Emerald Eyes

I had dinner with my son this week at Hananoki, a local Japanese grill.

[And, PS? Hananoki needs to have a grill area table reserved for people not interested in the "performance". Because for me, at least, one you've seen the ol' egg-in-the-hat, onion ring volcano, shrimp-tail-flicking show once, that'll do ya (unless you're five). ]

Chase was seated around the corner from me facing a large window, his face illuminated in such a way by the fading sun that his eyes looked...green. As we talked and drank beer and stuffed ourselves with grilled meat of all varieties, I continued to silently marvel at the trick of the light that caused his eyes to look so green.

Finally, I had to mention it.

"Chase, your eyes look positively green in this light", I told him.

"Mom, my eyes are green. They've been green for three years", he replied.

This was nothing short of startling information for me. And, I'm assuming, here, any mother. Because we are the people who absolutely know these sorts of statistics about our children. Chase's eyes have been brown since the end of his first year when I watched the slow progression they made from their original blue to muddy to, what I assumed would be their final color, brown. Certainly, the genetic odds in his case were overwhelmingly tilted toward brown since I am blue-eyed and the starter husband brown-eyed.

For a long time, that first year, I harbored a futile hope that Chase's eyes would, through some miracle, remain blue like my own, though I knew this was probably genetically impossible.

Turns out, though, now that I've done a little research, that yes, eye color can sometimes change in an adult (often because of sun exposure) and that a blue/brown parent combination can yield a green-eyed child probably in this case because his father has a green/green green/blue gene lurking somewhere in the mix. Genetics has always been something of a fascination of mine.

So, wow. Green is certainly closer to blue than brown and even though it probably isn't a result of my own chromosomal contribution, I'm going to just randomly take it as a positive wink from the universe for me, because that's how I am.

The whole situation just serves to reinforce and bring to mind once again the immortal words of the great philosopher, Ferris Bueller.


Life goes by pretty fast sometimes. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.