Good Vision

"Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals."

-- "Butch Cassidy," 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

"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.

Good Reading Glasses

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision

and strengthens our most fatal tendency --

the belief that the here and now is all there is."

-- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Reading Glasses and  a really good book 5-6-14

"I have two pairs of reading glasses.

One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction.

I've read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it's the same."

-- Steven Wright

I'm at that age where I have to hold anything I want to read at arm's length and squint real hard at it. 

Labels at the grocery store. The program at a show. Wine lists and menus. A baseball schedule. 

When it's still a blur, I've begun doing this thing where I'll ask my husband or one of my kids to "tell me what this says." Or, I'll just give up. So what if the jam is full of poison chemicals and corn syrup? Toss it in the cart! Who needs menus and wine lists? I can just order one of the specials that the waiter described and ask him to to bring me a glass of whatever he recommends to go with it. And that program? Who needs it? It's just a bunch of ads. Pay attention to the show, dammit!

Yes, I wear glasses, which do a Cracker Jack job of focusing my vision most of the time. But my regular glasses are no longer up to the task of reading and other close-up work. My optometrist has gently thrown around the b-word --bifocals -- but I balk at the thought. I feel like it's a slippery slope.

I'm afraid that once I go bifocal I'll start wearing beige sneakers and sun visors and sweatshirts with embroidered applique, and worrying how long I can talk on a long distance phone call, and doing crosswords on the toilet, and soaking my teeth in a jar at night, and calling people "Sonny," and tucking tissues up my sleeve, and no longer plucking my chin whiskers, and drinking Ensure, and liking Fox News, and repeating myself, and tucking tissues up my sleeve.

I'm just not ready to go there yet.

So in addition to my regular glasses, I have my "cheaters" -- inexpensive plastic magnifiers from the drug store that pump up the print size so I can see what I'm reading, and keep the b-word at bay. 

So far, they do a good enough job.  I don't need a huge magnification number yet. And even though I've had to switch up a couple of times, there are still lots and lots of stronger ones for me to try before I run out of possibilities. Best of all, they are not bifocals, so I can still cling to the illusion that I am not rapidly schussing down the slippery slope. 

Sonny, that's a good thing.