Magnified By Laura J. Oliver

 

Every morning, when I get ready for my day, I sit at my dressing table, known as a vanity by the judgy, and check out my face in a mirror that lights up and magnifies by a power of 15.

“Why do you do that?” my mother asked when she was alive. And “Stop doing that!” my former dermatologist groaned. “No one expects perfection!”

I smiled at him sadly. He was, of course, a man.

“You’ll never see anything better than you saw the day before!” Mom predicted, but it’s not that I think I’ll discover I’ve gotten younger-looking overnight; it’s that I am searching for the newest sign of deterioration. Stemming the tide requires grand-scale scrutiny. And if you have fair skin and blue eyes, it also requires pretty vigilant screenings by a dermatologist as you pay in spades for those days before sunscreen when you grooved to tunes on your beach towel in the Outer Banks.

But a magnifying mirror would not have saved me this Monday when I visited my new dermatologist after a weekend hiking through the woods of the Blue Ridge. I was chatting with the doctor as she updated my records when I felt something itchy about two inches above my hairline on the back of my neck. Without thinking, I slipped an exploratory hand up to touch the place and discovered a small bump.

Dr. Aguh was still studying the computer screen while I sat there, semi-horrified to realize that the itchy bump was a tick I must have picked up over the weekend. Now, I would have to dislodge the critter and offer it up like a creepy present. “I’m meticulously clean! I wash every day! And, oh yeah, here’s a bug I just found in my hair.”

So when Dr. Aguh beamed her bright smile on me at last, I was perched on the edge of my hardback chair in my gray jeans and white sweater, pinching my new friend with his tiny flailing legs between my thumb and index finger.

“I can’t believe this,” I confessed, “but I just found this tick …

“(I know! Gross!)

“And he was attached… (I know! Grosser!)

“Right here.” I pointed at the back of my neck with my other hand.

She didn’t look.

“A tick?” Dr. Aguh stepped backward involuntarily.

“Put it in here,” she suggested, handing me a specimen cup at arm’s length.

“I was outside all weekend,” I called after her as she abruptly exited the room. I peered in the cup at my new friend, left to ponder our effects on each other’s lives.

I walked over to the window, put my captive on the sill, and immediately googled “ticks that cause Lyme disease” on my cellphone. A nasty lineup of the usual suspects appeared. I began comparing mugshots. “Number One. Dog tick, step forward.” By the time the doctor returned, I was fairly certain this was not a Lyme disease perp but a harmless imposter. Still, we weren’t sure, so I was told that if I wanted an antibiotic after further research at home, I could call.

In my office, I taped the defendant to a piece of white paper, took his photograph, and then enlarged it. Which brings me back to things we size up and how this is not a good thing most of the time. Very little benefit comes from looking at something way larger than it appears to the naked eye. Or that is normally hidden. You think your dog is cute? Ever pulled back those lips and had a look at those teeth? Who’s cute now? How about your horse? So beautiful, so noble, but pull up those lips and call in the clowns.

Likewise, the person speaking on Zoom! You can change your zoom settings to automatically enlarge the speaker, you know. Please don’t do this in my workshops. I like to think you are seeing me as I’m seeing you—very small, with little detail, from a galaxy far, far away.

What else suffers from magnification?

Anxiety enlarges my impatience, makes me snap at the dog, say bad words to inanimate objects. I sound mean, but I’m really worried; about injured children in warzones I long to hold to my heart, about rising tides and temperatures. About my vanishing savings. And fear magnifies my inclination to criticize. I sound judgmental, but I’m scared. For my children, their children. For humanity. You.

But we can also magnify the moon, the Milky Way, and the light from distant stars. And magnification makes things appear closer, like age, but they are not really closer. In fact, they are not even right-side up!

All cameras, telescopes, and even the corneas of your eyes bend incoming light to produce an image that is upside down. It is your brain that receives those signals, decodes and interprets them, then constructs an image of the world right side up.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m seeing the world upside down from very far away, and my brain has not yet righted it, but it could.

The primal brain is ego-centric. There is only self. So, giving love feels like receiving love; extending compassion, feels as if we have been enfolded in loving arms. Praying for another feels like blessings raining down. A conversion accomplished by the brain but experienced in the heart.

When mom wanted me to feel the consequences of a questionable decision, say accelerating through a yellow traffic light, she’d ask, “What if everybody did that?”  Well, what if?

What if everybody did that?

Gave away, relentlessly, what we want to receive. Justice. Empathy. Mercy.

When that is the light by which we see, it will right the world.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.