The Eyes Still Have It

Stephen King knew a bouncer who could distinguish a kid with a fake ID from a legal adult with  a careful moment of scrutiny.  "It's in the eyes," the bouncer had told King, "in the way they look at you."  King in his 40s interpreted his friend as saying that older eyes "lost" something.  I'm sure the 60-something King would now see it differently. 

It always annoyed me, in my teenaged years, when my mother called me a kid.  I didn't understand the perspective of age.  I didn't realize that being considered a kid could be anything other than a social status putdown by a haughty old-timer.  There are many benefits in youth. I didn't "get" that age gives us more than wrinkles -- that it also affords us certain scars upon the soul.  Scars build up through time, and may limit us in ways, but time also provides us calluses, like the ones built up on an expert guitarist's fingers, that enable him to play a jazz riff.  Younger players can't play that long since their fingers are still soft.  Maybe older eyes, with their different vision, can see things younger eyes can't -- and vice versa. 

The eyes are the windows to the soul, as the Latin statesman Cicero first said, and as way too many people have quoted.  It bears repeating if only for the point -- the difference in the eyes may not be the loss of something but a necessary change of vintage --- a deepening, a broadening of vision.  As we get older, nearsighted people often become farsighted.  Maybe that's more than an optical phenomenon.  In what seems like a matter of weeks, we become our parents in many ways, even if only to stand in contradiction to them.  We lose something that youth retains, but we gain something, too.

I first started writing my novel erotic romane, Defining Moments (MC Books), when I was 41.  As I wrote it, I feared the couple was too idealized and, well, old to be an acceptable erotic romance couple.  I've now published the novel as my hour is  about to strike 52.  I know now that fifty-somethings are just twenty-somethings with whiter hair.  My only worry was that an audience in the twilight of Twilight romantica couldn't embrace my fiery-hearted late-blooming lovers.  I'm happy to say that reviews suggest I was wrong.  Young people see the same things we do, just in different ways.

Perhaps Stephen's door guard friend couldn't see what was there because he didn't have a sufficient range of sight.  The older eyes weren't missing anything.  They just weren't focused on him.  Us oldies know the future belongs to us and that our hours won't go on forever.  We're closer to the end than we are the beginning.  We direct our eyes to the future, to the days beyond, and we don't worry about the reaction of the doorman.  That's something the young might learn from us, just as we could learn from the young.