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Gift of Sight

As we drove up a freeway in Tehran, there was a bend in the road. When we finished the bend, all of a sudden we could see the majestic mountains to the north of Tehran, beautiful, tall, and breathtaking. Since my older son was seven and my younger son was four, we lived in Tehran, taking that freeway, making that bend, and seeing those mountains everyday. And almost everyday I would say: “Look you guys, look at those beautiful mountains, and look at those clouds above the mountains! Aren’t they beautiful?” As he grew older and went into the more challenging years of his life, my older son stopped answering me, or he would say something sarcastic, like: “Mom, how many times do you need to show us those same mountains? We have seen them before. They haven’t changed since the last time you pointed them out to us!” But I persevered. I said it again. When he was sixteen, one spring morning after rain had stopped and the sky had cleared, we were driving up a different freeway, facing the same mountains from a different angle, when he exclaimed: “Mom, look at those beautiful mountains! Isn’t it just the most breathtaking thing you have ever seen?” That was the day I knew he could “see.” He now sees the mountains, the trees, the clouds, the grass, and everything that needs to be seen, including beautiful babies and children which he once viewed with a complete lack of interest and disdain. My younger son, The Traveler, who has obviously been subjected to the same torture growing up as my son, has started “seeing” things for the past year. Here’s a photograph he took one day last March when he was home by himself. I found it in the camera, among some other “experimental” pictures he had taken, and it is now one of my most valuable things in life—proof that this one, too, can now “see.”