More to be seen, than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done.

I've thought about it a lot: I just want to live far away from everything.  Insert the cliched insult to a cliched idea, but, I just want someplace small I can call my own, a friend mentioned today that "a home is the ultimate canvas,"  I sit here, in my little bedroom in total agreement, staring at my blank walls.  Sometimes, I fear I've got more to say than can ever be conveyed.  I've considered marking my room off to the exact dimensions of a prison cell, and only utilizing that space.  I need to be confined.  I'm going to let simplicity beget happiness this week.  No more complications.  No more worrying.  I laugh as I write this but, I know I can be the sunshine.

Simba: "I'm working on my roar."

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.

Imperfections

 

You Are Not Perfect

 

As a child I always looked at any sign of being different as being bad, I really just wanted to stay in the background.  Until I was seven, the plan had gone off without a hitch.  Mrs. Joyce would soon be the hitch in my seamless program, after class one day she pulled me aside to ask if I had any trouble reading the board.  I hesitated for two reasons; one, I didn’t know if there was a right or wrong way to read a board.  Secondly, I was afraid that telling my teacher that sometimes the words she wrote were too hard to read would lead to more questioning, which up until this point in my life was completely against my principles.  Either way, I responded honestly and told Mrs. Joyce that I had to squint to make out the tiny words she wrote on the board.  I think she sensed my fear because she calmly explained that I might need glasses.

“Glasses, what a horrible disaster,” I thought to myself.  I would be the first one in my class to have glasses.  The idea alone seemed to scream harassment.  A couple days later all the kids lined up in the gym for the annual hearing and sight test.  As I was waiting in line, I realized that most of the kids took their test and were moved to one side of the gym.  However a small fraction of the kids took their test, were given a piece of paper, and then wandered over to another side of the gym at the discretion of the proctor of the vision test.  After doing my absolute best to identify the letter E in various positions from about ten feet away I was handed a piece of paper and told to give said piece of paper to my mom when I got home from school.

My second verdict on the opinion of needing glasses came from my first visit to the eye doctor’s office.  To my recollection the first time I ever stepped foot into a doctor’s office was at that very instant, with the optometrist.  Four fully grown men had to hold me down just to get the dilation drops into my eyes, then came the bombardment of tests.  The first test seemed pretty innocent; all I was told to do was stare at a red dot and then BAM! A puff of air hit my eyes and I recoiled in the same manner as a deer hearing a gunshot.  Immediately following my recovery from the shock I was informed that they would now have to perform the same test on my left eye.  After that small destruction of my ever decaying innocence I sat through an hour of the doctor flipping through lenses and being asked which was better 1, or 2.  After muttering what seemed like the four hundredth 2, I was permitted to walk through the frames while the doctor discussed my ocular health with my mom.  I was not fortunate enough to just be near sighted or far sighted, I had astigmatism, meaning my eyes were a little more oval than they should have been.  That was the day I learned I’d be living with glasses for the rest of my life.  I was crushed, I had been in denial throughout the horrible process, thinking it had just been some kind of mistake on someone’s part, I was wrong.  To add insult to injury, my mom managed to find the closest working replica of Beaver Cleaver’s frames.  As we patiently waited for Dr. Gold to finish putting my new lenses into the frames I stared at the glass coke bottles sitting on the tip of my mother’s nose.  I was going to soon be joining her club.  Sure, it had a large membership full of happy and successful people, but the glasses wearing nation was not a nation I cared to be part of.  The few minutes following the doctor calling my name and doing the final fitting of the frames to my face are a haze to me.  I think it had to do with the gamut of emotions I was going through, like a crash course in the 5 stages of guilt.  Finally, as I pulled the glasses onto my face and they snuggly grabbed onto my nose I became completely aware.  For the first time in my life I could see.  I could make out the patterns in the carpet; I remember seeing leaves on a tree for the first time and realizing that everything in life was not simply a blotch of color bleeding into another blotch of color.  For months I allowed my eyes to feast on all the visual desserts the world had to offer. 

            I did end up being the first kid in my class to have glasses, however I also would like to think I was the first kid to realize one of the hardest lessons of life, we are not perfect.  As I’ve grown up I’ve had a lot of different pairs of glasses, in sixth grade I tried contacts, but it just didn’t feel right.  When I wake up each morning and slide the all too familiar frame across my nose and tuck the supportive scaffolding behind my ears I’m quietly reminded, “You are not perfect,” but I reassure myself in knowing that at least now, I can see that for myself.

