TToT: Chameleon in a Room Full of Mirrors – Part Two, #10Thankful

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Ten Things of Thankful

I am thankful my brother and his family got to get away for a week together.

Winters can be long. Sun and sea and family time, no cooking or cleaning or work or school. Who wouldn’t like that?

I am thankful for my chameleon eyes.

I can’t see what colour my own eyes are in the mirror, but even when I had more sight, much more sight than I now have, I still couldn’t see the colour of my own eyes.

Well, every time I’ve ever asked, I’ve gotten varied and differing answers. I didn’t know whom to believe.

I got a new artificial eye made the day before Valentine’s Day and it was done within six hours. Not bad.

No, it’s not made of glass. I will answer all the most common questions, in a piece I’m going to write about the experience, once I get through some of the work I’ve currently got on the go this month.

I am glad the new one is in and I was told when the colour is bluish one day, green another, and hazel or whatever, with flecks of something thrown in there somewhere for whatever reason, that is what is known as the chameleon eye, changing colour, depending on the time asked and the light seen in. I thought it was so funny that I’d heard a saying about a chameleon in a room full of mirrors, which could mean any number of things, that I used that as the title for last week’s TToT and then I find out my eyes are chameleon coloured this week.

Thus…part two.

I am thankful for a single girl’s lunch to celebrate all the different kinds of love that matter.

Fancy old mansion and multiple forks and spoons at every place setting.

Truth is that I don’t know a lot about fancy food and don’t think it all that better, overall, but this was a nice way to spend February 14th, to enjoy a nice meal with a friend, celebrating the benefits of being single, especially on a day when all you hear about is romantic love.

I am thankful for a local, city library card.

I have lived in the town for ten years and am just now getting a library card. So many books that I feel held back from, many print, though there are more and more ways around that for someone who can’t see to read.

I do think the library is a fantastic public resource that everyone deserves to share in.

More on this another week.

I am thankful for positive feedback on a job I’ve got this month.

I was told, at least, I am on the right track which is always nice to hear and know. I will know more by next month.

I am thankful a yoga session could be squeezed into my day.

So busy lately. I can tell, by how quickly I am rushing through even this week’s thankful list that yoga is very much needed in my life.

I had no meeting. She was stuck on Montreal’s public transit. Still, a lesson worked out and I needed that for my sanity.

I am thankful for remittances.

Still learning about such terms of getting paid for work completed. I’m glad it means what it actually means. I admit, the word didn’t sound so good upon first hearing it. I am happy to know its meaning now.

I am thankful for my arms that learn a new thing (dynamics) on the violin.

I guess this is progress. I was sore after, in my upper back and shoulders, as I must have tensed up in learning such techniques. It involves ways of moving the bow, angles, pressure, and a whole lot more to make the music sound quiet or medium or loud, still learning proper names for each level of volume throughout a song.

More to come on this too, also, in the weeks ahead I’d guess.

I am thankful for the nostalgia of a romantic comedy from the 90s.

I wanted to see a movie from my past, about Paris, about forgetting Paris, about basketball refereeing even and I am no sports fan by any means.

It’s an old one of Billy Crystal and one that didn’t receive enough praise, if you ask me.

I am thankful I managed an ending to the short story I wrote last week.

I wrote it, at writing group, on my oma’s birthday. She would have been 97 this year. It’s fiction, based on the girl she might have been, with a few pieces of the girl she told me stories about.

I wrote most of it, but then my braille display died. So, I now have the ending written and I look forward to reading it at the next writing group’s gathering coming up.

Tired and pondering love/hate/indifference lately.

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pieces of Me, #FTSF

The truth is, my left eye is artificial. a rod fuses my spine, keeping the curve of scoliosis at bay. My father’s kidney sits on my right side, at the front of my body, in my abdomen.

I sometimes feel like more others and other things, than I do myself.

How I grew up to be the one I am now…well, I acquired all these things along the way, making me stronger, propelling me forward.

What is artificial and what what is real?

I became who I am, with those materials and those extra, needed transplanted body parts.

It sometimes feels like I am part of some science fiction story.

I am who I am today because of all of this, but not without those people and the memories we’ve made together.

Right now, pieces of me are being kept safe, within boxes and boxes of old cassette tapes, a passing fad it seems, but even vinyl has made a comeback, so who knows what could very well come back around again one day.

On those tapes I was becoming me all those years, with the help of my family, my friends, and my doctors. They saved me, my very life, on more than one or two or a dozen occasions.

When I grew up, I knew…well, I’m still growing. Up and up and up I go. Up and back down again, as life often happens.

But as long as I have my father’s kidney (working well and taking me straight to breaking records for longest renal transplant) – nineteen years, on June 5th!

As long as I have my artificial eye where it’s supposed to be and my spine held straight, thanks to the hardware that keeps me from curving and twisting.

As long as I have my family behind me, supporting me, in whatever I do.

As long as there now exists digitized copies of those memories from childhood and the life that gave me…its best shot at stability.

Then I will be here to finish another sentence with all of you next week.

Another excellent one, with

Finding Ninee and her journey as a special needs parent

and this week’s FTSF sentence producer,

Life Through My Bioscope.

TBT: Feeling Like a Freak

Today I returned to the office on the ground floor of the medical building. The place is so familiar to me, with the smell of the chemicals used to polish artificial eyes that hits your nostrils the moment you enter.. The smell may be strong, but the leather couches are just as comfortable as I remember them.

This took me back to myself as a twelve-year-old girl. I was scared, sitting in the chair, but out of pain finally.

What was going to happen?

I thought about the past, today, as I sat waiting for him to return with my artificial left eye.

It is an indescribable feeling. I tilt my head back slightly so my artificial eye can be removed. I still shudder at this thought.

It feels odd to even myself as he slides out the prosthesis and I am left with nothing but the place holder inside where my real eye once was.

It was being attacked by an unknown and unnamed virus of some sort. The doctors and specialists could not diagnose and the pain just would not stop.

Removal seemed like the obvious choice. I did not have to think about it for long and the surgery took place within a week.

Now eighteen years later and I can’t believe how long ago that was. So much has changed and I am no longer that little girl.

Six years ago was when I had a second eye made. They recommend making a new one every six to eight years.

My sister and brother were there, in place of my parents. My brother, with his photographer’s eye, stood in the room as the eye was skillfully made, formed and molded, fit and refit and resized until it fit just right.

This was a unique photo shoot, but one well worth capturing.

On this throw-back Thursday I still shudder at the thought of no eye there at all. It’s in my own head and I can barely stand to have anything to do with it. I don’t touch and don’t remove it if I absolutely do not have to.

Last time it was not in its place, where it should remain, was a few years back, one early morning when I rubbed a little too hard and it fell.

This isn’t easy for me to speak about. Something still makes me want to distance myself from my own eye, but I can’t. I can’t get away from it and most times I would not know anything different.

But when I am required to let this ocularist examine his creation, I sit alone in an examining room by myself and I wonder.

This still grosses me out. I feel somehow less feminine and like a freak, but why?

It’s fascinating even, depending on who you ask. Some may be grossed out too.

How can I expect everyone else to be totally fine with it when I myself never quite have been?