Enduring Stars

Sixty-two-year-old researcher, Elizabeth Spelke stares out from the Science Times with bright brown eyes. Reflecting on those eyes, I wonder what makes the brown eyes so bright. Not the color, certainly. I go back to my newspaper to look again. Through the frames of her glasses, each eye has a tiny dot of white, not the eyes themselves, but reflections off them. I immediately think of another woman I know and realize this isn't the first time I've described an older person as having beautiful, shining eyes.

I turn to the next portrait in my mental album. The skinny woman in her forties, dressed like someone in her twenties, face framed by a frizzy mane of brown hair, also has sharp brown eyes. Why don't her eyes strike me as shining, beautiful? Here the eyes are the last thing I describe.

Aren't the eyes the same, anyway?

It's not a question. The eyes do look the same as we age. That's what is striking. A woman's face becomes pasty, puffy, wrinkled, her hair fades to gray or white. Striking, dark, angular becomes muted, softened, blurry. The eyes remain perfect, glossy marbles. The shining blue eyes of an older person aren't cliché. They really do shine, particularly against a subdued background. Like the inner rings of a big tree or a time capsule buried in the backyard, they make the connection to younger days .
Why don't the eyes age? Maybe they don't see as well as they used to, but they are "well preserved." They are like museum pieces, displayed in the frame of the eye socket, moving behind glass. The eyes move from side to side, up and down, hands exploring the fishbowl for a way out. They try to escape, but find they are trapped. Trapped in time.

Though the eyes can't escape the cage, the frame, the fishbowl, they can and do move the whole thing, turn the head, lift the body from the chair, pull it across the street.

The eyes are more free than the mind in its bony cell. The mind relies on the eyes to bring back photos of the world outside.

My own eyes like to look inward or focus idly on the page, or somewhere between the page and keyboard, more interested in what they have already seen than in what they might see now or later. These eyes are content in their cage.

And as I dance, it's not the eyes that direct my movement. My mind responds to a sound or to the sensation of feet against the floor. My eyes watch as through a train window. They are not manipulative, dragging me around face first.