I want my (soulful) eyes back!

When I was young, I had big brown eyes and almost black hair. The Italian butcher on Main Street called me the "little bambino" when Mom would take me along on her shopping. My brother would call me "bug eyes" when he was in one of his kinder moods. A rarity. More often it was worse names.




I was always mistaken for some ethnicity that I wasn't. Italian, Jewish, even Cuban, but I am mostly Irish. My grandfather on my father's side was a merchant seaman out of Belfast who decided he liked America. An affection I think had something to do with the Irish lass he had met in New York and eventually married. My mother said we came from the Black Irish, which turns out to be a bit of myth mixed with legend. She was referring to the Spanish Armada myth. The genetic evidence often does not quite jibe with the romantic legends, doesn't it?

But we don't stay the children we start out as, do we? As I grew up, passed through puberty, and became an adult, my eyes shrunk a bit, the dark brown faded a little. My mother said I once had red hair... when I was an infant, maybe even as a toddler. She kept a clipping of some fine red hair in an envelope that had my name on it. I don't recall that, of course. My own memories are full of mirror reflections of a dark haired child. A red-headed child would have stood out in our family and probably caused a bit of gossip.

As I got older, my hair grew finer and finer (and the hairline receded). Eventually, I suppose I will have the sparseness of my mother's. My eyebrows are shrinking and may even seem to disappear as they become gray and even finer. My eyes seem to have shrunk also. I looked back through my pictures and realized that this has been a long process that has been so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable. I lost the large dark eyelashes somewhere along the way, too. Now they hardly exist at all.

I was often jealous of my brother, who got my mother's light eyes (hers were hazel, his are blue) and nose (small). I was plain ol' Douglas who ended up looking mostly like Dad with my brown eyes and larger nose. Though not as dark and not with the thick black hair.
Ah youth! Where have you gone?