Although my father’s eyes seldom flashed with anger, they could. More often those eyes looked with measured calm into the distance—calculating a golf shot or the potential trajectory of a duck flying across the sky. When looking at things close up he wore glasses. Tying a fly or using a tiny file to incise a gun stock could keep him bent in concentration for long periods. Then he would look up and grin, his eyes alive with humor.
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I reached up and hugged my dad tight. “I love you,” I whispered. “I love you too,” he choked in a hoarse voice. As I backed away from him I saw tears in my father’s eyes. Up until that point I had no idea he was even sad I was leaving.
My Father’s Eyes do not work when I want them to, but when they want me to see through them. I met the child of a girlfriend for the first time, and I could see she wanted someone to see her through those eyes. Desperately yearned for it.
But it doesn’t stop at the eyes. Father’s Voice, Father’s Touch, a Father’s Love. The last extends further than your own flesh and blood.
The clear blue remained, but the vision was going. Macular degeneration, the doctors called it, but to him it was the loss of things he held dear–reading, making rosaries, woodworking. Sometimes I think it wasn’t a bad heart that killed him. I think my father’s aging eyes caused his heart to break.
The last thing I wanted to see that night was my father’s eyes; bloodshot, raging. They say a person’s eyes are the window to their soul. But what survives in that vacuum when a soul has already departed?
Dad’s eyes were the prettiest color of blue, almost unique to him, and I hadn’t even noticed until he was an old man when he was wrinkled and his face was weathered from so many hours of labor under the hot sun throughout his life. I missed those eyes so much after he passed away but I saw them again yesterday when my young grandson was sitting on my lap.
Dream Daddy
As I fall asleep I wonder about my daddy’s eyes.
Downstairs the TV thuds and dinner plates clatter. Poohy cabbage smells again. My teddy hot-water bottle keeps me warm and safe from the Lion who eats cold feet.
Would they be like mine? Would he know me if we met?