, home-school, or perhaps some distant private school.

The fourth option lie outside my parents' abilities, both financial and travel. I got stuck with the first option, as did roughly three-quarters of the population (most of the rest took the second option).

In the end, I failed kindergarten, withdrew from school, and immediately re-enrolled as a first grader. Apparently, the school had to fail 30% of kindergartners to get state funding or some such nonsense. No big deal.

Oh, yeah, and if Mr. Barry really cares about his daughter, I suggest that he administer an eye test himself. No one told my parents that I was legally blind without glasses until I was in the fourth grade. School officials and even medical doctors irrationally presumed that everyone who didn't pass the eye test were either uncooperative or illiterate or both.

In the fourth grade, my teacher wrote something on the blackboard. As usual, I couldn't see it from my desk in the back of the classroom. She told me to move forward until I could see it. So I advanced to the front of the room--with my face probably at most a foot in front of the chalkboard, where the writing finally came into focus.

This teacher astutely observed something that even the school nurse couldn't describe: I literally couldn't see anything more than a foot in front of my head. By the end of that school year, a pair of eyeglasses corrected the problem.

I still only can wonder what I might have missed because I couldn't see. I understand some of it now. For example, you can't catch a ball if you don't see it.