Shift

It is always so surreal when—for just a second—I find myself seeing a person I am very close to, or have known all my life, as a complete stranger would see them.  One moment they are the person I know, they are what their name, their features, their traits have come to embody for me—and the next they are just some woman, just some man, just a random child sitting next to me or a boy smiling out from a picture. 

When this happens to me with a picture, I always try to recapture the fleeting feeling after it is gone.  It really does last only a second—maybe less—and then I am left staring, looking at the photograph this way and that, trying to refocus my eyes until they see something different again, that slight shift in perception that is so strange and so fascinating.  It’s like that picture of the duck and the rabbit.  Which is it?  A duck or a rabbit?  Which one do you see first?  Which image remains, making it harder to return to the other?

When I was little, riding the school bus, I sometimes sat in the back and stared out the small window at the bottom of the emergency exit door, where you could see the pavement on the street gliding smoothly by in a blur of grain and tiny stones.  I stared at it because, if I refocused my eyes just right, I could imagine that the road was much farther away than just under the bus—that it was miles and miles away, as if I were flying far above it—or that it was a huge, magnificent road for tiny people, or a small, insignificant track for giants.

“What is she doing?” kids around me whispered.

I can’t imagine how I looked to them.  Or maybe I can: a strange kid transfixed by the bottom of the bus, her eyes huge and unswerving, spellbound by—nothing.  I kind of grin when I think about it now.

What is she doing?  I never did let them know.  Just ignored them and went on refocusing my eyes.

Why is it so fascinating—this occasional quest to alter my vision, my perception of people and things?  Sometimes I think it is just the fun of playing with the brain.  Sometimes it is because I want to do the impossible and travel back in time, where I can unknow a person I’ve known for years.  Other times I’m sure that it is a desire to see outside myself, to find someone else’s eyes, shift the crystal ever so slightly in the light and see what colors flash forth.

I had a dream recently that I was a dying old man.  The hospital couldn’t do anything for me anymore, so they released me to my daughter’s care.  As I stepped shakily off the bus that brought me to her home, I saw the bright smile on her face, the same smile my teenage granddaughter was wearing next to her.  The smiles were genuine.  I knew that.  They were happy to see me, despite the circumstances.  But I felt my heart sink as I looked at them, felt the hollowness beginning to spread all through me as I longed for someone I could lean on, someone I could look to for support.  My mother was gone.  My wife was gone.  My daughter would take care of me, I knew, but she was not someone I could sink into, let go with.  I was her caretaker.  Or that was the way it was supposed to be.  That was the way it had been.

Everything was different.  Everyone was gone.

And as the dream flashed to the next day, with me as an old man sitting by myself in my daughter’s den, I felt myself slipping away.  I closed my eyes, letting the darkness cascade over me, deeper and deeper, in waves, and was only partially afraid.  The rest of me knew that this was as it was meant to be.  And then, suddenly, I was half old man and half the real me, and a soft voice in my head said, You’re going to wake up now, and then I really sank back into the darkness, waiting to wake up.

It was such a strange dream, and the feeling lingered for so long afterward.  I kept marveling at how real it had seemed—at how I had never really felt what it was to be like that old man before—could never have hoped to feel it, but for that dream.

Why? I kept asking myself. Why did I dream it?

“Caretaker?” my dad scoffed when I told him about it.  “You’ve never been a caretaker to anyone in your life.”

But that was the point.  I’d never been a father or grandfather.  I’d never been an old man, or a dying one.  But I was in that dream.  In that dream, my vision shifted, my emotions shifted.  I was someone else—or another me.

I don’t exactly know why.  But changes in perception are, I think, even in their smallest forms, gifts.  For a chance to see the world a little differently, just for a moment, I would stare and stare and stare.