At the gym last week, I noticed a woman kind of smiling in my direction. She had a friendly face and I smiled back. Later, when I got on the exercise bike next to hers, she said: "Are those your eyes?"
The question is as familiar to me as "What are you?" Often people will say: "I bet people tell you that you have beautiful eyes all the time." It's just shy of a compliment so it's difficult to know how to respond without sounding vain. I would never respond: "Well, actually, yes." Instead, in those instances, I give my standard line: "You know, I always feel appreciative when I hear that."--which by the way is true. Who doesn't love to receive a compliment?! But the lady at the gym that day had a new response to my eyes.
"Yes," I said. "They're my eyes."
"I mean, wow. They're not contacts?" Now, back in the day, this would have really ticked me off. Whose eyes could they be? They're in my head! Oh how I used to rant against "posers" who "faked" their eye color and now made people question me! 
"No," I said, without explaining that I do wear contacts to see, but they are not colored.
"You're so lucky," she said. "Being tan, and those blue eyes. They're like wow--beams!"
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you very much."
Luckily, I was wearing my ipod and that was it for the conversation with her. But it seemed like such a strange thing to say: I was "lucky" because of my eye color. Why does that make me lucky?
“So it was. A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.”from The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
