Tag Archives: eyes

by

The Temple of Clothes

I caught someone inspecting me the other day. Okay, it wasn’t an inspect exactly –it was more of a look… Well, maybe a glance, but it bothered me all the same. I could feel her eyes doing a quick little dance on me. They started on my mud-caked running shoes, before appraising the hem of my rumpled jeans where they had partaken of the same puddle. Then they scampered up over the tattered edge of my untucked sweatshirt before flitting around my face like barn-swallows looking for insects. I felt violated, even though it certainly wasn’t my first encounter with eyes.

Frankly, I hadn’t expected the examination on a trail. It’s true I am not at my best in the woods. I am an anticipatory dresser; my couture is seldom haute even on city streets, but when I have to be en garde for roots, wary of curiously moving bushes that extend onto the path, and on the lookout for riparian sinkholes, I like to move carefully and blend in. Not make myself more of a target than necessary. And looking shabby, and unostentatious is all part of it –I do not dress for passersby, although I often wave.

I heard them coming before I saw them –a little girl’s shrieks of delight as she ran along the trail ahead of her more cautious mother. The girl was tanned, perhaps six or seven years old, and dressed in jeans and a grey sweat shirt that seemed several sizes too large for her. Curly black hair that tumbled and bounced on her shoulders as she ran, the forest held no terrors for her.

Her mother, though, was wary, looking from one side to the other, and then at her child, uncertain just what to expect. She was wearing a dark-coloured cloak that partially covered her head, and was making her way slowly over some roots and stones on that part of the path when I first saw her.

It was the mother who noticed me first, and then grabbed her little daughter and sheltered her from my advance, lest I lunge at her. I suppose I should have admired her courage –I could have been a criminal for all she knew. Or maybe a fugitive bent on taking them hostage. I mean, you just can’t be sure with men in forests nowadays. Her eyes were lasers, bullets aimed squarely at my clothes, but she was in mother mode.

Her daughter, on the other hand, was in child mode. Curious mode. She whispered something to her mother, who instantly shook her head. “Stay away from him!” she must have said, because the little girl began to pout.

Finally, she broke free of her mother’s tether and walked a few paces towards me. We had all stopped to declare our territorial boundaries by then, and she knew precisely where to halt.

“You live here, mister?” she asked slowly, her expression flirting with wonder. I thought I could detect an accent, and suspected the girl might be encumbered by a beginner’s vocabulary.

I had to smile at the innocence of the question. I shook my head and lowered my eyes to disarm the mother who by now was hurrying to restrain her child before she got too close to me.

“Where you live?” the girl continued.

I shrugged. “In the city. How about you?”

The mother had caught up with her by then and I could hear the urgent whisper but the only word I recognized was a name: “Nattie!”

Nattie looked up at her with adult eyes, and shook herself free of her mother’s grasp once more.  She said something to her that I didn’t understand and then turned to face me again. I suppose I must have looked puzzled, because she then translated it for me. “’Why not speak?’ I say.” There was a big smile on her little face. “Can we be friend?” she added, glancing at her mother out of the corner of one eye.

I smiled and nodded, but her mother still looked worried –terrified, actually- so I decided not to move.

Nattie went into a sort of huddle with her mother and the two of them began to argue –or maybe it was just a discussion -I couldn’t tell. But eventually Nattie turned to face me, her eyes sparkling. “My  mother want your name…” And as she said this, her eyes sought refuge on the ground. “She say is important…” I could hear her mother say something again for Nattie to translate. “She is afraid for strangers, but I say her this is Canada, not Afghanistan.” She seemed pleased at being able to communicate so well.

“My name is Gary, Nattie,” I said, uncertain about whether or not to offer my hand to shake –especially under the still-suspicious stare of her mother.

But little Nattie came right up to me and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you Gary,” she said, as if she’d memorized the phrase for just such an occasion. Then her face puzzled up. “How you know my name?”

I smiled again to reassure them both. “I heard your mother say it, Nattie…”

She immediately turned to her mother and said something, and her mother laughed and waved at me. Nattie turned back to me with a little giggle. “I say you must speak little bit Pashto, Gary… She okay now.”

We all smiled and laughed, and I suddenly realized how similar we were -no matter how we dressed for the woods. There are no strangers on a trail.

 

by

The Unfallen Yellow Leaf

‘Age, with his stealing steps, hath clawed me in his clutch,’ as the gravedigger in Hamlet says. I’m not so sure I agree –he was speaking about a skull, after all- but I have to admit there are times when I do feel old, and shipped ‘into the land as if I had never been such’; when I do wonder if whatever I have done has gone as unappreciated as a shadow from the moon, as unnoticed as an owl in the night.

