Friday Five: Windows of the Soul

Sophia at RevGalBlogPals says today:

"This Friday Five is inspired by my husband's Lasik surgery yesterday....He'd been contemplating it for a while and was pushed over the edge by the fact that we put too much money in our healthcare spending account this year and it would have been gone anyway. (There was only enough for one eye, but the kind people at the eye clinic figured out a way to divvy up the charges between surgery and followup in January=next year's spending account). So please say a little prayer for his safe recovery and share with us your thoughts on eyes and vision."
Prayer said, here are my answers:
1. What color are your beautiful eyes? Did you inherit them from or pass them on to anyone in your family?
I used just to say brown, but now, having looked closely at really brown eyes, I say hazel. I believe they are close to the same color as my mother's were. However, having married a blue-eyed man, and having had a blue-eyed father and a blue-eyed maternal grandfather, all three of my children have blue eyes.
2. What color eyes would you choose if you could change them?
Just as with hair color, I'm quite happy with what I have. But if I had to make a change (and it could somehow be a natural one) I'd like red hair and green eyes, please. It's such a Romantic Jacobite Heroine combination!
3. Do you wear glasses or contacts? What kind? Like 'em or hate 'em?
I've worn glasses since I was seven. I can still remember the joy of riding home from the optician's and being able to make out the letters on the advertising signs (I couldn't actually read them because they were in German, this was in Wiesbaden). I'm very nearsighted, have astigmatism, and of course now have developed presbyopia (nothing to do with Presbyterians, it's "elder sight" or farsightedness) so I have bi- or tri-focals. They're progressive, no line in the middle, which I like. In my late teens, contact lenses were just becoming widely available/affordable but I was never tempted. I am very grateful for my eyeglasses.
4. Ever had, or contemplated, laser surgery? Happy with the results?
Too scary. Also, I suspect I have too many different things going on in there for successful treatment.
5. Do you like to look people in the eye, or are you more eye-shy?
I'm terribly shifty-eyed. Also rather shy in other ways. Looking people right in the eye seems very intimate to me.
Bonus question: Share a poem, song, or prayer that relates to eyes and seeing.
This is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from her first book of poems, Renascence, published in 1917. I don't have a particular association with grey eyes, but I understand the sentiment. Courtesy of Bartleby.

7. Tavern

I’LL keep a little tavern Below the high hill’s crest, Wherein all grey-eyed people May set them down and rest. There shall be plates a-plenty, 5 And mugs to melt the chill Of all the grey-eyed people Who happen up the hill. There sound will sleep the traveller, And dream his journey’s end, 10 But I will rouse at midnight The falling fire to tend. Aye, ’tis a curious fancy— But all the good I know Was taught me out of two grey eyes 15 A long time ago.