By Richelle E. Goodrich
I looked out the window on
an early-morning bus, noting how low the gray cloud-cover hung. The dark and heavy sky was threatening rain. I watched a tall line
of trees that bordered acres of hay field, the wind flailing branches like they
were bits of straw.
“What a miserable day,” I
sighed.
Surprisingly, someone
responded to my bleak announcement—a man one seat back. “You just need new
glasses,” he said.
His hand reached over my
shoulder, a finger and thumb pinched as if holding the thin arm of actual
frames, only there was nothing in his fingers.
I glanced backwards, my
expression questioning his comment as well as his sanity.
“Go on,” he urged,
holding up his gift of nothingness. My
eyebrows slanted, appraising him.
“There’s nothing there,”
I finally pointed out.
“Sure there is,” he
insisted. “These are special eyeglasses. Go on,
put them on.”
I played along, partly to
be kind and partly to avoid a public scene with a madman. In a careful gesture, I took the invisible
spectacles and pretended to slip them over my nose. Another rearward glance found the man
smiling. He pointed at the window.
“Now look again.”
My head turned the other
way to take a second glimpse at the gray sky.
There were raindrops clinging to the window now, tracing a slow,
horizontal line across the glass. Before
I could say anything, the man made a soft but excited observation in my
ear.
“See that beam of
sunlight streaming through the break in the clouds?”
It was beautiful, like a
spotlight glimmering on a distant rooftop.
“And look there,” he
said, gesturing again at the sky. “See
that rainbow? Or half of it, anyway.”
My eyes followed a
translucent smear of colors to somewhere behind a neighborhood of houses. I hadn’t noticed it earlier.
“See those pink blossoms
on that little tree?”
I nodded as we past it by. “Pretty.”
“See the hawk circling right
above it?”
“I think that’s a
blackbird,” I said. It appeared charcoal
from beak to tail.
“Huh…” He laughed for half a second. “That’s one big blackbird!”
He gestured to an
upcoming cluster of young evergreens growing tightly together on someone’s
property. “See the naked Christmas trees?”
Funny. It made me smile.
“Oh look!” I exclaimed, startled by my own unexpected
exuberance. “Puppies!” I pointed at two young golden labs on
leashes. They seemed more interested in wrestling
one another than being walked.
“I see, I see,” the man
grinned.
He continued on, pointing
out things beyond our window that were exactly opposite of the gloomy and
miserable picture I’d beheld earlier. It
amazed me the number of wonderful things he managed to find. Before long, I was noticing pleasantries he missed as we drove along.
Realizing the gift he’d
given me, I thanked him. “I guess it’s
not such a miserable day after all."
He pretended to take back
his lenses and smiled wide. “It’s all in
the glasses.”
This short story is from the book, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, and a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year
Copyright 2015 Richelle E. Goodrich
