I see you!

In his later years, my dad drank his coffee black, but for most of his life he drank it with milk and sugar. He liked one heaping spoonful of sugar and what he considered to be the perfect amount of milk. He never measured the milk. He just added enough milk to make his coffee the perfect color. I’ve always been good with color. My mother and I were born with the ability to see more colors than most people and to see all the underlying colors within any color. Because of this I was really good at making the perfect cup of coffee for my dad. I should note that my father, though not colorblind, really wasn’t very good with color. He memorized which ties my mother told him to wear with his many different dress shirts and which suits to pair them with. My mother made up fabulous combinations for him. She was a designer and an artist. She really knew color, but somehow, she never managed to get his coffee just right. It’s probably not my job to delve into why she couldn’t. Or didn’t. My dad always looked at me with so much love in his eyes when I handed him a perfectly colored cup of coffee. He acted as if I were handing him one of my kidneys. I know that he felt seen.

It’s an amazing thing to be truly seen by another person. It’s even more amazing when they appreciate what they see. Sometimes people see us and love us even when they don’t agree with everything they see. I have a dear friend who only visits a couple times a year. He walked into my new studio apartment and said, “It’s so you, Cinse.” I’m sure he was talking about the art I had chosen and where I’d placed everything in my tiny space. His home looks nothing like mine. He wouldn’t want it to, but he gets that mine makes me happy. He gets that it’s a refection of who I am. Of who he sees when he looks at me. Him seeing me in my choices felt like a hug. So does his appreciation of who I am despite the fact that we make vastly different choices.

When my dad was high on drugs for pain a few days before he went into hospice his engineering brain was still going strong. He drew a diagram for what he claimed would be a better catheter design. He showed it to me as soon as I walked into his hospital room. Because of the drugs his voice sounded as if he were only about nine years old, but he was still who he had always been. Then he tried to explain something else to the nurse. She kept saying that she didn’t understand. He started to get frustrated, then he smiled, pointed at me, and said, “Ask her to explain it you. She’s my daughter. She understands me.” He wasn’t wrong. I told the nurse what he had been trying to say. He and I beamed at each other. It’s one of my last memories of him. I can see him every time I remember that moment.

Cinse Bonino
2023