Something in My Eye

            I worked at OCADU at 11:50 on Tuesday, November 8th. When I signed in I noticed that Brian Haddon was working the same shift and that he hadn’t yet signed in, so I decided to wait for him. After about ten minutes, a female model that I recognized, but whose name I’d forgotten, arrived at the front desk to record her signature on the time sheet. I think I’d only met her once in the model lounge last year or last semester and we chatted very briefly. After she’d scribbled her handle in the book, she turned and noticed me, saying, “Don’t tell me …” She thought for a few seconds and then offered, with a furrowed brow, “C – h … ?” I nodded. Then she thought a little longer and said, “Chris …” I encouragingly told her that she was getting closer, Finally she said, “Christian”. I was impressed. I only remembered that her name was Susan after she reminded me. I waited for Brian till 11:45 but then I had to get to class.

            I worked for Chinkok Tan, who teaches painting in the Fine Arts department. He’s been working at OCADU for a long time, but it had been a couple of years since I’d posed for him and he’d forgotten my name.

            The only thing that hasn’t turned grey on Chin are his big black eyebrows that look so starkly different from the other sparse foliage on his head that one might think they’d been glued above his eyes for comic effect. They actually look like a pair of very dark flipped up sunglasses with invisible rims.

            He asked me, “How are you and Maria?” I was confused for a second or two until I realized that he’d mixed me up with Maria Kasstan’s late husband, Jim Calvert, who also used to model at OCADU, but who died 12 years ago of a heart attack on a bench in front of police headquarters on College Street. The police assumed he was homeless because he was wearing old clothing and perhaps they thought he was just stretched out drunk on the bench. He died even though the hospital was two blocks away. Jim and I did not really look much alike, other than both being tall and blonde, but I guess guys like that all look alike to Chinkok Tan, perhaps because of his ability to “see”.

            While he was looking over his students’ homework, he told them that they don’t need to take anatomy classes, but rather just need to learn how to see the shapes. He assured them that if they do that they will draw the figure perfectly. “It’s like magic!” He explained that instead of seeing a human figure or a Coke can, he just sees a series of shapes. He said that there are millions of artists as old as he is that are still struggling because they don’t see the way he does.

            He told them that he would give everyone in the class a 69, unless they are absent a lot. But if they wanted to get more than 70 they would need to learn to see. He gave seeing a monetary analogy. He said that one has no inventory in one’s seeing brain unless one sees the shapes. But we can make deposits in our seeing brain just like money in a bank account. If you don’t make those deposits then you have nothing. I guess that proves that Jim Calvert and I were identical twins.

            On my way out I saw Brian hanging out in the atrium, so we chatted for a while, then made a tentative arrangement to go for a beer when my semester is over. I had to leave to get to a doctor’s appointment for 15:15.

I got to Bathurst and Bloor with just two minutes to spare, but of course I had to wait fifteen minutes anyway. Dr Shechtman looked tired but it didn’t seem to interfere with him doing his job. I told him that I’d had something in my eye for the last two days. Since I ride a bike I get lots of bugs and specks in my eyes but they usually blink out within minutes or hours. This one lingered, so I thought the safe bet would be to have my doctor look at it. I told him that when I was looking on a dusty shelf for bags to put my laundry in, I felt something go in my eyes. He looked, but couldn’t find anything. He put some fluorescent dye in my eye that would show if there were any scratches on my cornea but still found nothing. He had another more thorough look but the source of my sensing a foreign body in there was nowhere to be found. He told me that if something is in my eye it is too small to see or it could be a very small scratch caused by something that came in and went out. He advised me to use Visine for a while and if the problem persists to come back and see him.

I got him to renew a prescription for psoriasis cream, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.

I checked the US election results before going to bed at midnight and it looked pretty certain that Drumpf was going to win. Ironic that a country founded on revolution would fight so hard to keep from progressing.