Living life through a child's eyes.

She was six when she saw it. It was on the second shelf, third cubicle from the right. She was so mesmerized that when the old woman with the handbag nearly ran her over, scolding her with a high pitched squeaky voice, the words never found her ears. She reached as high as she could – then a little bit higher - the fingers of her right hand stretched out like arrows pointing in all directions but still the object remained out of her grasp. Closer - but still unattainable. So she stood there her heart palpating with hardly contained excitement as her mind filled with an almost never ending series of images. Another little girl undoubtedly attracted to her transfixed counterpart stopped and stared - strangely not at the object of the first girl’s attention but at her eyes which were opened wide, the beautiful blue orbs dancing with unfettered enthusiasm.

The frame of her vision was suddenly interrupted – the object of her wanderlust wantonly grabbled by a heavily calloused hand with small hairs huddled in patches on three fingers. As the man took the tiara away, the plastic diamonds caught an exposed flickering fluorescent lamp which hung slightly askew and the prisms filled her eyes brilliantly with flashes of blue.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

That night she replayed her experience over and over in her head. At first she imagined wearing the tiara – a princess in her own home. Her mother, father and siblings fawning over her beauty and grace. She smiled as she lay back on the wrinkled white pillow. But then the daydream changed and the tiara was the famous lost treasure of a small African tribe who hunted for it day and night. It was their god and lucky charm and she had miraculously discovered it half covered in mud on her families’ property in California. All the newspapers and TV programs reported it so. Never mind that they lived a half world away. Still, when she handed it back to the tribe’s hunched over leader dressed in a grass skirt just like the one she had seen in National Geographic, he thanked her profusely and she graciously accepted a token of their appreciation - a small striped lemur that her father quickly insisted on giving to the zoo. But that was OK as she got her picture on TV again. That story quickly dissolved into a hunt for diamonds in the Amazon where she found herself wading through waist high water wriggling her feet in sticky muck to find the precious stones. Of course all the while avoiding the man eating snakes which she had seen on that movie that her brother knew they weren’t supposed to watch when mom had left him in charge last week.

It was the third warning from her dad that finally snapped her out of her fantasies and she reluctantly got up from her bed to brush her teeth.

Just a couple of them at least.

For the rest of her life, long after she had forgotten the details of that fateful day in Woolworth’s, she somehow managed to hold onto her most precious gift. That gift that most of the world of adults lose sometime between their first day of video games to the day they experience the anguish of a broken heart. Eyes that could see beyond the grey and dark world and look not past it but in spite of it – and find that single gem in a field of man made garbage.

When she was in her thirties on a day she didn’t expect, it happened in a particularly special way – not so much for her – for her, the ability to see with eyes of a child was ingrained in they way she had chosen to live. But this day, for four strangers, it would be an exceptional day. Today they would find something very precious that they didn’t even realize they had lost.

It was the color of rose.

A soft illuminated hue of red pinkishness that glowed effervescently in a pool of rippling light green water. She was mesmerized by the ebb and flow of the translucent membrane as the large South Asian Jellyfish hung suspended in the liquid. Her eyes were wide open, the blinking deliberate as the beat of her heart gently slowed down until, like a single drum tapping out the lead for a marching band, it found the measured cadence. There was wonder in her mind. Awe and admiration of the small creature that floated before her and the color that emanated from the living art. She never saw the mother holding the hand of her small blonde girl with the two bobbing ponytails or the grey bearded worker that happened to pass by in order to explain why the jellyfish was the color it was. A passerby would have found it amusing as the small makeshift family stood around her looking as inconspicuously as possible at the face of the woman as the woman herself gazed at the vessel in front of her. The throngs of people passing by the exhibit were as shadows obscured by the sun – unseen and invisible. No longer heard or felt because in that small instant of time only the four marveled at what they were watching - for they had been drawn into a world within the woman’s eyes. They saw passion and yearning and dreams and…hope that seemed all but foolish to hang on to in a world hardened…and angry… and empty. The mother, who by now had unconsciously rested her hand lightly on the head of the girl her fingers lightly entwined in the blonde locks, and the old man with his lips slightly parted stood there not looking at the living and breathing masterpiece but they, along with me, were staring at the woman’s eyes… as they danced brilliantly with flashes of blue.  ...