Seeing

My little brother stood quietly beside his desk with a magnifying glass in his hand. I looked at him from the splintered pine frame of our kitchen door where I was standing. He turned around slowly, like a person who is in deep thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown – as big as the world and as brown as the turned soil in the fields around our farm.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

- Why?

- Did you know tomatoes come from the Andes Mountains 'round Peru in South America? And they're fruits and not vegetables 'cause they have seeds inside of them and 'cause they come from a flowering plant? And they're good for your heart and can fight certain kinds of cancer?

I walked to him and knelt beside him. I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught to me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. But it was Carver who taught me how these parts work together to help us see. 

His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts he had memorized from the old set of encyclopedias in our house.

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into five parts, a little more than three of those parts would be filled up by seeing?

- There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. It’s the retina. Nobody could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. When people looked inside the retina for the first time they found millions of these tiny cells called rods and cones. Those rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for these things called optic nerves. The optic nerves send these signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. ‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. The brain turns it right side up. Idn’ that amazing?

- Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know what? So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. But those parts remained hidden to me. 

I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.