The Eyes Have It

by MILDRED CLINGERMAN

I KNOW a man who can glance up at the summer sky, note the white, towering, majestic clouds, and say, “Cumulo-nimbus. We may get some rain,” and then stroll on without further comment. This man astonishes me, not for his knowledge of cloud formations and their weather meaning, but for his inability to see the faces and figures ranging overhead. How can he miss the fact that the third cloud on his left looks exactly like a parrot wearing enormous slippers?

“It’s easy,” my friend assures me. “I’m not, thank heaven, one of those people who see profiles in mountain ranges. I’ve never seen the man in the moon, either, or rabbit heads in larkspur, or cute little faces in pansies. On conducted tours through caves, I’ve been shown what the guide called pipe organs and cathedrals. All I saw were stalactites and stalagmites. One huge rock balanced on another doesn’t, to my mind, look at all like Harry Truman wearing a baseball cap. Water pouring over the side of a cliff doesn’t remind me of bridal veils; moreover, the chickens and dogs I’ve met never resembled their owners.”

The nice thing about friendship is that you can’t strain it to the breaking point over a cloud-sheep wearing a George Washington wig, particularly if you don’t mention it. It’s highly unlikely that my friend will ever notice, either, that the crack in his front walk is a long, crooked gun pointing right at his door. But how could he lie for two weeks in that hospital room with the plaster ceiling

and not see the angel overhead? True, the angel sometimes, late in the afternoon, put on a Mexican sombrero, thus lightening the atmosphere somewhat; but the legless Crusader riding the legless horse still pursued the fat toad who was trying to swallow the wrong end of a toothbrush.

“Don’t you find this room a little too busy?” I asked, a day or so before he was allowed to go home.

“Busy?” he snorted. “It’s dull as ditchwater. Before you go, pull down that window shade for me, will you? I think I’ll take a nap before dinner.”

With the shade down, the Crusader turned into a Ubangi woman carrying a monkey by the neck. I think she was headed for the cathedral in the corner, but she may have had her eye on the old-fashioned meat grinder. I couldn’t stay to find out. Visiting hours were over.

I rode down in the elevator with a man who looked exactly like the turkey I once raised, and I hen couldn’t bring myself to kill and eat, because he reminded me so much of sore throats wrapped in red flannel.

I caught a taxi outside, and after several blocks the driver pointed to an ugly building with a yellow cupola. “See that?” he said. “Ever notice how much it looks like an egg yolk with a toothpick stuck in it?”

I smiled and nodded, but the truth is, it looks like a knitting needle rammed viciously into half a beach ball. Why can’t people be more obsorvant?