This morning when I got up I simply couldn’t get my eyeballs working. I have a horrible feeling it’s one of those things that sneaks up on you with age, supposing you had working eyeballs in the first place.
I have always had very short sight and spent much of my childhood with my nose very literally in a book because I could see perfectly about an inch from my nose. I could not, however see at any distance and was continually told how stupid I was. ‘See the squirrel running up the tree!’ my mother said. ‘Where?’ ‘It’s gone now. It’s you, you’re stupid, you just don’t look.’ I was, of course, looking very hard; what I couldn’t see was the tree. I came to the conclusion that adults could see the squirrel because they knew more than I did. So began a lifetime of study. The carpet in my bedroom was one of those made of the leftover lengths of wool so it was multi-coloured random stripes. I thought it was lovely and spent many hours lying on it squinting at the fibres; at one point I had myself convinced I could see the atoms of which it was made.
At school there were sight tests, but as I had no idea there was a sight chart on the far wall, which wall I could not see, I decided it was a memory test and listened carefully outside the door to the utterances of the girl in front and reproduced them perfectly, rattled off the minute I got in the door. I now realise the reason I was such rubbish at sports was that I couldn’t see the ball. Added to that my non existent skills were continually derided because I evolved a strategy in a field where balls were arriving unannounced, at speed, close to my head, of standing stock still to limit the damage. I was surprisingly very good at rounders as a batsman, as the game requires you to stand still, bat at the ready until the ball appears within your range of vision and then belt it. I developed a reputation for fearlessness based, obviously, on a mixture of short sight and genuine hatred of the ball; when I whacked it it stayed whacked.
At sixteen, swatting for O levels I was told that, whilst my original notes were appreciated it was OK to copy off the board. ‘Board?’ I asked, ‘What board?’ Finally I was provided with glasses and the world swam into view.
Some things were an utter surprise. Buses had writing on the front, how easy was that? There was no need to memorise the timetables or the bus colours on certain routes at all. I think the biggest surprise was tree flowers. I could see the colours were changing but I thought it was just the leaves. Trees have flowers! Plants that big – with flowers, no wonder people get excited about spring, it’s utterly magical, once you can see it.
Then I got contact lenses and I could really see. Boy was I cooking with gas! I could just go round looking at things like there was no tomorrow. In fact never was there such looking until my son was born. He opened his eyes while he was still a beautiful shade of lavender and didn’t stop looking all that day. He didn’t cry, he just looked.
The world is extraordinary. If you have the gift of sight there is so much to see. Not just travelling to far flung countries but right under your nose. One of the facets of family life that continually surprises me is how much you can tell about family dynamics from photographs. Look at them and see how the dominant family member is either at the front, or has a controlling hand on someone else. Whose body posture is aggressive and whose defeated? Who is smiling too manically, who is not smiling at all?
Me, in the morning when I simply couldn’t see what I was looking at. The gap in my vision crowded my mind with expressions such as cataracts and macular degeneration and a dozen worse things. Then tidying up I bent to pick the paper off the floor, and getting interested in an article, realised I could see perfectly leaning forward. I stood up and couldn’t see again. I bent forward and vision was restored. Inter-ocular pressure! The reason I could not see, I deduced, was flat eyeballs. And, indeed, four glasses of water and a cup of tea later normal service was resumed.
Like my son on the first day of his life, I spent the rest of the day looking at everything. If you have vision to read this and can spend some of today looking, you may see something lovely. Just in case there’s nothing interesting to look at where you are, here are some photos from my garden, which has been a lot of work this year but rewarding in the outcome.
What a wonderful world!
Midweek Miniatura, your guide to all that’s worth seeing in the world of miniatures will be along soon, keep looking here.
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JaneLaverick.com – window on the world.