The Color of a Faded Pair of Dungarees

Anyone who ever met my mother remembered her eyes - they were an unbelievably pale blue. To call them cornflower blue would be ascribing them with a depth of color that they did not possess. They were a blue that if painted on a wall might be a bit insipid or wimpy but in the setting of a fine-featured face, the color was unexpected and striking. Until the day she died at 80, strangers complimented her on their beauty.

As a child, I was always a bit jealous of the 5 sets of blue eyes in my family because after all, no tiny girlchild is ever partial to the color brown - the eye color I shared with my father and one brother. Brown...the color of wood and the "plain" songbirds and well, lets face it, poop. It is never the first Crayon worn to a nub by young artists. When I complained about my genetic curse, my mother would always exclaim and repeat the story of how glad she was when I was born and she saw that I had eyes that were "a real color" and had not inherited her old faded blue.

Oddly, you see, my mother hated her baby blues. As a tiny child, her adored maternal grandfather, Papa, had once commented that she had eyes just like his. "They're the color of an old washed out, faded pair of dungarees," he said. Who knows why she decided he meant that as a criticism. Maybe he really did. Or maybe she just didn't like denim. Whatever it was, she seized on that one comment as a "truth" and let it cancel out the thousands of compliments she got in the seven decades to come. To her, those beautiful eyes were forevermore colorless.

Like all mothers, mine left me a lot of legacies besides the genetic. Some were intential lessons and some not. Some are positives and some are not. In this case, whenever someone criticizes me or my actions, I remember my mother and her blue eyes: one opinion does not a truth make. An opinion is just that, an opinion and I can choose what meaning to apply to it. It is an unintentional legacy, but important all the same.