From the bedroom through the front room to the kitchen and then the bathroom was 23 steps. Down the cellar stairs was nine and up the church steps, five. His wife told him where on the plate the potatoes sat and took him shopping, maybe just ice cream and not too much else at a time, so there'd be something to do each day.

They would meet friends at the store, he remembers, and later he would lie in bed at night and think, "I wonder what they look like? I wonder what . . . " It was like that.

For nine years, Edwin Robinson was blind from a truck accident on an icy overpass. But last Wednesday, he says, he was in his Falmouth, Me., backyard clucking for his pet chicken ("She follows me around, just like a dog") when he walked under a poplar tree and was struck by lightning.

"It was like somebody cracked a whip over my head," he says. "I fell right on the ground, face forward." When he came to, he walked into the house for a 20-minute nap, and upon awakening, felt like rubber.

And then, he says, he saw.

It was in the front room, where he'd stopped on the couch before heading into the kitchen to eat a sandwich with his wife. "I was sitting there," he says, "and I said to her, 'Do you know, I can see that plaque on the wall.' It was one our grandchildren had made. 'And not only that,' I told her, 'I can read it.'

"So she said, 'Can you see the clock on the wall?' And I said, 'It's 5.'"

That was June 4. On June 5, after a 40-minute visit with his doctor who pronounced his vision 25 in the left eye and 20 to 30 in the right, Edwin Robinson, former truck driver, came home to his gray frame house as Edwin Robinson, modern miracle and media event.

And subject of medical controversy. Robinson's story, via networks and newspapers, has made for some highly skeptical doctors.

"There's something very, very screwy about this case, says a neuroophthalmologist with the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital. "In my opinion, from what I've read, it's really not phsiologically possible to be blind from a brain lesion and then all of a sudden, after all those years, to get your vision back. The odds are that this is probably hysterical . . . and that this guy, for one reason or another, decided he wanted to see again."

Says Malvin Krinn, a Washington ophtalmologist and attending physician at the George Washington University Medical Center: "Now a guy comes along and nine years later, he has electroshock therapy, so to speak? Well, how do you explain it? You have to assume that it was some sort of contusion or concussion to the optic nerve. Now, to understand how the electroshock restimulated things to start functioning again, I don't know."

Robinson's won eye specialist, Albert Moulton Jr. of Portland, Me., wouldn't return phone calls yesterday. "He doesn't want to talk to anyone," said Moulton's son, Stephen. "He didn't do anything, so why should he talk about it?"

Not that he wasn't asked. The media swooped down on everyone connected with Robinson. A shrine from Spain called. Representatives of fundamentalist churches reportedly phoned, interested in his making speeches.

It started with a neighbor's nephew who, as it happened, was a reporter for one of the Portland papers. Then the TV people got hold of it, and then the wires, and then "Good Morning America" flew Robinson, 62, and his wife Doris down from Falmouth, and brought his son, daughter-in-law and the two grandchildren he'd never seen up from Dale City, Va.

They appeared on the show Tuesday. On Monday, they were put up at New York's St. Moritz.

"Such VIP treatment," says his wife.

"We had guards," says her husband.

"Fantastic. You know, tears and hugs and smiles," says their son, Lee Robinson, a 37-year-old Marine gunnery sergeant who's thinking about managing his dad.

"I don't have any plans," he explains, "and I'm retiring next year. And the way things are going now, he's going to need some help. I think it would be a super idea. I don't know what you'd call it. Manager. So if he has to travel, I'd travel with him. Lik the stuff I've been doing here."

He points to the white legal pads of paper on the kitchen table in the wall-to-wall-gold-carpeted house. It is at the end of the cul-de-sac just down from the Seven Eleven in classic suburbial, Dale City, Va.

Listed neatly on one of the pads, by military time, is his father's agenda. Yesterday, for instance, there was a phone converstion at 0830 with a New York doctor. At 1000, a phone interview with the BBC; at 1100, The Washington Post; 1130, Newsweek; 1145, Channel 4; then, 1400 to 1500, KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

"We haven't decided on "That's Incredible' yet," says Lee Robinson, pointing to a piece of paper that includes a message to call 'To Tell the Truth' as well as New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, collect. There was also, he says, the $200 offer from the National Enquirer for exclusive story rights, upped to $750 after the reporter followed them from New York to the Dale City door.

The phone rings again.

Robinson, in cutoff jeans, bare feet, a red USMC T-shirt and USMC emblem tattooed on his right forearm, plucks it from the wall. "Hi," he says to another reporter. "He's out in the backyard with a camera crew -- another one. I'm going to have to squeeze you in here . . . ah, Jesus, it's gonna have to be around 3 o'clock this afternoon."

Out in the backyard, the sun bounces off his father's shiny head. He wears green sunglasses (his eyes are still tender, he says) a hot pink shirt, gray tie and blue patterned polyester suit. Against the backdrop of a robin's-egg-blue sky and a neighbor's aboveground swimming pool, he holds his wife's hand and faces a television camera that a week ago he couldn't have seen.

A little earlier, during the 1100-hours interview (this one in the living room) he talks slowly, with a slight speech impediment.

"It's all amazing," he begins . . .

"He never saw digital numbers; he never saw jogging shoes," interrupts his wife, who frequently interrupts a husband she's described as "growing out of my arm for nine years." He can see his own arm now, but that doesn't seem to matter. "I'm trying to think," she continues, "of allthe things that really amazed him."

"It went from a quiet little backyard that I'd been moping around in for 10 years," he offers, "and it turned into TV cameras. The house is full of them. The yard is full of them. They had me out there, feeding grain to the chicken."

It was in October 1971 that Robinson first wint to Moulton, his eye specialist in Portland. He was about 50 percent blind at that point, suffering from recurring blackouts after the February accident that forced his head through the back window of the truck. The doctor, Robinson says, told him this caused brain damage."From the base of the brain to the retina, there was no connection," Robinson explains.

A Lutheran who goes to church most Sundays, Robinson gives God the credit for returning his sight. But he's not sure, he says, why he was singled out.

"I don't know," is all he can offer. "I don't know . . ."

Robinson can only surmise God's motives. "He put me with this," he says. "I coped with it, and when the time came, lightning stuck me."