Blue Eyes
My dad’s eyes were fluorescent blue — clear as water. As a child, I remember him winking at me from behind his large oak desk in his study. He was a diplomat. Politics, not blood coursed through his veins. He read constantly. Those magnificent eyes zipped across pages and pages of foreign newspapers and policy magazines.
When I was a teenager, my parents divorced and my dad stopped winking. We would visit, but he didn’t see me anymore. The latest congressional hearing seemed more important than my lead in the school play. We drifted apart after that and only occasionally talked on the phone.
Then at 70, he went blind. The otherworldly blue clouded over with glaucoma, but he found clever ways to adjust to his condition. He’d memorize microwave instructions, always buy black socks to avoid mismatching, and even distinguished blue versus yellow towel sets by removing the tags on one.
But despite his fierce independence, he did run into trouble. One day, he walked into a car as he crossed the road. That’s when I intervened. I convinced him to move across country from Washington, D.C. to an island off the coast of Seattle where I live.
We spent the next two years constantly together talking about life, sipping his favorite hot chocolate at Starbucks, and going on long walks. He loved his new town. It smelled fresh, he’d say. He was ready to listen then, and helped me through some difficult times. He became the father I missed as a child. Now it was his soul that saw me, not his eyes.
My father died six months ago, but when I look in the mirror I see those same florescent blue eyes and I miss the man who gave them to me.
