lazy bones

i was a scrawny, homely kid. hell, i was a violet baby so it's no surprise that a couple years didn't improve my looks. mom posed with me as an infant in a lavender dress and there i lay, a sorry excuse for a baby, my skin color matching her dress. meanwhile, there is mom, looking like a 60's beauty queen. we lived in brooklyn, NY and when she'd (proudly?) stroll me in my baby carriage the old neighborhood ladies would peer in, shake their heads and tsk-tsk. no wonder. i was 6 pounds when i was born then shrank to 5! failure to thrive, i guess they'd call it nowadays. but i had an excuse. i projectile vomited every time milk was introduced to my gullet. eventually, before i shrank away to nothing, my parents sold their car to pay for my return to the hospital to figure out just what is wrong with this child. and it was the milk. i couldn't tolerate it. and so i got Soy before Soy got cool. it was 1960, after all. no one was thinking edamame or tofu-pups or soy burgers back then. and now, at 48, you couldn't get me to ingest tofu even if i became the incredible shrinking person yet again.

a few years later i was diagnosed with a Lazy Eye. there is something vaguely accusatory about that term. that eye is just not pulling its weight. punish it! wait....no....punish the other eye. patch the good eye and make that Lazy Eye work. and so i became the Eyepatch Kid for about a year. maybe it wasn't that long but in my memory it was, and that's all that counts. they stuck some eyecup on my face, pasted it on with a bandaid. i was a sight to behold. and the bitch of it was, i couldn't see worth a damn with it on. the middle of every page of a book was missing. half of the face i looked at in the mirror was missing. the world around me appeared in some warped version of tunnel vision. weeks went by, months, and my Lazy Eye did not submit, refused to improve. i would be interested to see my school grades from that time because i can only imagine that they'd suffer since reading tediously took twice as long. i'd cock my head like a bird, shift my head back and forth as i followed the line on the page. in fact, it's rathering amazing i remained an avid reader, despite it all. this may be the only picture that exists of me during that time and i look pretty happy, despite the What Not To Wear bikini of the times and the ever present eyepatch. i'm sure i got mocked for my fashion accessory. kids are mean. i was a walking target. bull's eye, so to speak. but i'm lucky. i can't remember any of that particular torture. i can't remember much from that time of my youth at all. sometimes i wonder if i have memory from that time, or just a photograph that's become a stand-in for memory. i just have a feeling, and the feeling isn't good.

the doctors may have been right about my projectile vomiting and cured me with soy, but they got the eye wrong and needlessly tormented an already homely kid for a year. when the patch failed to achieve the goal it simply came off. only years later did an eye doctor peer into that eye and declare it "incurable". the damn thing was missing a patch of rods and cones in the back and there was and is nothing that could ever improve my sight. a defect, never to be overcome. even as i type these words i can close my left (good) eye and half the screen disappears. i can't even finish this sentence assured of proper spelling. obviously, punctuation and capitalization went out my literary window years ago. i guess it isn't just the eye that's "Lazy".