I woke up at 2:30 one morning last week feeling like I was being stabbed in the eye.
I wasn’t, of course, so my next thought was that some particle was in my eye, something big and jagged. I pictured a morsel of granola.
Here is where I was grateful to live with someone who could gaze lovingly into my limpid pool and tell me if any breakfast cereal was floating in it.
I hated to wake her up.
I woke her up.
She fetched a flashlight and examined my eye as I pulled the upper lid up and the lower lid down. Nada.
She filled a salad bowl with warm water so I could flush the UFO (unidentified foreign object) out of my eye.
She visited the usual medical websites to find out what the trouble might be and what might be done about it.
Finally, she called Tel-a-Nurse. The nurse’s advice: Get thee to an emergency room.
Oh, how we did not want to go to the ER at that hour, in that cold. We went anyway.
If you watched “The Pitt” last winter, a show about one day in the life of an overwhelmed and under-funded Pittsburgh emergency room, this, the ER at Mount Nittany Medical Center, was the opposite of that. There were two people in the lobby: the receptionist and a guy on a laptop. It was not a long wait.
The first thing the physician’s assistant did was squeeze numbing drops into the injured eye. Instant relief. Then she examined it. Diagnosis: No foreign body. Corneal abrasion. She’d already treated several eye problems this quiet night. I tried to recall if there had been a granola storm during the day.
I wanted to take the numbing drops home with me, but the PA wouldn’t let me: They’d interfere with the healing. Instead, I took home antibiotic drops and after-care instructions, which included a moratorium on reading.
No reading? What about the New York Times’s word puzzles? Come on, I have completion streaks going. I decided I could read if I covered the injured eye, so I improvised a patch: I folded a COVID-era mask in half, looped the elastic around my ear and secured it, sort of, with my glasses.
It occurs to me only now that I could have spent the rest of the day listening to audiobooks and podcasts. Instead, 20th-century relic that I am, all I could think of to do was watch movies (“Train Dreams” and “Frankenstein”) and sleep.
Meanwhile, the antibiotic drops worked. Hour by hour, the imaginary granola morsel shrank to the size of a grape nut and then to a mote of dust. The eye, I’m happy to report, is a fast healer.
But any threat to vision is a call to appreciation. A line from Ecclesiastes came to mind: “The eye never has its fill of seeing.”
So as I write this, pain-free, I’m thinking I’ll end this Year of Our Column Writing 2025 with an ode to eyesight. What sightings, what visions gladdened my heart these past 12 months?
Sappy grampa that I am, my first thought is of a photo of my granddaughters, Bea and Lolo, ages 4 and 7. They’re making holiday cookies. The girls don’t just look happy; they look delighted. They’re beaming light into a dark world.
A second image: My daughter Rosa arriving at the State College airport at Thanksgiving. Picking out a loved one’s face amid a sea of strangers is a huge joy. I felt the same thrill of recognition last summer when my son Ethan appeared among all the tie-dyed Deadheads converging on a Grateful Dead tribute concert in San Francisco.
To help me summon other delights, I’m tempted to sample my photo library. Like everyone, I mostly take pictures when I travel – this year’s album shows I’m a fool for falling water – but I don’t want this to be a travelogue. It’s the visions that are vouchsafed to us as we make our daily rounds that I wish to celebrate – the sighting of a bird, a leaf, a cloud, a flower. Moonrise. A robin’s egg. Streetlamps on a foggy night.
One October day, I wandered into the Bridge Gallery at the Palmer Museum, which overlooks the Penn State Arboretum. The view of fall color was as beautiful as any painting in the building.
I had brought my writing students to the Palmer to practice seeing. Twentieth-century relic that I am, I am forever exhorting them to disengage from their phones and attend to the world around them. Great writers, I tell them, are great noticers. Thus the poet Mary Oliver’s
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
There were plenty of news photos during the past year that I would unsee if I could. Looking back and looking forward at the turn of the year, I prefer to focus on what the eye never has its fill of seeing.
