This is Getting Old Read Free Page B

same in both eyes. If the symptoms didn’t go away in half an hour, I was to call him back. They went away.
    I have had several visual migraines since then, and I have learned to enjoy them, since they have never been followed by headaches. My favorite was the evening when bursts of colored lights danced across my field of vision, painting the face and black-robed body of a Zen teacher who was giving a talk in the dimly lit zendo.
    I was about sixty when, on a Zen retreat in a remote village in Mexico, I had new and scary visual symptoms: I kept seeing nonexistent flocks of birds flying above the ocean. A dark ghost haunted the middle of my right eye, and a spark flashed at the bottom of my vision whenever I shifted my gaze. The retreat center’s director made an appointment for me with an eye doctor she knew in a town two hours’ drive away. She even hired a driver from the village and asked one of her employees, an aging beach bum from California who was fluent in Spanish, to go with me as my translator. I was embarrassed that it was such a major production, but it would have been worse than embarrassing to go home to California blind in my right eye. And so the three of us set off to the town of Tepic.
    The eye doctor was a kind man, who said, through the beach bum, that he liked to meditate and was curious about Zen. In an ancient, dark office with high ceilings, he questioned me about my vision and typed my answers on a red manual typewriter. Then he examined my right eye and reassured me that my retina was not detached or torn—there was no emergency. He said he could see a spot at the bottom of the retina that he thought might be a certain parasite you get from pets that’s common in Mexico—but I didn’t have any pets. He suggested I have my vision checked when I got home. He wouldn’t accept payment—he was doing this as a favor for his friend, the director of the retreat center—so I later sent him a Spanish-language book about Zen.
    The symptoms all went away by themselves except for the shadow, which the California eye doctor told me was just a big“floater”—a tiny, harmless clump of cells within the vitreous humor, the clear gel filling the eye. After a while, he said, my brain would correct for it, and I wouldn’t even see it anymore.
    It didn’t go away—in fact it got bigger—but I learned to see through it, or around it. I often think my glasses are dirty, which indeed they often are, but after I clean them, the gray spot is still there. I notice it when I look at a solid field of color, like the sky. Still, that stain on the sky is not just a blot in my vision; it’s what’s in front of me, a reminder to be grateful that I can see as well as I can.
    In recent years I’ve fallen in love with taking photographs. The sun lays its light on whatever it meets, and I have only to raise my camera to my eye and put a frame around what’s given to me. I’ve been taking pictures lately of screens, veils, curtains—things that seem to obstruct vision. But when I focus my camera on the veil itself, it becomes the subject. What’s in the way is not in the way after all.
    My father went blind one eye at a time. After the first retina detached, he continued with all his normal activities, even though he didn’t have binocular vision. Five years later, the second retina detached, and he underwent a series of surgeries—five in all—in an attempt to save some part of his vision. The surgeon was a star doctor who had pioneered retinal surgery. He was passionately concerned with his patient’s retinas, but not concerned with the person who was attached to the retinas. After the first surgery, my father had to sit up in bed for a week with his eye bandaged. He was allowed to rest his chin on a board, but that was it. All he wanted was to lie down. He developed such a bad headache that he thought he had a brain tumor.