An Eye For An Eye Making The World Blind

Morning came well before I was ready for it. A combination of meds seemed to keep me awake well beyond the limits of my usual sleep pattern, but not for my kids! No, they were bounding about when I awoke. I could hear them doing lord-knows-what in the floors below. So, glancing at my wife's gracefully somnilent form, I got up staggered to the shower.

The shower's such a handy thing... a malodorous cure and a relaxing place to think. So I did. First I thought "hey! who used all the shampoo" but then as the monotony of the routine took over, I started to think about other things. There's a cease-fire underway tomorrow. Israel will stop bombing what's left of Lebanon. And in an effort to get ready for the hiatus, there's a push to destroy as much as possible. There is a sadness about this suffering that will not rinse away. In that moment hunting about for some other shampoo, I'm thinking about the fact that some evil genius has developed a formulation that will blow up airplanes and moisturize dry and damaged hair. Impossible to imagine.

Mindlessly I get out of the shower and fumble about the routine of getting dried off and dressed. From the vent at my feet I can hear the gleeful shriek of my middle child and someone else making an animal sound. There is no intermediate volume in my home, just on and off. And thinking they'll need food or find it themselves, I hurry. Brushing my hair and teeth at the same time. Grabbing the aerosol deodorant as I look about for my pda. Suddenly my eyes are on fire. I'd sprayed the deodorant, but in my haste, did not look to see in which direction. A blast of butane propelled Cool Fusion is melting my eyeballs! Reaching for the sink I rinse. It burns. I repeat. Still burns. For some reason this stuff seems to repel water, oh... right. Its a deodorant.

Its a DEODORANT! I use soap to wash that off in the shower!! So blindly I search for the soap, lather, and I wash only to realize I AM PUTTING SOAP IN MY EYES! Before my eyes burned, but they at least smelled good. Now they were soapy and no matter how much I rinsed, I could not seem to get all of it off. Ouch! And however rediculous it sounds, when you NEED to rinse your eyes, you can't. They don't want to open. I tried and tried and the kept closing. So I'd fill my hands with water, hold it to my eyes, and open and close and the water poured from the spaces between my fingers. It wasn't working, but I was not going to try conditioner, no matter how dry my eyes were.

My ankles were aware of the nubby cotton towel and with a blind swoop, grabbed and dabbed. And dabbed. And blinked, waiting for the pain fade, then chuckled. My mind, vastly contemplating fighting and death and airport security and happy semi-ferrel kids, had not considered the many small and essential tokens in that present moment. I wasn't paying attention, and the chuckle was from imagining what my mother would say if I'd done that as a kid. Frankly, it would be more of a look than a word from her; something mixed between pity and wonder for this son of hers who is alternately bright and retarded.

So I dressed in about 200 blinks, found my groggy wife and kissed her a few times (I wonder if she could smell the deodorant on my face... she's like a hound dog that way... *gasp*... did I call my wife a dog? This is obviously untrue, but I begin to digress...) and went downstairs where my happy kids ate fruit and cereal and watched Scooby Doo cartoons.