LOOK OUT!

Being on the Radio

NPR #1. -  From National Public Radio, now revised

            In the early 1990s a producer at “All Things Considered” called and asked if I’d be willing to write a 3-minute essay and read it out loud on the air, and I said, I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Oh, it’ll be easy, he said, because I don’t think he was a writer. You just look out your window and write about what you see. So, this is a new version of the first piece I read on National Public Radio. I’ve named it…

LOOK OUT!

I was renting a beach house in South Carolina (this was cheap to do in the winter), so first I went out onto the deck to look at the ocean. The tide was low, and an old man sat in a folding chair out on a sandbar.  Was that interesting? Next I went downstairs to the kitchen, but, instead of staring out at the beach, my eyes lit on the storm window and the layer of dead air and dead bugs between the world and me. I wasn’t getting this assignment right, so I wandered downstairs and sprawled in a big stuffed chair. Here the living room faced out to the street, and the large window was composed of small square panes, a lattice-work over the outside world. I watched a pregnant woman on roller skates glide by reading a letter. Was the letter from the old man sitting in the folding chair on the beach?

Unlikely, of course, but any window will try to create a composition, a frame, and the frame will want to hold a story, where one thing can exist in relation to another. So I finally understood the assignment, because the only frame I have ever used successfully is the one created by my eyeglasses.

I’m 78 years old now and I first got glasses when I was 8. I remember the thrill of seeing the world sharply, with clean edges and clear colors. The frames of the glasses bothered me at first because I had no peripheral vision, but I felt oddly secure behind this shield. A window, after all, requires an opaque structure that the window is part of. With eyeglasses, I could see out, but it was more difficult for others to see me.  As I got older, I compounded this privacy with tinted lenses.

When contact lenses became available, I started wearing them, and for the first time the world appeared as it was: that is, it had no edges. All that peripheral vision made me nervous. I was seeing the world without a frame, and the world looked back. I worried that folks could read my feelings in my naked eyes. If I got bored or angry or sad, those reactions would become apparent, and I’d be caught with my emotions down.

When my sister asked what had happened to those new contact lenses – I’d gone back to wearing my tinted glasses – I said, “The eyes are the windows of the soul. I can’t have mine flying around that easily.”