Lenses

Posted on August 1, 2003 in Book of Days Possessions

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a tool.

I’m leaning over in front of a book case. They’re hanging from three fingers. I’m at just that distance where rocking my head slowly makes a difference as to whether I can read the fine print on the spines or not. The other hand does the job of pulling a volume close to me for inspection. But then I have to find a place for this wire and plastic contraption. I slide them into the V of my shirt and read. They’re structured for many situations. Or is it an accident that they can be put away like that?

One day, at a precise time and at certain coordinates which are lost to memory I saw someone who I do not remember carrying their glasses like this. I’m a blatant imitator, you see. I suspect that when I saw how they ported their spectacles, I said to myself “Well, there’s a clever way to deal with not having a pocket or a case for them.” When I started wearing them last year, I adopted the habit as my own. It is my own.

I don’t like what it means having to wear glasses: I can no longer read freeway signs at a third of a mile away for one thing. Growing up I would say to my mother “There’s the exit you are looking for. The sign says that it is one and a half miles.” She’d peer ahead. “You can’t see that. You can’t possibly see that.” But I could and I was vindicated when we neared enough for her to see.

Of the four members of my family, I was the only one who did not wear glasses. I didn’t need them. My brother ruined his eyes by sitting too close to the television set. This was before my time. He had six years to ruin his eyes before I was even born. I never saw him in the act, but I can imagine him sitting so close that if the screen were mist instead of glass, he could fall through it into the studio world were he to fall asleep. I always sat about eight to ten feet back. Today, when I watch television in the loft — DVDs and video tapes only — I keep the distance as long as I can find my glasses.

I felt like a freak being the only one in my family who didn’t need them, who had such good eyes that the others insisted that he was lying when he saw things at a distance that blurred into the background for them.

The decision to wear glasses instead of contacts is one of those things that I decided on the basis of a personal code of ethics. I know that there are a lot of people who wear them around me. They’re more concerned with being beautiful than anything else. I believe in honestly showing the world that my eyesite is failing. I won’t wear short shorts to show off my gnarled legs either. There was a philosopher who died recently who had a large bump on his cheek that he could easily have had removed. He decided against it because it was vanity. I wouldn’t go that far. I use glasses instead of contacts, though, because I will go as far as that.

Driving is the time when I mourn for my decaying vision. I must creep close, rely on memory, to get off at the right place these days. No more picking out the signs at a third of a mile. Speed limit signs must walk up to me until they stand within 100 feet. I’m 45 and I’m losing my gift. Of all that I have in the way of senses, sight is perhaps the thing I’d miss the most if I lost it. It is falling away, suddenly, in this flash flood of aging. What I have banked on as a young man is no longer mine to have and to hold. So I use these ungainly spectacles, to be truthful about what is happening to me and just to see.

• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a time you were misunderstood.