Seeing eye people

This was supposed to be posted last week, but I don’t think my Chief of Staff is very committed to her job right now, because she hasn’t finished it until now. I had to take Mom on her long run so that she would be ready for her marathong, so we went to The Wetlands that Smell Like a Fart very, very early before the morning.

It was a clear night, and Mom and I could see the stars in the sky. Since I couldn’t see much of anything else, I looked at the sky as I sniffed the air for bunny scent. Suddenly, a giant smudge went across the sky for a second. “Oscar! Did you see that?” Mom said. “It was a shooting star. I’ve never seen one so big! It was blue around the edges!” “What’s blue?” I asked. “Blue is like the color that happens on the stove when you cook food.” Even though Mom is real dumb at reading smells, she can see a lot of things that I can’t. It’s hard for her to describe the stuff sometimes, just like it’s hard for me to explain smells. But she tries.

As we ran on, the moon got lower and lower in the sky. As it got lower, it also got bigger until it was the size of Mom’s head. “Oscar, the moon is bright orange!” Mom said. “What’s orange?” “It’s like a fruit. Like a peach, or a carrot, or… an orange.” It sounded nice. I didn’t know that things in the sky could look like fruits or cooking food. If everything in nature looks like food to people, no wonder Mom’s eating all the time.

We kept running, and the sun started to come up. When the sun comes up, the edge of the world turns on and suddenly I can start to see things starting with far-away things and slowly moving closer to me. “What do you see when you look at that?” I asked Mom. “Well, right now I see purple. Like the color of your stegosaurus. The colors are really bright because of all the fires.” “Why do fires that are too far away to see make the world light up?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” Mom said. “You know how it’s smelled like bacon and camping all week? That’s smoke. When the sun hits the smoke, it lights it up and makes the sunrise really intense.” So to humans, sunrises can be like bacon! The world must be very beautiful to them indeed.

A few minutes later I asked again, “Now what do you see?!” “Now I see a lot of pink and yellow. Like if you mixed grape fruit juice and cranberry juice. That’s in the sky. But the water looks just like gold. It’s like a big, smooth sheet of shiny metal.”

I didn’t realize that Mom saw so many things when we ran. When I run, I like watching all the smells go by: like the juniper bush that smells like an old man soul, and the message boards on phone poles where sometimes dogs get into the most hilarious pee battles, or smelling all the places where cats have been in my neighborhood (where do they all go?!?!). I always wondered why Mom wasn’t into all those interesting things. It must be because she’s enjoying her own playlist of experiences that make her think about food or money or other things that she likes. No wonder she’s okay with running on her hind paws with her nose so far away from the ground.

-Oscar, proud supporter of Seeing Eye People everywhere