Observing the world through soft focus
My mother always saw the world through rose colored glasses and that is what kept her sane because she could not suffer reality. I always thought I took a sharp, clear view of the world but then at 45 when my eyesight deteriorated and I couldn’t read anything and I couldn’t remember anything I realized my focus was not as crisp as all that. I went to the eye doctor and he prescribed new glasses and I asked how often I had to wear them and he said, “Anytime you want to see.” Grrrr.
So I wear them to work and to read but the rest of the time I meander through the world seeing it through soft focus as he indicated the state of my sight. So this morning while I was walking though the park, amidst that welcoming quiet that only holidays bring (no traffic, no cars, no people, hardly a dog), I noticed the lagoons were low and so still that you could see every colored leaf and puffy cloud reflected on the surface. We turned a corner and behind a tree a white egret stood poised for flight and when Heidi made a move towards it, it flew, wings stretched out almost as wide as Heidi is tall.
Then we saw a white errant duck from the cluster that was released irrationally into the bayou careening with the brown ducks and I thought to myself, you don’t even know you are different as the duck chuked back and forth along with the others. As we rounded another corner with a dense grove of trees, tucked in next to the walkway were four swans, three white and one black, all grooming modestly in their cove. Their color stood out stark against the still dark water. Vibrant and breathtaking.
We saw a couple of our fellow park friends – the guy who comes and does sit ups and reads his paper on the bench while he talks on the phone, the guy who walks with his weights, the girl who runs now without the black lab who passed a year or two ago, and we saw Loca’s arch enemy #1, the dog she loves to hate, the one with the oversized pink ears. And we saw the woman who dated a guy who was interested in me a while back; she always wears glasses when she walks and it got me thinking.
What would I see if I actually was wearing my glasses?
A friend of mine is turning 47 next week, and I told her when she turned 45 that it was all downhill because losing your ability to read without glasses is a real pain. She’s been going through the usual issues at 47, loss of sight, loss of memory, loss of patience and the other day in an email string about her birthday celebration I reminded her I told her it was all downhill at 45, except what I didn’t tell her is the ride down is what we spend all that time climbing to the top for – weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.