Now For Something Completely Similar!

“The Rain is Gone...”

As children, we rarely notice all the tools used by the adults in our lives.  Complex items such as computers, washing machines, alarm clocks, and fancy underwear seem so meaningless.  I remember my first tool all too well.  The problems began just as I had started to write the alphabet in grade school.  Every day I would leave school with an overbearing feeling of emptiness.  I tried my hardest to learn all the letters and to form them correctly on the paper yet each lesson ended the same.  My memory serves me only the vague image of an upturned smile.  (You must take into account that there is a difference between an upturned smile and a frown, generally a frown signifies disapproval  while an upturned smile is an expression that seems to portray understanding with a twist of disappointment.)  Luckily for me, the owner of that expression was my teacher, Mrs. Joyce.  One day after class she took me aside and asked if I had any trouble reading the board.  Being young, naïve, and fearful of being anything but all the same, I told her I could see the board just fine.  There was no need to lie to Mrs. Joyce, she wouldn’t have mistaken by squinty-eyed tears from a mile away.  That day was the only day I played tradesies with a teacher; I traded my unhindered fear of individualism for a note to my mother explaining my recent venture into the market of facial accessories.  

My appointment with the eye doctor was torture.  To my recollection the first time I ever stepped foot into a doctor’s office it was at that very instant, with the optometrist.  Among the battery of regularly painful tests that doctor’s give patients with seeing problems, I had to be held down by four fully grown men in order to receive the silly dilation drops.  After the torture session I was forced to choose my implements of bondage.  My mom picked out a pair that bore a striking resemblance to Beaver Cleaver.  As I sat waiting for the doctor to finish putting my lenses into my frames I stared at my mother and her coke bottle thick glasses.  How could she have made it through school, she looked like a complete goofball.  

After waiting an hour which most certainly contained more than 60 minutes, the craftsmen of my first tool of life appeared.

“Here,” he said, “try these on for size.”

As I slid the glasses onto my nose and allowed my eyes to readjust, I calmly realized what I was allowing my eyes to readjust to.  All the blurs and splotches of various colors finally had definition; it could only be comparable to the first time a young chef gets a finishing sauce just right.  Of all the thousands of things I looked at on that fateful day, one tree remains the clearest.  The tree which stood directly outside of the optometrist’s office was no taller, nor more extraordinary than any other tree… Except to me.  Except on that day.  At first, I simply stared at its entirety.  The vibrant glow of the sun burst through the small openings between branch and leave.  Branches and Leaves!  I had never realized a tree had these complex properties.  The intensity of the entire image took my mind by storm.  The citizenship of my mental palette was immediately overpopulated.  Not only did this glorious tree have branches and leaves, but each individual leaf had its own story, its own intimate details.  Vision made the whole world breathe.  I can see clearly now.