Better Than New

So I got that LASIK surgery done to my eyeballs. They pinned my eyes open, cut a flap on the front, sculpted my corneas with a laserbeam so that images would focus on my retina instead of in front of it, flapped the flap shut and sent me on my way. Now I see fine.

And now I want to know how to acknowledge this on my organ donor card. As a rider of motorcycles, I make sure I'm listed as a willing donor of organs, even though as a husband I promise daily that I'll never die.

It's awfully creepy imagining someone running around with my eyes. I'm glad I'll never have to see it. I did see a black man at the Indiana State Fair with very pale blue eyes, and I don't expect to ever forget it. He had on a black cowboy hat and faded, light-denim overalls and his eyes matched the overalls.

I'm not sure anyone else could ever get my eyes, though, because there's still a restriction on my license stipulating that I have to wear glasses when I'm driving. I can just picture the paramedics rushing my body off to the hospital or wherever organs get harvested, flipping through my identification and saying, "Oh, wait, wait. This guy was nearsighted. Don't bother with the eyes."

And I'm floating around the area in a panic, this hovering spectre silently yelling "No, no! I got those fixed, they're perfect! Give them to somebody else; they'll work fine!"

There's a name in the auto trade for a car that's been totaled - wrecked, flooded, set ablaze, whatever - and then fixed again. In order to get a new title for the car so that it can be legally sold and put back on the road, there has to be a stamp on the title: SALVAGE. It may run fine, but it can never be sold again as though the accident didn't happen.

Perhaps some time down the road I'll find myself outfitted with titanium hip sockets and a computer-regulated pulse, but for now there's just the one modified part of me, and it's taking some getting used to.

Ferris Bueller vowed to give his eyes to Stevie Wonder, you know, and I like to think of myself as being at least as generous as Ferris. I don't think Stevie would have minded having a set of salvaged peepers, even a pale blue set. All he'd need would be a cowboy hat.