A story of resilience: 'Exciting Life of Joe Sorenson' a compact and lively autobiography

Joe Sorenson’s story is one of resilience and strength of character.

He was born blind. Then after surgery at 10 days old, he said he was able to see bright colors, light and some objects up close, though only with his left eye.

And, Sorenson added, by the time he was five he had undergone a total of 13 eye operations.

With the help of computer adaptive technology, Sorenson, an 83-year-old Albuquerque resident, wrote, edited and spell-checked his book “Exciting Life of Joe Sorenson.”

The subtitle states it is “Volume 2,” but that’s misleading. He said the two volumes are actually combined into one volume that is recently republished.

It’s a compact, lively, unpolished autobiography, heavily sprinkled with poetry.

A poem in the book “With Partial Sight” reveals his enduring positive outlook: “Oh my, I can see,/with glee,/the color red,/the sun,/the clouds,/lights — the white, white snow!/Oh my, the faces/up close/like my wife/and my mother who is in heaven./All kinds of flashlights,/lightning from thunderstorms-/oh, what a flash!”

In the second chapter, Sorenson writes about a visit from the superintendent of the Minnesota Braille and Sight Saving School in Faribault, Minnesota, 55 miles away from St. Paul, where Joe grew up.

Sorenson recalled that the school official informed his parents about all the things their four-year-old son could learn there. One thing was learning braille.

His parents declined the offer and instead sent him to the St. Paul Public School. That school, Sorenson said, promised to teach him braille, but in fact it did not.

“I was happy to be a normal kid and play like the sighted kids do,” Sorenson happily remembered.

At age five, he was attending kindergarten at the Gordon School. The next year he was in first grade at the Hill School in St. Paul.

There he was supposed to start learning braille but said no one at the school had the training to teach it.

So Sorenson said he spent two years at the Hill School mostly playing in an indoor sandbox. During lunch breaks, he listened to radio station KUOM, where later in life, Sorenson said, he would work as a student announcer.

One day in 1948, his dad came home with a braille book.

What follows are seven pages of poems. One of the poems, “My Dad,” is about Sorenson’s braille-absent years at the Hill School: “Oh my,/How mad he was/that I couldn’t read!/He raised his voice,/not at me,/but at the school.”

Then the book reverts to the narrative. It is 1949 and Sorenson’s parents finally agreed to send their son to the Braille and Sight Saving School. Because he hadn’t learned braille, he had to repeat kindergarten.

He quickly caught on to braille and, socially, came out of his shell.

Sorenson did dramatic readings, played the trumpet in the school band, sang in the school chorus and read from a braille hymnbook.

After graduating in 1962, Sorenson sold greeting cards door-to-door then, living on his own, worked at snack stands in public buildings selling candy bars, cigarettes and other items.

He relates how he met his first wife, Ginny.

In 1972, Sorenson writes, he took an Introduction to Broadcasting class at the University of Minnesota. That led to a job as a radio announcer, some of it playing music for a soul-gospel program. And he studied drama.

Sorenson and his wife moved to Albuquerque in 2006. On a visit here the previous year, they befriended Ellen, who is legally blind and wheelchair-bound.

Sorenson and Ellen had an Albuquerque soul-gospel radio show for a while.

When Ginny’s health began to worsen, Ellen became part of her caregiving team.

Ginny died in April 2015. Sorenson and Ellen later married.

It was soon after Ginny’s death that Sorenson took a strong interest in poetry. He began listening to Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac online, joined the Albuquerque chapter of the New Mexico Poetry Society and started contributing poems to the Albuquerque-based Fixed and Free Poetry Quarterly anthologies and Fixed and Free’s monthly readings.

Sorenson and Ellen also collaborated on writing some poems for his book.

“People respond positively to Joe. He’s so enthusiastic,” said Billy Brown, editor of the quarterly and organizer of the Fixed and Free readings. “Joe has a strong speaking voice and I think he’s a terrific guy.”

Sorenson said he reads scriptures out loud in braille on Sundays at First United Methodist Church. “My job title at the church is liturgist,” he said.

He said he doesn’t read books but enjoys reading newspapers and magazines provided by the New Mexico Commission for the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind.