I’m as blind as a bat. I have been for as long as I can remember: It’s a genetic thing. My Dad’s end of the gene pool was responsible for bad teeth; many of my cousins on that side of the family were in dentures in their 30’s. From Mom’s side we got bad eyes, and those cousins were in eyeglasses before they were out of grade school. I’m glad I took after Mom’s side of the family, but it doesn’t seem quite fair that I could have good teeth or good vision, but not both: Some people actually do get both, you know. Next time around I’m going to select my parents more carefully.
If you examine the photo record, starting from about the 5th grade there is a series of pictures of me with eyeglasses of uncompromising ugliness. I was a heavy kid, and if the humiliation of shopping in the “husky” department at Sears was not enough, turning into “Four Eyes” did not add to my popularity.
This was the era when eyeglasses were unrelentingly hideous. Since the common presumption was that boys did not care how we looked, eyeglasses for us were utilitarian and severe, and in my case, exceedingly thick. These were the frames favored by NASA scientists during the LBJ administration and nuns ever since.
I transitioned into hard contact lenses in high school. These were precisely as comfortable as you would expect if you had shards of glass inserted into each eye. Photos from this era look like I have been unexpectedly and brutally goosed, but I stuck with them until I got soft contact lenses in college, which I have worn ever since.
I never thought my eyes could get worse, but as I got older, strange things began happening. For example, lights in restaurants got dimmer while print on menus got smaller. A restaurant that I once would have regarded as romantic I now regarded as an affront to functionality. Worse yet, I turned into my father, holding the menu at odd angles, brandishing the candle like a flashlight and muttering under my breath. Simultaneously, reading traffic signs on I-95 became virtually impossible.
The eye doctor told me if I really wanted to regain my vision that I should go back to wearing eyeglasses, but, remembering the childhood taunts of “Four Eyes!” I refused. The eye doctor then decided to “correct” my deteriorating vision by prescribing me two different intensities of contact lenses, the idea being that one eye would be my “far” eye and the other would be my “near” eye.
Rarely is a remedy this stupid successful, and it was not int this case: If I wanted to read, I had to close my right eye; to see distance I closed my left. This resulted in an awkward situation on an airplane when, trying to see if the restroom was occupied, I closed one eye to check the “vacant” light at the precise moment a fat lady walked out of the lavatory. She smiled suggestively and winked back at me.
I briefly debated going back to eyeglasses, but apparently they no longer make the simple wire frames that I favor. Eye glasses for men are now a fashion statement, which means that the majority of the frames, heavy, oversized and dark, look like the glasses worn by Elton John in the 1970s and Dame Edna ever since.
Vanity dies hard, especially in middle age. Since my self-esteem is more important than perfect vision I’ll stick with my faulty contact lenses, winking, squinting and scowling through middle age. But if you see me across a crowded room and first I ignore you, and then I wink, please don’t misinterpret.