When I was
6 or 7, did my parents notice that I tended to watch TV by turning my head
sideways and scrunching up one of my eyes? My grandmother noticed and told me
to stop. My myopia must have already been starting then. But it wasn’t until
fourth grade that I gradually had to move ever closer to the front of the
classroom to be able to read what was on the blackboard. When I finally had to
stand right in front of the board, the teacher must have sent a note home
to tell my parents to take me to an eye doctor.
I still
remember coming out of the optician’s office with my first pair of glasses,
looking up and noticing the side wall of the big department store in New Haven,
Malley’s I think it was, which earlier had been nothing but a grayish-brown
slab. Now I saw windows scattered up the wall. I’d had no idea. I soon lost all
memory of what the world looked like before I had the magic of glasses, but
living out in the country I didn’t always need to see details in the distance.
I knew where the fences surrounding the adjoining fields were, the trees, the
big rocks, the hedges along tiny creeks.
I didn’t
wear the glasses all the time. One of my favorite pastimes was to pretend to be
a singer or dancer and perform to an imaginary audience. My stage was the
concrete slab leading into our basement garage, and the audience was out in the
graveled driveway. No performer I had ever seen on TV wore glasses, so of
course I took them off when I did my imaginary performances, usually putting
them in the back pocket of my shorts. One day, I forgot they were there and sat
on the grass after one of my performances. Oops! Broken glasses. They must have
been fairly expensive even then, because my mother was quite angry at having to
replace them.
Two years
ago I had cataract surgery on one eye, which is now farsighted, while the other
eye is still quite nearsighted. My brain has somehow learned to process
distance with the right eye, reading with the left eye (at about 8 inches),
while working on this laptop is the only task requiring glasses. Driving in
bright daylight I can do with only the right eye—amazing. When it turns dusk, I
need glasses. But most of the time I am most comfortable not wearing glasses.
I began to
wonder why glasses felt less comfortable if I can see better with them.
Eyeglasses aren’t the only way to correct one’s vision. In fact, all through
high school, I hated wearing glasses. On first hearing “Men seldom make passes
at girls who wear glasses,” I thought it was a piece of folk wisdom; I was
astonished years later to learn it was a poem written by Dorothy Parker. Glasses
in the 1950s were pretty hideous, the so-called cat’s-eye, strongly upswept
where they met the earpiece. But that’s what everyone who needed to wear
glasses wore, so that’s what I wore.
I first
heard about contact lenses when I was 19. A friend of my younger sister wore
them. But they were so expensive, more than $100. I didn’t even think about
asking my parents.
But the
next year, I had dropped out of college. I had my own job, making my own money.
I was going to explore this possibility to toss the glasses forever.
The first
ophthalmologist was sure I wouldn’t be able to tolerate contacts. I had dry
eyes, a condition called blephritis. I don’t care, I thought. I’ll try them out
and see what happens. I can still remember the thrill standing in the middle of
the opticians’ (Nichols and Oldt, in Washington, D.C.—that still remember that
shows how important it was to me) and could see my reflection, sans glasses, in
the mirror eight feet away. I followed instructions scrupulously: wear for one
hour a day for a week, and gradually increase by an hour a day per week until I
was wearing the contacts all the time I was awake. To my surprise, I had no
trouble putting a small piece of hard plastic, which is what contacts were in
the early 1960s, into my eye. Although getting water in my eyes had prevented
me from learning to swim, the desire to not wear glasses was powerful enough to
overcome the fear of putting my finger in my eye.
I wore
those hard lenses for 20 years, scrupulously keeping them clean, not sleeping
in them, wearing sunglasses outside no matter the time of day to keep dust and
other mess from irritating the lenses and my eyes. When I started going to a
gym, sweating through weight-lifting, or race-walking for exercise, I couldn’t
imagine doing any of these activities while wearing glasses; sweat would cause
them to slip and slide on my face.
Perhaps it
was the dry eye problem asserting itself. My lenses smudged up more and more
frequently. I had to clean them five or six times a day, then every hour, then
every half hour. They became annoying, got in the way of my doing my work.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was now copyediting on a
computer all day. I was also now over 40, a feminist, less concerned with my
appearance.
I returned
to glasses, which were much more attractive. Wore them for four years. Until I
met someone who wore soft lenses. Who persuaded me to try them. Soft lenses
were different. You could sleep in them, if you wanted. I didn’t tempt fate. I
did have one thing to overcome. From my earliest contact lens days, I’d had a
recurrent dream: the lens I was about to put in my eye because as large as a
salad plate, and floppy, something I could never put in my eye. Soft lenses
turned out not to be as floppy or as large as I feared.
I wore the
soft lenses for another 20 years. Then the same smudging began again. Protein
deposits, my ophthalmologist told me. At the same time, my aging eyes were
beginning to require different correction for close and middle distances. If I
read a recipe, I needed reading glasses. Working on the computer required
reading glasses. Wearing glasses while also wearing contacts seemed excessive.
This time I thought I’d given up lenses for good.
I’ve worn
glasses regularly for only 25 years, a third of my life. I’ve worn contact
lenses for 40 years. My glasses now help me see the middle distance, but I’m
still most comfortable not wearing glasses when I read or watch TV or wander
the streets. It no longer has anything to do with vanity or fear that no man
will make a pass. My face just feels freer without any plastic resting on my
nose.
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This year there is
another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. I am so far behind that I confess it is week 42, and this is only the sixth or seventh essay I've posted. I doubt I'll get to 52 essays this year, but I will try to do more before the year ends. If you’d like to try it, go
to the Facebook page for #52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or read some of the
essays that will be linked to there.
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