Is that a tear in your eye?
Since adopting Tin everyone and their mother has great advice to offer us. I get this strange feeling that the older African American woman are positive I don’t know how to care for him and they stop to tell me, “He needs shoes; why is he crying; isn’t he cold?” Then there are the children who are always saying, “Ah, he’s sad, he’s crying.” No, I tell everyone, he has a blocked tear duct. Or he takes his own shoes off. Or how can he be cold when it is 80 degrees?
There is other advice too – as in when I was feeding him applesauce and a colleague called and said, “Applesauce? My child wasn’t allowed to eat apples till he was older.” What?
Or take peanuts before 4 years of age – forgetaboutit. So when I absentmindedly let Tin have a bite of a freshly made pistachio cookie, I nearly freaked later when I realized that a pistachio is a nut!
Well, now I learned this morning at the eye doctor that Tin needs his tear ducts unclogged and so he has to have a procedure, which is routine they say but requires him to be put under. Makes my stomach crawl inside out.
At least it will eliminate everyone and their mother, or as we say in New Orleans, their mama and them, from thinking that the tears in is eyes are because he’s sad, mistreated, or cold.
Albeit his leaky eye was also another tie to my mother – she had a leaky eye. I remember sitting at her dining table having lunch and her dabbing at it so carefully, so slowly bringing her finger to her eye with a tissue – it was then I could see the age in her – the sort of deliberate way the elderly touch themselves almost without recognition that they are attached to their bodies.