Pittston Dispatch // PD Columnists // Ed Ackerman - Optimist

Sunday October 18, 2009 | 01:00 AM

I took a new route from Pittston to Luzerne County Community College Friday morning: Interstate 81.

But isn’t that the route I take everyday?

Well, yes. But Friday was different.

Friday it was new. Brand new. And if I keep my head on straight, it will stay that way.

See, the unseasonable snowfall Thursday night caused me to do something Friday morning that I had forgotten all about. It caused me to play my “Fresh Eyes” game. And it changed everything.

Snow at this time of year is weird anyway you look at it. And the way I looked at it while driving to work Friday was to notice it created a distinct white band across the top of the rolling mountains around us.

There was a band of grey (the sky), a band of white (the snow-topped trees) and a band of many colors (the flaming foliage, past prime to be honest, but still breathtaking).

I had seen snow covered trees before and certainly trees adorned in autumn’s splendor, but never anything like this.

A car passed by with a South Carolina license plate and I wondered what the driver was thinking. Surely, if this were my first time enjoying this spectacle it must have been his. He’ll be telling everyone back home about this, I thought. And that reminded me of the Fresh Eyes game.

It goes back perhaps 10 years to when Mary Kay and I vacationed in Palm Springs in the California desert. I had never before seen tan mountains and I could not take my eyes off them. My fascination with the horizon got me to wondering about what lifelong residents of the Southwest would think if they saw the green, or better still multi-colored mountains that surround us in Wyoming Valley.

Mary Kay said she has hosted such visitors here and I was correct in my thinking. Just as I could not take my eyes off the mountains of the desert, her friends could not take their eyes off ours.

That’s because my eyes out there and their eyes back here were “fresh eyes” – eyes seeing something for the very first time.

When I returned home, I tried to look at our mountains as though I, too, were seeing them for the first time and discovered it was rather easy, not to mention marvelous. And the Fresh Eyes game was born.

I remembered seeing for the first time the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and began to look at the beautiful churches of Greater Pittston and, indeed, all of Wyoming Valley as if I likewise were seeing them for the first time. And instantly, my world was filled with beauty.

First United Methodist Church, observed at night from the top of William Street, Pittston, glowing from across the Susquehanna River in West Pittston, is as awe-inspiring as any place of worship on earth when seen for the first time.

So, too, is St. John the Evangelist Church on William Street in Pittston, especially the view at night from the intersection of Church and Butler streets. I could stand at that spot and look at it for hours.

Churches are at the top of my Fresh Eyes list.

I drive on North Main Street, Wilkes-Barre, with one eye on the road and the other on the churches. As soon as I step out of my car in the parking lot at the college, I look toward what is known as the Hanover Section of Nanticoke and enjoy the white steeples of two small churches pointing skyward above the treetops.

The Fresh Eyes game is my antidote to the disease of allowing beauty to become “white noise” – you know, the ticking of a clock that you no longer hear.

Henry David Thoreau said “The perception of beauty is a moral test.” If that’s true, then observing the world through fresh eyes is the surest way to pass.

It’s also, I suspect, the surest path to a happy marriage.

Mary Kay will kill me for saying this but when encountering her after not seeing her for some 30 years, I kept saying to myself during our conversation, “Was Mary Kay always this pretty?” It’s been more than ten years since that moment, but I say that same thing to myself every morning at the breakfast table.

That’s what fresh eyes do.

I suggest you give the game a try. You’ll soon find that nothing is ever again boring. And nothing – especially, and most importantly you, yourself – ever gets old.

Thoreau also said there are “none so old as those who have outlived their enthusiasm.”

The Fresh Eyes game will spare you from that fate.