When beautiful things attack

At age five, exploring my Great Aunt’s Pearl’s farm on the Oregon coast one summer, I somehow got locked inside her pen of prize peacocks. They were beautiful. I adored them. I wanted to get as close as I could so lifted the gate’s latch and stepped inside–except my desire to become best friends with them didn’t happen.

Peacocks may be beautiful, but they’re not nice. They hissed and ran at me, pecking my bare legs. They are terrifying in attack mode and achieved their goal to make me run. The gate had latched behind me, but I instantly managed to scramble up and over the five-foot-high chicken wire fence, although I had never tried that stunt before. I stood outside shaking. The majestic birds didn’t look beautiful now. In fact, I stayed far away from then on and didn’t consider them as beautiful again. They were spared the outcome of the offending rooster in that same barnyard that attacked people  He was served in Sunday’s dumplings. To soothe my hurt, Great Aunt Pearl did give me a dozen gorgeous peacock plumes that decorated my room for years, but I had learned that looks can be deceiving. Things that look beautiful may not always act that way.

My grandfather taught us that beauty is only skin deep. I remember watching the Miss America Pageant with him when the handsome emcee was Burt Parks. Grandpa would say, “See that fella? See me? Take the skin off both of us, and we’d look just the same.” We laughed with him, but Grandpa’s words are true.

Sometimes, people or situations I’ve encountered in life didn’t initially look appealing or beautiful but turned out to be wonderfully si and cherished once I got to know them past surface appearances. The saying is true, “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.”

Yearly eye exams safeguard my eyes. The dilating drops mean I shouldn’t judge distances or drive afterward, but getting new glasses with improved  vision is worth it. When I got my first pair of glasses at age six, I kept crashing into the sidewalk because it was actually much nearer than my eyes told me. I had to re-calculate and re-learn distances.

Maybe our nation and world are paying a long overdue visit to the eye doctor. The dilating drops our eyes make our vision blurry—we should wait and not travel much distance for a while. Lets pray and believe that our new corrective lenses will help us go forward with clearer vision so we don’t accidentally trip ourselves or others.