The Great Grandma Eyeball Episode

We took Little Smoot to a Haunted House this weekend at a middle school. We expected it to be incredibly lame considering that it was being run by kids, but we were pleasantly surprised that the students involved with it pulled it off very well! At one point, one of the “ghouls” was walking around with a fake eyeball, asking if any of us would be willing to provide another human eyeball for him.

Well, I have to tell you that I will never be freaked out by some kid with a fake eyeball, not after the “Great Grandma Eyeball Episode, Circa 1978.” I was something like 10 years old, and was visiting my great grandmother, who lived with my grandparents. She had a downstairs apartment at their house, and for some reason she had one of her eyes removed and replaced with a glass eye.

I assume she had this done for sound medical reasons, as opposed to doing it solely for the purpose of being able to pull off one heck of a prank at any given moment. I know that if I were in this situation, the temptation of pulling pranks with it would be way too great ("Hey, I'm keeping my eye on you...!")

I don’t know how glass eyes operate nowadays, and frankly I don’t want to know, but back then, great grandma had to remove her glass eye at night. There was a period of time where her eye muscles had to gain enough strength to keep it firmly in her eye socket. I was visiting with her one day, and as she was talking, her glass eye went, “PLINK!” out of her eye socket, coming to rest up against the inside of her eyeglasses, and she was oblivious to the fact that it had even happened. I have never seen a Halloween mask that comes remotely close to being as scary as seeing my extremely elderly great grandmother sitting there with one eyeball dangling off her face.

I can still recall the exact words I said at that moment. I said, “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!” as sensitively as I could, and I ran the heck out of there, never inhaling to replenish my ability to scream, and setting the world record for sprinting up a staircase.

Halloween just isn’t nearly as creepy as some of my real life experiences, it turns out.