MY FATHER'S GLASSES (a Gonething)
“…they were an odd hybrid, just like him.”
[Editors’ Note: This is the story of a gonething, something precious that wasn’t kept.]
My father’s glasses were as much a part of his face as his skin. Neither round nor square, neither bifocal nor traditional, they were an odd hybrid, just like him. The frames were gold and the lenses could flash with light that prevented me from clearly seeing the eyes behind them. Sometimes I imagine he’s like that now: here, but hidden.
If he were a character in a children’s book, his glasses would have been magical because vision was his gift. He was a professor of economics whose background was physics, and his way of seeing the world was wholly open and nonjudgmental. Like God, but without the human notions of anger and punishment.
He died of cancer in 1995, when I was 26. Around that time there was a song playing on the radio by the Crash Test Dummies—“God Shuffled His Feet”: And if your eye got poked out in this life / Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
Of course he wouldn’t need his glasses after he died, but it seemed only fair that he should be wearing them when we buried him. Who would he be without his glasses? From the moment I opened my eyes and greeted the world, they had been on his face. But I wanted to keep them. If death was taking my father, my hero, my best friend, I should be able to keep one little piece of him.
He and my mother had divorced when I was twelve, and a few years later he met someone else. His new wife was nice enough, but she had no wildness in her, and I used to think she was not his equal. Can I have my dad’s glasses? I wanted to ask her. Can I keep his glasses, when they put him in the ground? She was the kind of person who was always moving: pulling a tray from the oven, wiping a counter. Stop moving, I wanted to say. I have something to ask.
My father, in the next room, was dying. “We are of the dirt, and also of the stars,” he used to say, and his glasses, resplendent and greasy, reflected this. The blue in the eyes behind them was maybe the first color I ever saw. It was my blue, the color of my own eyes.
I didn’t ask if I could keep them. How I wish I had.
—Alethea Black
Alethea Black was born in Boston and graduated from her Harvard. She’s the author of the memoir You’ve Been So Lucky Already.