SEEING SPOTS

"Hey! I just noticed how freckly you are,” my husband said. He sounded shocked.

We’ve been married for thirty-four years.

I looked at him, stunned.

“Who have you been living with for more than three decades?”

I’m so freckly that I could be a one of those models in the clothing ads where they feature a super freckly human as if to say, “See how beautiful even the genetic weirdos are?”

Or as my six-year old grandson said, “YaYa you have a lot of spots.”

“It’s camouflage for when I hide in the tall grass,” I said. “In a trillion, million years everyone will have spots like me.”

“And you’re really hairy.”

“Go away,” I told him.

As a writer, I find the contrast between my fifty-year old husband’s observational skills and my six-year old grandson’s abilities, fascinating. What’s the point of having eyes if you don’t use them? Thirty years living with the first guy and he never noticed I was half Irish and half cheetah? If my husband is evolving, it’s to become an eyeless lemur with huge hands. I don’t want to talk about why he’ll have huge hands.

Learning to see with better eyes is a skill that I’m not sure can be taught anymore, especially now that the angry birds are distracting the lemur people, but Conner gives me hope. His eyes work just fine.

It’s his mouth that gives him trouble.

So when I’m watching for hair and spots and trying to find fresh ways to depict the hairy spot people as clearly and as crisply as I’d like to be able to describe a wart on a backside, I keep my mouth shut. And I do my best to say it with my keyboard. I’m trying to learn to see with better eyes. I figure, if I work at it really hard I might get as good at it as a six-year old.

“YaYa, why do you have a black booby bra?”

“Because it makes me invisible to zombies.”

Conner nodded and like a heat seeking missile went in search of his next fascinating, albeit embarrassing discovery.

Linda (Four Eyes) Zern