#3

When I was about twenty, my mom told me that my grandfather had a fake eye. Apparently, he had been in a very bad car accident when he was 23 and injured his eye. I was shocked. I had been living with my grandfather all of that time and had never noticed! What an amazing glass eye this was!

My grandfather’s glass eye became a frequent topic for me, when I needed a quick weird story to tell my friends. My college boyfriend Matt also took it into his story rotation. He especially loved that in Russian the word for eyes is глаза - glaza - sounded SO CLOSE to “glass eye.” Whenever I went home, I would look closely at my grandfather’s face to see if I could figure out which eye was the glass eye. I both longed and was terrified to see the eye out of its socket. This never happened.

Finally, maybe ten years later, I was sitting down with both my grandparents when I asked about the eye - I said mom had told me that he had been in an accident, and that there was a fake eye, but that I had never figured out which one!

Oh, how my grandparents laughed.

Especially my grandmother. She was in stitches. I think she cried from laughing so hard.

Turns out, my grandfather had been in a bad car accident when he was in his twenties (it ended his budding college ice hockey career), and the eye was indeed dead - but it wasn’t glass - it was just his regular eye that he could not see out of. And, what kind of an artist was I (in my family, artists and writers were always admonished to look at everything super closely) that I could not tell that his eye was not glass? I was chagrined.

I told this story yesterday at the bar, to great success.

But here’s the thing - I still wonder about the glass eye. There is an entirely separate life somewhere, like a Sliding Doors situation, where there is a glass eye and it’s kept in a jar at night, on a bedside table, and it is tangible and cool to the touch (but warmed when in the socket?) - and I am still a little grossed out but also mesmerized by the whole thing.

And would you believe, this is not even the only eye injury story to have come out of my grandparents??? One time, they were mushroom hunting (they were AVID mushroomers) and my grandfather accidentally STABBED my grandmother in the eye with a paring knife! She had to get stitches. Apparently, the doctor who stitched her eye only had green thread and so the stitches were green?!! Again, when this story was first relayed to me, I thought she had been stabbed in the eye ball and was extremely confused why the insides of the eye ball did not then leak out?!

Clearly, I have a very approximate understanding of how bodies, and eyes in particular, work. I have continued to do zero research into this and instead have chosen to hold on to my delusional ideas.