blonde with blue eyes

Struggling to see with the salt burning after a day’s sailing on the ocean, laugh-lines twitch around my dad’s light blue eyes. His retired hairline receding since I can remember, proudly crowing in grey a sun-blocked scalp. Resembling Einstein’s curly genius at the end of our annual four week beach holiday over Christmas. We easily de-rig the catamaran without many words. Each one untying the designated sheet or halyard, indicating with the nod of a head or the roll of an eye a warning to the other of a forgotten batten still left in the yip.

Safety lies in his aging blue eyes, love and trustworthy advice―helplessness, too, sometimes.

It is hard to remember the color of Derek’s eyes. I think they shined with a darker, almost grayish hue. Like our mom, he also carried “coffee in his blood” and used to get a rich brown tan showing off his brilliant ash blonde hair as a boy. Two months after a similar summer holiday, on the day I celebrated my fifteenth birthday, we received the results of his first lumbar punch―Leukemia. Bravely he joked about waking up one day with all his hair lying beside him on the pillow.

It took much longer to fall out.

After forty-eight endless tides of biweekly blood tests, three disinfectant-mask-covered visiting hours per day for over a year, five sudden admissions, continuous chemo and one bone-marrow transplant later―the four of us laughed around the dinner table together once more. Stroking over his bald brow in true Koyak-fashion, he proudly informed us, “my head feels like Leani’s legs.”

Six months later I saw those tired blue eyes for the last time.

Five Octobers ago on Derek’s earthly twenty-third birthday, while treading water in an aqua aerobics class, I saw a young blonde boy wander into the swimming area. He carefully sat down beside the stainless steel ladder with his tiny feet dangling in the water. Quietly staying clear of the pool he waited there for the duration of the entire class gently staring at me with his innocent blue eyes.

At the Fall Fest this year, I baby-sat my friends’ six-month old girl Liz all afternoon. Her smooth little head decorated with a bow and no hair bopping around non-stop, inquisitive blue eyes flashing at every movement―following her starfish fingers tugging with all their might at an elusive lock of my own yellow hair or groping toward the cold Canadian ham on my piece of pizza.

As the autumn sun began to set, it caught the indigo of another pair of eyes to my left reflecting his almost-empty Diet Pepsi can. They turned away to see where I pointed out Liz’s older brother running away from their mom. Looking down at the thick cool grass still prickling at my legs beneath my skirt, I panicked when Liz stared back at me chewing her disassembled pacifier chain.

“Can you see the other half,” I ask the guy next to me. “Quick! before her mom gets back.”

I found it while he still sat there smiling at the boy running circles in the distance.

“I love little blonde kids,” he said, “they remind me of me and my brother.”