Here’s Mud in Your Eye!

Would you let him do it?  Would you let a guy spit into the dirt in his hand and put it on your eyes so that you could really see? 

I’ve been badly near-sighted all my life.  In second grade my teacher suggested to my parents that I have my eyes checked.  We were, if not dirt poor, pretty close to it.  My dad worked in a factory and spent all of his time at home working on the house he and my mom had bought as a “shell” – walls and roof – right after the war.  Pennies were things to be pinched, dimes to be turned over before spending.  So taking the drive into the city to have my eyes checked and then returning a week later to have my glasses fitted and paid for took a lot of sacrifice.  The sacrifice would be made again and again, each time I’d broken my glasses playing and my dad’s attempts to repair them finally failed. 

I wonder now how much of my physical and social clumsiness developed thanks to the fragility of my spectacles.  So now I’m 14, and tired of these darned glasses, and the way they look like coke bottles (people tell me so from time to time and it hurts) and this guy comes along and spits into the dust in his hand and offers to save me from this. 

“Hey, buddy!   I can fix that for you, your eyes I mean, so you won’t need glasses anymore.”

I look at the mud in his hand, pushing the bridge of my glasses up with my forefinger.  He sees the doubt in my eyes, even through my thick lenses.

“You don’t trust me, do ya?”

I shrug my shoulders and shake my head “no”.

 50 years later I still wear glasses.  And so I admire the beggar’s courage in John’s Gospel.  And I think about receiving communion.

“Hey, buddy!  Eat this bread; it’s my flesh.., and drink this wine; it’s my blood.  You’ll really live.”

I do eat it, and drink it.  But do I’ like the beggar with mud-smeared eyes, go to the pool, to where I’m sent, and take the next step?

Tomorrow: Going to the pool.

Oh…”Here’s mud in your eye” (try it with an Irish accent) was a toast made at the horseracing track, referring to the rider in the back having mud from the hooves of the winning horse.