My youngest daughter, then 3 years old, picked up my copy of Monet's 'Parliament' paintings and exclaimed 'Look, Mom! A pretty sunset!' Then her face clouded over and she added 'But it didn't turn out.' Poor child, She has 20/20 vision.

I've always loved impressionist paintings, probably because I've always lived in an impressionist painting - constantly until I was 7, and at will since then.

I never realized that whereas other kids saw the world as a good girl's coloring book, where all the colors stayed obediently within their lines, I saw it as one huge Monet canvas were light played and pulled at the colors, coaxing them beyond their bounds, bending, blending and blurring them, melding sky and water into a world of no horizon, a world that doesn't insist that you stay within the lines, a world a little closer, warmer and more forgiving, a world that wraps its arms around you like a grandmother.

I could have a 'normal' world if I wanted, if I had to have it, say, in order to see the blackboard. I could just 'make cat eyes' (pull at the corners and squint) and the colors lined up like neat rows of magic markers - at least temporarily. That's when the teacher noticed I had a 'problem'. She sent a note home recommending that my eyes by examined.

I sat in a dark room, perched on a high chair. The optometrist was a walrussy man with hairs in his ears. He whistled through his nose when he breathed. He leaned over me, nose to nose, shined little lights in my eyes and said 'un-huh' a lot. I tried to burrow into the chair.

Then the walrus performed magic. He created a split picture and made each line up on top of the other. Like a sorcerer, he could call one image forward and it would obey, changing perspective. In place of brush and oils, he flicked levers and spun dials in front of me, rapidly tranforming the soft, misty images of Monet to crisp, clear Raphael and even to bizarre Picasso.

'Number one... or number two? Number three... or number four?'

I sorted out the Raphaels. Slowly my fluid, 'water-lily' world begain to wash away, replaced by neat rows of coloring-book perfect trees.

So I traded my own 'cat-eyes' for a pair of artificial, plastic-rimmed cat eyes. I learned that houses are built from individual bricks and that trees have individual leaves even before they turn colors and fall. And that you can see as well as hear birds; that colors stay within the lines; that water and sky are separated by the horizon.

Now the world was sharper. Less grandmotherly. My mother tried to point out the Big Dipper, confident that at last I would be able to see it. But she was disappointed. I could still find a Big Dipper in a bowl of Cheerios. Constellations are Rorschach tests.

I soon tired of my new coloring-book 'life' and began to leave my glasses here and there. At times you want Monet instead of Raphael. At Christmas, the glasses gave me reverent red and green points of light in a flat black sky. Without them, I had the Fourth of July - huge balls of green and red exploding against velvet. And a bare tree looked less stark; it seemed to shiver less against the cold.

At 16, I traded glasses for contact lenses. Vanity and the constant drooping of the heavy lenses forced me to remain in the rigid coloring-book world. But at home, I wore (or didn't wear) my glasses, and Money returned from time to time.

Lately, my optometrist urged me to try a pair of extended-wear lenses. For two weeks I saw everything clearly from the time I opened my eyes in the morning until I fell asleep at night. I didn't need to grab my glasses to go downstairs to the bathroom at night. I could see the time on the alarm clock in the morning. I watched my husband's eyes when we made love. He smiled.

But at the end of two weeks, I gave them back. As I said, sometimes a person needs Money instead of Raphael.