I used to think that ‘Aged’ was just a word –but an adjective, not a noun; a descriptor rather than a described -somebody else, in other words… And that makes a difference, even when it is not mentioned in your CV but, rather, implied in the later stages of your career. I prefer to see the years as a kind of parliament where habits, and opinions and experience, all cohabit equitably, calmly debating the memories they were each elected to serve, sifting through them, perhaps, to decide if any merit publication.

And I’m sure there are some memories out there where my face is almost discernible in the background; where at least my voice was recognizable at the time. ‘What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand’, John Updike wrote in one of his ‘Rabbit’ novels. He’s right, of course –and yet… Sometimes it can happen that you forget the very ones that watched from early on; you forget they cared.

Janice sat giggling in the corner of the waiting room, watching a little child toddle across the room towards her, his legs bowed around bulging diapers, his progress uncertain but determined. I could see her eyes from the reception desk; they glowed with excitement and her head seemed to bob in time to every tottering step. Her entire face became a smile, an expectation living vicariously as the little boy approached, followed closely by his beaming mother.

The consultation request from her GP said she had been referred for antenatal care -as if the rapture in her eyes, and the glow on her cheeks could be mistaken for anything else. Some people wear their pregnancies like jewels. It’s why I love obstetrics.

As I walked across the floor to greet her, she suddenly jumped up and extended her hand. For some reason I had the impression that she wanted to hug me, and would have under different circumstances. Not that I don’t enjoy being hugged, but it did seem unusual from someone I’d never met before. Pregnancy can be an unpredictable gem, though, and I have learned to appreciate its various rewards over the years.

“I’m so happy to finally meet you, doctor!” she bubbled as we headed down the little corridor to my office. “Pregnancy opens so many doors,” she added, smiling at nothing in particular with her eyes.

Indeed, she spoke as much with her eyes as with her mouth as she glanced around the room like a tourist in Paris. They pointed like children in front of each picture hanging on the walls, flitting from pictures to plants and back to pictures again -excited hummingbirds. They finally came to rest on a little terracotta begging lady I’d placed on an oak table in the corner. Pennies dripped from her little bowl, mute testaments to her longevity in the office.

“Where on earth did you get the pennies?” Janice whispered, this time rolling her eyes.

I had to shrug; it was a long story.

“I Googled you before I came, of course, and all your patients seem to mention the begging bowl… Now I see why,” she added shaking her head with what I took to be admiring disbelief.

“And there’s the carving of the woman holding the child and hiding behind the leaves!” she said, excitedly pointing to the little, pot-bound Areca plant on my desk. I was beginning to feel a bit like an employee at a Disney resort.

But then she calmed a little and instructed her eyes to leave the office thermals they soared and perch on my face. I could actually feel them, heavy on my skin, their prey firmly captured. It was almost as if I should understand that they had come back to roost; that mine was the aerie they had once called home. And throughout that first visit, I thought I felt her disappointment –a father finally seen after many years away, that no longer recognizes his child. I could sense a hope for reminiscence, a need for demonstrating familiarity, sharing secrets I couldn’t possibly possess.

Indeed, I got to know her quite well in that pregnancy, and the initial expectation of acknowledgment she had worn, soon blended imperceptibly into an easy friendship. Who once were strangers, now were allies in the weeks, then days, before delivery. But there was always something in the background that I sensed she was disappointed I hadn’t recognized. Something she was now holding as a surprise; something I should have known from the start.

And then, a week before her dates predicted she should deliver, I saw her sitting in the waiting room with an older woman. She’d told me her mother was flying in for the delivery and seemed excited that I was finally going to meet her. I could even feel the italics in the word.

I saw the two of them whispering excitedly in the corner seats Janice always chose, glancing secretly at me as I greeted other patients with earlier appointments. I thought I heard them snickering once or twice, but sometimes people do that when they’re nervous.

They both stood up and glanced mischievously at each other when I approached them. Her mother was a short matronly woman with greying hair that was precariously balanced on top of her head like a silver hay-stack. Her face, though wrinkled, held a pair of familiar eyes that strained at their cage doors just waiting for liberation.

It’s an interesting thing about faces: no matter how much they change, they stay the same… Or is it just the eyes –roses by any other name…?

The waiting room by then was empty, and there was nothing to stop Denise from hugging me, followed, as if on cue, by her daughter.

“So now do you recognize my daughter?” she said, her face an imp, her eyes laughing silently as they flew towards me.

“She’s changed a bit…” I stammered, still flustered by the secret, and admittedly a little embarrassed at being old enough to deliver a patient I had already delivered so many years before…