Just call me Eagle Eye

I have had poor eyesight for much of my life. I got glasses for the first time in third grade–yeah, that helped the self-esteem of the skinny, shy kid who cried at the drop of a hat. I could have used windshield wipers for those things. Fortunately I moved to contact lenses in eighth grade when I started regularly appearing in community theater shows that required me to lose the specs on show nights. My parents decided that it was better to shell out for the contacts than risk me falling off the front of the stage because I couldn’t see where I was going (I’m not exaggerating). This was early in the days of soft contact lenses and I had all kinds of trouble with them during my teen years, including a short fling with lenses that had a weight at the bottom to purportedly fix my mild astigmatism but really just made my sight worse. I still remember the new eye doctor who looked at those and said he couldn’t let me put them back in my eyes since my body was rejecting them. Yikes!

Eventually, my eyes found stasis and I settled in to a regular routine involving contact lenses, with backup glasses for early morning, late night, and long trips. I kept my annual eye appointments of course, since the eye care industry won’t allow you to buy contacts without an annual exam, even though my prescription didn’t change. For years. Then decades. Until…I hit 50.

Starting around that point, if not exactly on my 50th birthday, I suddenly could not see close up. What the heck? My problem had always been distance vision. For years I laughed (to myself, of course) at friends whose arms weren’t long enough to read the newspaper without magnification. Smug in my perfectly corrected eyesight, I went on merrily reading whatever I wanted. Until I couldn’t read it any more.

First, I grudgingly purchased a pair of reading glasses. I didn’t change my contact lens prescription, just added the readers for close-up reading. But after about a year of that, I added a bifocal lens to one eye. I don’t like having them in both eyes because it degrades my distance vision, so I correct one eye for close up and one for distance viewing. Boy, if that’s not a sign of aging, I don’t know what is. Each year we raise the power of that near vision lens, from “low” to “medium” to where I am now, “high.” There is nowhere else to go! Unless they invent “extra high” before my next appointment. Hope springs eternal.

In the meantime, even with the bifocals, I STILL need readers! So I have piles of them all over the house. The orange ones are for my desk, the pink ones for the games area, the blue tinted ones for looking at screens. I have them in the car, in the bedroom, and in the kitchen. There is a pair in every purse and backpack that I might use. I buy the cheapest ones I can find, in bulk, because if I don’t spend much money on them I must not really need them, right? I think back nostalgically to my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, who wore glasses on a chain around her neck. I didn’t understand the reason for that at the time, but I certainly do now.

Recently I noticed that in addition to trouble reading books and papers, I’m having trouble reading music when playing my cello. Readers don’t help with that because of the distance of the music stand from my eyes. So my ophthalmologist suggested that I put the “high” bifocal lenses in BOTH eyes for playing cello. That works really well, except that now I can’t see the conductor that clearly. (Some of my past conductors would no doubt note that it wouldn’t make a difference in how well I follow.) So now I have a special “cello contact lens” just for playing music, which I usually forget to put in. My husband has taken to calling “did you put your cello contact in?” as I’m running out the door to rehearsal. My son suggested I just keep the darn thing in my cello case. Not a bad idea.

The thing is, it doesn’t seem like those friends I used to laugh at (on the inside) are still using glasses. (Maybe it’s that I literally can’t see them.) At choir rehearsal (where the cello contact doesn’t work, because of the difference in distance), I swear I’m the only singer who has to use readers. And a lot of those people are waaay older than me! For choir, I have to use the old lady-half glasses, so I can look over them to see the conductor (and pretend I am watching him). Why is it just me? Is everyone having LASIK and really doesn’t need glasses any more? Do they memorize the music? Do they just ignore the conductor? All of the above?

Even with glasses all over the house, I never seem to have them when I need them, and often am too lazy to go find a pair, so I go with a “squint and hope” strategy. Yesterday I baked a pie using a recipe that I’ve used dozens of times. I’m supposed to bake it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350 for the remainder of the baking time. I know this, and it’s stated clearly in the recipe directions. Except that I didn’t have a pair of readers handy when looking at the recipe, and accidentally baked it for THIRTY minutes at 400 degrees. That “2” sure looked like a “3” without the magnification. The crust got a bit over-browned, but at least the pie was still edible. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing glasses on a chain around my neck. Mrs. Taylor, you knew what you were doing.