XVI.

One of my grandmothers got caught reading the newspaper
upside down. Can you blame her? What’s written there makes
you think the whole planet’s topsy turvy, yet most of us
only blink at poverty and war because we have to, closing
our eyes is involuntary. My grandmother though, she tried
to turn the entire world on its head and instead got carted right off
to doctors. They operated to remove a brain tumor and fix her
world view. During surgery my father surmised God would let
his mother live when he saw the sky change colors. And she did live,
though I suspect he only saw what happens most days, a sunset
or a sunrise, which makes me wonder if it takes some sort of lesion
for this species to see what’s really going on. Perhaps my grandma’s
skewed vision, corrected like a straying sheep, was an opportunity
for all of us to reassess what we find so right-side-up in this world.

From Red as a Lotus by Lisa Gill
http://www.lisagill.org/