"Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
-- "Butch Cassidy,"
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
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| "Four eyes" 7-31-14 |
Nellie Oleson:
"Well, look at Miss Four Eyes!"
Willie Oleson:
"Mary has four eyes! Four eyes!"
Laura Ingalls:
"You be quiet, Willie!"
Willie Oleson:
"Well, Mary has four eyes. Two real ones and two glass ones. Four eyes!"
Laura Ingalls:
"And you're gonna have two black ones!"
-- Little House on the Prairie, "Four Eyes"
"Was blind but now I see."
-- Amazing Grace
My eye doctor is a super great guy. Genuinely as nice as can be. So I could tell yesterday that he was searching for a kind way to tell me what he knew I needed to hear.
He hemmed and he hawed, he um'd and he uh'd.
Finally spit it out.
Him: "You know, it might be time for you to maybe consider -- and I'm not saying you have to right now -- but maybe, you know, somewhere down the line, you might want to consider something like a no-line ... bifocal."
He de-voiced the last word, the b-word, like he was saying Lord Voldemort. He kind of whispered it the way people do when they mention someone's cancer. The walls between exam rooms are thin. Maybe he was just protecting my privacy.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
I think he was afraid.
I think he was afraid of what I might do once he dropped the bifocal bomb. I'm pretty sure he flinched, or winced -- like, he actually physically pulled back a little bit when he said it.
But I didn't freak.
Hell, I know my vision is shit, but even I saw that one coming a mile away.
In truth, I went into the appointment prepared to broach the bifocals subject myself if he didn't say something first. It's been lurking in the shadows, nibbling at the edges, for a while now. I've just been putting it off with excuses like, "Oh, I can just use my reading glasses," and "Oh, bifocals are so expensive."
But now I'm switching glasses all the damn time, and if I'm stuck somewhere without my cheaters, I'm fucked cuz I can't read shit. I didn't fully appreciate how much reading I do in the course of a normal day until my eyesight declined enough that it became impossible to do it without a pair of big, fat magnifying lenses.
And so ...
I accepted my new prescription as the good thing that it is, and today I will venture to the optical store and pick out my new bifocals.
Eyesight may seem like an obvious "good thing." But until mine began to falter and fail, I didn't fully appreciate just how good it is.
But now I see.
