After His Blindness, a Stirring 2nd Act

Suddenly there was just the darkness.

No metaphors here. Ray Toelkes was 45 and trying to read the fine print of a Thomas Bros. guide. He couldn’t. Within two weeks, he couldn’t distinguish red from green lights when driving at night. His fade to permanent gray was complete.

This thing called life hits some people especially hard. Sometimes, what it takes away seems especially cruel. Toelkes lost his sight, and when you’re a man who makes your living as a cabinet and furniture maker, your eyes are almost as important as your hands.

And then there’s the ego. When you have a special talent, like designing and making furniture, you realize you can do things other people can’t. Toelkes says that while his college classmates in first-year industrial arts classes still were working their way around cheese boards, he was making desks and tables.

No brag, he says; just fact.

In the 1980s, he says, he had a woodworking business in San Diego that employed 15 people and did a million dollars in sales. Even after the business slumped and went under, he made a living as a self-employed cabinet and furniture maker.

Then came 1997, and there went his eyesight, the result of Type 2 diabetes that he now says he could have controlled better if he’d listened to his doctor.

Toelkes went on disability. “My whole life I was wanting to be independent, he says. “And when I lost it, it was an emotionally devastating experience. When you’re going along making 80 to 100 grand and then you go to 12 grand, you’re pretty shocked.”

For many people, the story would end there. Some blows just lay you too low.

Toelkes knows. He was down there for a year or so, before he started to pull himself out. And that’s why we’re talking in the Santa Ana town house he shares with his second wife and her two sons. A friend of his had told me about the twist in Toelkes’ life that now has him up and running again.

As much as Toelkes loved woodworking, so it was with cooking. He’d cook family dinners and, for a time after he first went blind, he cooked daily for 12 people at a board and care facility.

About three years ago, a friend asked Toelkes if he’d cater a party for 25 to 30 people. Toelkes said he would. Then he did another, then a third.

In 2003, he did 20. In 2004, he did 40. The “My Chef Ray” business (yes, that’s also its Web address) was percolating. If it keeps going, Toelkes says, his disability payments may have to end.

Out of nowhere, a lifelong love became his psychological salvation. Cooking requires the same deft touch and planning as working with wood. And despite his blindness, Toelkes honed his senses and timing and turned his passion into profit.

The menu trends toward “family style” and is sprinkled with choices like pork cutlets and pot roast.

Despite the free plug, this isn’t meant to be a business story. It’s about a guy who thought the world had stripped him bare but found out it hadn’t. Going blind didn’t end the game for him; it just sounded the whistle to start the second half.

“I don’t think about what could have been,” says Toelkes, who turns 53 on Saturday. “I think more about what I need to do. And I still don’t think I’m blind. I know I’m blind. I know when I leave a lighted room and go into the dark that I can’t see anything.”

That, Toelkes says, is the reality. Slice and dice it any way you want, but that’s the way it is.

And although his inner voice still wants to tell people he can do things by himself, he’s also learned to take someone’s arm when he needs help.

“I’m a different man than I was then,” he says, referring to the self-made man of yesteryear. “I’m absolutely a different man. I have become humbled by my experience.”

Then, with a laugh, he adds, “Well, not completely.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.