Tanney is blind since birth.
She is a strong Braille reader, and works once a week at Canyon Ranch translating their marketing literature and meal menus into braille.
She plays piano. She doesn’t read music, but says she has a great ear for songs, and whistled a scale of notes during a recent conversation – key of F, she says – and then whistled the next scale. “That was the key of B flat.”
“Tell me what this is,” she said, making several stop-and-go sounds. “That’s punctuation! The first was a question mark. The second was a semi-colon.”
She then whistled again. “That was a White-breasted Nuthatch.” She explained that she has CDs of bird whistles and enjoys listening to the sounds.
Tanney rattled off a list of more than 15 countries. “I took a DNA test, I’m from all of those countries.” From there she spoke phrases in several languages.
Asked about her good friends, she listed a few dozen first names, mostly from her BCArc home in Lenox, which she shares with three other individuals, and her BCArc day program, the Center for Development in Lee.
“I like living here,” she said. “I like to read in my room, I like music, I have friends, I listen to birds,” she said, maneuvering around the room, avoiding her keyboards as easily as someone with sight.
Problems at Birth
“I was born 1.5 pounds,” she typically explains to new acquaintances. “Three months premature. When they put me in an incubator, the oxygen blinded me.”
Her first move when meeting someone is to hold their arm and ask them a slew of questions: name, birthdate, heritage for starters.
After some math calculations out loud, she concludes: “You were born the year of the rabbit. You are Neptune. I’m Mercury. I’m creative.”
“You are a viola. Am I a violin or a viola?” she asked, singing a high note.
She doesn’t accept goodbye in English, instead offers a lesson in goodbye in several languages. She finally accepted “Au revior,” only after correcting the accent several times.
