Dear Boo and Bubble,
I’ve always believed that of all the senses available to us,
the most important is a sense of humor.
It allows us to navigate every type of situation, particularly stressful
ones. The old saying goes (with
apologies to Mary Michaels on the grammar) - “anything you can laugh at, you’re
bigger than.” Your great, great, great grandmother Mamie Bryant lived such a
creed. I imagine the ability to find
light-hearted perspective was essential for a widow left at age 40 with eight
children to raise.
Granny Bryant’s health was never particularly good. She suffered diabetes and in 1936, at the age
of 72, had to have a kidney removed.
Nothing was more devastating to her, though, than the loss of her left
eye to glaucoma. Not only did she have
to adjust to seeing with one eye, her sense of pride and appearance suffered
because she had to wear a patch.
Her daughter Mittie and your great granddaddy Schaefer tried
to persuade her to consider a glass eye.
At first, the thought repulsed her and she would have nothing to do with
it. Finally, they convinced her to at
least go to the doctor and discuss an artificial eye with him. She remained skeptical, but acquiesced.
The doctor matched her good eye perfectly with a glass
one. He slipped it into the vacant
socket and told her to look in the mirror.
She stared at her reflection, mesmerized. From that day on, she was never without one. Granny’s glass eye created quite a few comical
moments in our family folklore, but she always enjoyed the joke as much as
anyone, even when she might be the butt of it.
Glass eyes were just that….glass. And occasionally, Granny would lose grip of
hers and it would shatter on the floor.
“Pst, pst…” she whispered clandestinely for your great,
great Aunt Katherine, who was living with Granny at the time. “Here,
Katherine. Take this $10 and these
broken pieces of my old eye and go down to the doctor’s office and find a match
for me.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Katherine replied.
“Oh, and don’t say a word to anybody about this. It’s just between you and me.”
“Okay,”
Katherine shuddered when she walked up to the tray of eyes,
all glaring up at her like a big old fly’s head. Finally she found the right one. She paid the doctor and home she came,
sneaking in with Granny’s eye, no one the wiser.
Granny always took her eye out at night and soaked it in a
glass of water. One weekend, her
step-grandson William Kendrick came to visit.
In the middle of the night, he awoke and went into the bathroom for some
water. Not wanting to disturb anybody,
he decided to leave off the light. He
tapped around the sink until he felt a glass and turned on the faucet to pour
in some water. After a couple of gulps,
Granny’s eye rolled into his mouth. He
didn’t swallow it, but spit it into the sink where fortunately, it neither
broke nor disappeared down the drain.
One Saturday morning, Granny was still in bed when she heard
a knock on the back door. She realized
that it was probably the little black boy who came through the neighborhood to
sell eggs every weekend. She needed
eggs. Quickly, she got out of bed,
grabbed her robe and went into the bathroom to retrieve her eye out of the
water glass. Granny popped the eye in
the socket and hastened downstairs.
“I’m coming….hold on….don’t go anywhere,” she admonished him
urgently.
She came to the back door and flung it open, smiling with
familiarity.
The little boy gawked back at her in utter terror. His eyes grew wide and his mouth gaped
open. He threw his entire carton of eggs
high over his head and they crashed to the ground splattering all over. The little waif scampered away as fast as his
short legs could go.
Granny stood there stunned, not knowing what had just
happened….until she went into the kitchen and caught sight of herself in a
mirror. In her haste, she had put her
eye in backwards!
She burst into such laughter, she could hardly stop.
“Guess I’m going to have to find a new source for eggs. I reckon I’ll never see the likes of him
again.”
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