Sunglasses

Day 269: Sunglasses

Sadly, if you are blind in one eye, you begin to lose the vision in your good eye at a younger age.  When you are a teenager, you might feel smug about the fact that the vision in your good eye is better than most people's. So what if you can't parallel park or play tennis? Not only do you have 20/20 vision in your good eye, you have better than 20/20 vision! You can read the phone book (back when there were phone books)! You can see an eagle flying near the clouds at dawn! You can walk in the woods at midnight without a flashlight! Woot.

All that hubris fades around forty, when you're the youngest person you know in progressive lenses. At fifty, over-the-counter reading glasses (to supplement your progressive lenses) are no longer strong enough, and you find yourself squinting, or buying large-type books, or reading eBooks on a tablet that allows you to increase the font size (thereby trading the irritation of holding the books at arm's length for the irritation of having to turn the metaphoric page every few seconds).

Furthermore, at fifty, you can no longer spend $5 for a pair of fashion sunglasses, which you don't really have to keep track of because you can always buy another pair. No, it is prescription all the way, indoors and out, summer and winter. Your prescription lenses are as much a part of you as the mole on the back of your hand or the little space between your front teeth.

The blessing in all this - and I think of this almost every day, is that eyeglasses are an option. Without them, I would be in trouble. Everything I do - working, going to the movies, needlepoint, reading - would be lost. With them, it's a fashion statement.

Remember the Twilight Zone episode where Harrison Ford plays a henpecked husband who wants nothing more than to read from morning until night, if only he weren't constantly thwarted by his wife? But good news is coming! A nuclear holocaust wipes out mankind (including the shrewish wife)! How extremely fortunate! Harry, miraculously unscathed, can read, read, read, day in and day out. Until his glasses get broken.

Another advantage of modern times: when I can't see to read any more, I can always listen to books on tape. When the holocaust comes, no worries.

Goodbye, cheap old sunglasses. Hello, old age.