4 - Eyes

March 20, 2017

The girl in the short story

placed her glasses on the bedside table

lenses down.

Which is when my grade 9 English teacher asked

“Anyone?”

So, was this about wilful blindness?

Or that what you see with your own eyes

can be unreliable?

Or something to do

with the careless insouciance

of invincible youth?

(Mrs McGregor

would not have spoon-fed us,

nodding toward the big well-thumbed Webster's.)

They would have called her “4-eyes”.

Or taunted her

about the lazy one

that sometimes wandered.

Sitting out

dodge-ball, and double-dutch.

They would have been bright pink

cat's-eyed

post-war plastic frames,

the kind with spangles

and bottle-bottom glass

that left her looking googly-eyed.

But none of this was explained.

She simply placed them there,

and we imagined the scrape

of glass on wood.

The telling detail

that said she didn't like what she saw,

that it didn't matter

looking out at the world

through a scratched or broken lens.

Glasses off, when she slept.

Technicolor dreams

in which she was invisible,

eyes at rest

in the blessed dark.

I remember this, from Mrs McGregor's grade 8 or 9 English. And I'm pretty sure it was J.D. Salinger; either Nine Stories, or Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

And I still return to this, when I find I'm not giving the reader enough credit; when I find I'm saying, instead of showing.

It's surprising how a tiny incident can burn itself into your brain so that it persists intact for almost half a century. I think this is because in that moment I felt so excited by his mastery, by the power of the telling detail, by the deft use of simple language. And maybe, in my pride, embarrassed I'd missed noticing it myself.

Could this even have been when the writing bug first grabbed me? When I thought I might aspire to the same deft mastery as Salinger? (And if I've failed to come close in that, at least I have in reclusiveness!)

(Knowing what I know about memory – how we conflate memories, now we recreate a memory anew every time it's opened -- I probably don't really remember this. But if I'm missing the literal truth, I think I've retained the essential truth. Which may just be better, anyway. ...Mrs. McGregor, though, is absolutely real, and I'm glad I managed to get her into the poem: a nice way to honour a good teacher, and by implication all the good teachers who were so influential in our young lives.)