Through a cloudy lens

My job is weird. Many of my responsibilities fall into the realm of "who in the world would ever want to do that?". There are compensations, though. Last Thursday I was waiting for something with nothing to do in the interim, so I dissected an eye that was lying around awaiting disposal. Don't ask. Trust me when I say it was a spare, it was slated for disposal, and it wasn't human.

I hadn't dissasembled an eye since undergraduate days. We didn't do one in vet school - there wasn't time to waste on stuff that you could study adequately from slides and diagrams. I didn't have the proper tools for a decent dissection, so I made a hash of some of the more delicate parts in the anterior eye (the iris came out a scramble mess). Still, I was able to tease out the lens with only minor difficulties. It's the lens that has always fascinated me most about the eye.

This one was perhaps two-thirds the size of my thumbnail, and came out crystal clear. It's shape and size were reminiscent of those red and yellow Tylenol gel caps. Circular rounded edges, it looked more like a small clear plastic pellet than an integral part of the visual system. It was fresh and still clear, so I held it up to see what the world looked like through it. Holding it up in the air caused it to rapidly cloud over though, and after a short period of time it had taken on a milky cast.

That's been happening to me a lot recently. I'm not particularly gifted at seeing the world through other people's eyes. Perhaps it's a rigidity that comes with age. I try to force my mind to encompass another's viewpoint in attempt to understand why people do what they do. I think I used to be better at it.

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I turned fifty yesterday. For most of my life I have managed to resist that superstition that numbers ending in zero are somehow more powerful than those ending in another digit. There was no more significance in 30 to me than there had been to 29 or 31. I made the usual jokes about entering new decades of life, but I never really felt the trauma that others I knew seemed to encounter. It would seem that there is some magic connected with 50 though.

Perhaps it's because 50 is half a century. Maybe it's the certain knowlege that there is more life behind me than ahead of me. Or maybe it's just because I get to apply for my AARP card now. Most birthdays seemed to pass as any other day, but yesterday felt different. It was more joyful, more life-affirming, more significant than the usual day, even the usual birthday. I felt like I had something to celebrate. I met up with Dr. Twenty Cats at a local mall and attended a "by invitation only" jewelry showing. (Actually, she's now Doctor Eighteen Cats, but for the sake of consistency, I will stay with Twenty. After all, it is a nice number ending with a zero that somehow makes it seem more significant.)I puchased nothing at the show, though she purchased two absolutely gorgeous blue diamond pieces. Me, I'm holding out for my canary yellow diamond.

We then went into an estate jewelry store we both like. I had planned to purchase something for myself to commemorate the day, and was disappointed that I hadn't seen anything I liked that I could afford at the private showing. (There was a gorgeous 20-something carot tanzanite necklace there for a mere $57,000 that I could have happily given a home, but decided it wasn't the right color to go with the outfit I was planning to wear that evening.) At the estate store though I found a sweet little gold band with twelve tiny diamonds set in a channel that was lined with rhodium. The stones were small, but had a flash and sparkle that belied their size (mostly thanks to the rhodium behind them). It wasn't what I went in expecting to buy, but it's what rode out on my hand with me.

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I've been having a hard time making entries for months now. I compose them in my head. I make little mental notes of observations that interest me, and of events that should be commended to some sort of record. I have things to say. But when I sit down at the keyboard, things I wanted to say vanish, or at least diminish into insignificance. I can do nothing but patiently wait for the wind to shift.