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Life, actually…

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MY SOUTH THROUGH FUZZY LENSES

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Back when I was a kid, my eyesight was just about perfect. Being a kid, I took this fact for granted. I did not know that some kids could see better than other kids.

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Back then I could see anything anywhere, particularly things nobody thought I could see or, better still, things nobody wanted me to see. Some elders regarded kids as quirky ornaments, present and accounted for but clueless as to what was really happening. They were wrong. Kids notice everything, particularly when they nonchalantly appear to be otherwise engaged.

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Watch out what you do and say around kids. It will re-appear when least expected.

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Anyhow, during early teendom, it became obvious that I was trending toward nearsightedness. I was not seeing the world clearly. I was missing things.

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My father took me to have my first eye examination. I obtained my first pair of eyeglasses.

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Lo and behold—as we elders say when least expected—Lo and behold, on the way home from the eye doctor, I looked out the car window and suddenly realized that lawns were not hazy carpets of green. They actually consisted of individual, clearly distinguishable blades of grass!

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For a while I was seeing the world for the first time all over again!

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In later years when I saw Buckminster Fuller in person, he reported that he had been practically blind for the first few years of his life but didn’t know it and didn’t have eyeglasses till he had already learned to experience the world in patterns and designs rather than details like blades of grass.

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I felt better about my own vision when I heard this, for I don’t really know how long I’d been seeing the world through fuzzy Vaselined lenses.

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But, looking back, I do think that in many ways my childhood patterned world was a bit clearer than it ever has been since

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© Jim Reed 2024 A.D.

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