Lower Case 'T'

It was a rare day in Washington State, the sun had decided to make an appearance and had coincidentally dried out the usual sulky, sopping, seconds-from-Seattle scene.  My mother, in her infinite wisdom and constant need to fuel the economy, had decided that this particular day would be a shopping day.  She loaded her 73 year old, crazier than a bitch on wheels mother and her 5 year old only child into her dilapidated 1973 convertible Volkswagen Super Beetle.  As I shoved my nimble body into what only a small European man would call a backseat, I avoided all the hazards that car had collected over the years.  First, I had to struggle over the lever that kept the car from moving when my mom wasn’t driving it.  From that point I had to make an acrobatic toss of my body over the hole which had formed behind the driver’s seat and beyond the barbed wire-esque metal spring that stuck up from the seat ever since we tried to take our dog, Teton, for a ride and he decided there were Milk Bones hidden somewhere deep in the upholstery.  After I strapped myself in my mom began the laborious process of getting Granny into the car.  

Granny had lived with my family for a number of years.  We never really knew what happened to her mind.  We did know she had a few strokes, which my mom believes led to Alzheimer’s Disease.  I never knew Granny the way my mom knew her.  Apparently, Granny loved me, unfortunately, the only way she knew how to show her affection was through throwing things at me and grabbing onto my hair with her death grip every time I walked by her wheelchair.  

In order to get Granny into the car we had to angle her backwards and slide her, rear end first, into the seat and then, much like putting pants on a toddler, we would shove her flailing legs into the car.  Slam, Click, and the job was done.  We had to start locking Granny in after she tried to open the door of the car and walk home while we were doing 65 miles an hour on the highway a few years back.  Basically, once Granny was in the car, she stayed in the car; given my mom’s wonderfully responsible nature, I often played the part of my grandmother’s babysitter.  

I can’t quite remember which store my mom visited that fateful day.  I remember the strip mall being stereotypically early 90’s.  The store fronts were adorned with names like BAR, FURNITURE, CLOTHES, and LIQUOR.  Mom’s infamous “short” shopping trips usually consisted of me sitting in The People’s Car counting the number of ticks between stations on the radio dial.  Granny would usually mumble incoherently to a number of invisible people who probably were paying as much attention to her as I was.  That day things got interesting.  I guess Granny realized that her “friends” were momentary figments of her imagination because she became very interested in the mechanical workings of the gear shifter that bolted into the floor.  Usually, being the good babysitter that I was, I would have stopped her.  I must have been off my game that day; before I knew it we were slowly creeping backwards.  To be completely honest, I didn’t think much of our journey in reverse until I peered out of the small rear window and came face to face with certain death.  

Slightly farther down the incline was a freeway of sorts.  I’m not sure of the criteria are used to define a freeway from other forms of roadway but the cars on the road behind us were moving rather quickly.  At age 5 I didn’t have quite the grasp of physics that I do now, but, I did a few calculations on the fly and realized if our trajectory didn’t change, I wasn’t going to blow out the candles on my 6^th birthday cake.  I looked into Granny’s eyes and for a moment we were connected, she was thinking clearly and knew exactly what she wanted, “Gimme a tootsie.” Connection terminated.  Realizing Granny’s grasp on the situation wasn’t quite as firm as I had hoped, I began looking around for help.  Suddenly the driver’s side door swung open.  The long haired fellow who sat down confidently in the driver’s seat was not my mother.  Without saying a word the man gingerly engaged the clutch and then pushed the brake pedal, bringing the car to a stop.  He placed the gear shifter into first and pulled up the emergency brake.  He broke the silence nonchalantly, “You guys okay?”

He sensed Granny’s lack of understanding immediately as he redirected the question to the sole person sane enough to answer, “I think..we’re okay.”  

“Cool, have a good one man,” and off he went.  I tracked his movement across the parking lot; just as he was about to enter the store labeled BAR he turned and looked back one last time.  The fluorescent buzz of the Bud Light sign gave him an almost angelic aura, highlighting his shoulder length auburn hair against a sullied white t-shirt.  I don’t think he actually waved but I’ve forced myself to remember that he had.  

Hours later my mom walked out of the furniture store, bewildered to find her car missing.  I stared at her from that awkward space between the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat, waving erratically.  Finally, she spotted us and galloped to the car.  As soon as she opened the door I started regaling her with my latest near death experience.  My mom started asking questions before I had even finished. 

“Who was this man? Where did he come from?  Did he smell like Uncle Dwight’s special orange juice?”

I informed her that the man had gone back into the bar.  When prompted for a description of him I answered accordingly, “he looked just like the dead man tied to the lower case ‘t’ that hangs in the hallway at home Mom.”  She was awe struck, she looked for the man from the bar for an hour.  She asked everyone about the guy; she had just wanted to offer him a reward for his good deed.  No one had seen him though, even the bartender couldn’t place him in the bar that day.