Re-Writes of Passage: Chapter Eight

Seeing a World I'd Never Seen Before

Photo by Eyekeeper Eyekeeper on Unsplash

I remember the day I took my daughter Annie to the optometrist.. She was nine years old. On the way there, she surprised me by saying she hoped she needed glasses. I assured her she wouldn’t like glasses. They get lost. They break. They get foggy in winter and steamy in summer. They’re a pain. The doctor eventually rendered the discussion moot. Annie had perfect vision.

Afterward, I thought about the day I got my first pair of glasses. The memory came to me with 20/20 accuracy. 

I was eight years old. It was a warm spring afternoon. My mother drove the family Studebaker down the elm-lined streets of our working-class neighborhood. Everything outside the car windows looked exactly as it always had—bleary and indistinct, though I had no way of knowing it at the time.

We were the only customers at Zilliox Optical that afternoon. I closed my eyes as Mr. Zilliox slid my new glasses onto my face. I opened my eyes in time to see his beaming face recede. I looked around the office.

 I was astonished.

I could see wonders I’d never seen before. Mr. Zilliox’s smile. Behind him, a poster of Issac Newton refracting a light beam through a prism. Gazing through the office’s front window, I could see the A&P across the street. Behind it stood giant maples and elms that surrounded Holy Family Church’s baseball diamonds. Off in the distance, Republic Steel’s towering stacks belched smoke at the Lake Erie waterfront.

Everything I saw, everywhere I looked was sharp and clean and shot full of colors that had only been foggy blurs before. It was as if my eyes had new muscles. I felt so strong, so excited on the way home I imagined I could see the curvature of the earth behind Republic’s billowing clouds, the sky-blue lake behind them, then Canada and whatever else lay at the top of this newfound world of mine.

This was how my favorite superhero, Hal Jordon, aka Green Lantern, must have felt when the Guardians of the Universe gave him his power ring. He slipped his ring on as easily as Mr. Zilliox had slipped on my glasses. 

By brightest day

By Darkest night

No evil shall escape my sight

Let those who worship evil’s might

Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.

However Hal Jordan must have felt as his power ring transformed him, I felt on the ride back home. I could read stop signs from two blocks away! I could see airplanes as they soared across the sky! I remember my mother leaned her head over from behind the steering wheel to where I sat in the front seat. She smiled to hear me marveling at a world I’d never seen before. I was sure I could see twice as well as the other kids in the neighborhood. I couldn’t wait to get home.

We pulled into the driveway. A small gaggle of neighborhood kids were idling in the front yard. I leaped out of the car. I looked around at faces I’d never seen so distinctly before. Their faces were smiling. 

No. They were laughing,

“Hey! There he is – “four eyes!” 

I stood motionless in the midst of the mirth, a high-flyer brought suddenly to ground. My new glasses were the type favored by Jerry Lewis in his nutty-professor incarnation—huge, rectangular lenses encased in jet-black plastic frames. I hadn’t given a thought to how I looked behind my new glasses.  

With my superpowers gone I was suddenly the center of my friends’ teasing, finger-pointing attention. Eager only to tell of my new powers, I was made to understand in the quick, brutal way of children that my friends couldn’t see the world through my eyes. They were outside looking in and what they saw—me—looked hilarious. 

I was a grounded Green Lantern.

The rest of the day’s events have receded into the fogbank of memory, the place where much of my life now resides. But what I saw on that ride home was a lightning bolt. In its flash, I could recognize the fog that I’d taken for granted all my life, the fog that renders life drab and indistinct. But I also saw the unforgettable power of discovery, of being granted the chance to see the fog for what it was and to find comfort in seeing—literally—what lies behind it.