I Can't See Clearly Now

It’s a funny thing about your sight; you think you will always have it.

I began wearing eyeglasses in the fourth grade. I distinctly remember that is was during a routine eye exam with the school nurse that she discovered that I couldn’t see. Using a delicate piece of medical technology that was a mere step away from scratchings on a cave wall, she asked me, several times, to use the tool (4 tongue depressors taped into an “E” shape with drafting tape) to simulate the orientation of the “E”s on her wall chart. Good God, they didn’t even use the alphabet, merely the letter “E”, a pre-literate chart for all who entered her office: kindergartners, primary grade students, orangutans, bonobos.

The nurse, clad in regulation nurse whites, starched to military crispness, smacked her wooden pointer against the rows of “E”s, as they pointed east, south, west, north. And I made a stab at trying to get my E tool to correspond, but the only thing I could see was that I was that I was causing her great distress.

Believe it or not, at one point she actually told me to go up to the chart and learn the sequence of the “E”s! And I did stand abjectly before the chart, but memorizing a sequence of random letters would have been hard enough. I just couldn’t figure out any rational procedure for remembering the sequence of  “E”s that could only point in four directions.

After a few minutes, she called me back to toe the line across the room from the wall chart, and with a sigh, she began clapping that wooden pointer back against the wall. Despite my failing to even accidently get one  “E” identified correctly, the test went on and on. Finally, she stopped, and heaved a deep sigh. She plopped down in her desk chair, her body language letting me know that I had really disappointed her. Despite her best efforts to have all students pass this test, I had failed. I had persisted in rebelling against her efforts. And now, there would be problems, for me.

“I’ll have to send a letter home to your parents,” she said. “You’ll have to get glasses.” Oh no! Four eyes!

I carried my glasses to school every day, and every day, at some point, my teacher, Mrs. Hoffman, would remember that I was supposed to be wearing glasses and she would interrupt whatever lesson she was engaged in and shout out to me, “Where are your glasses, Joan?” Oh, the embarrassment, the horror. As I recall, there was only one other kid in my class who had to wear glasses – Wayne.

Against all fashionable odds, I soldiered on and made it through elementary school. Doing much better now that I could actually see what was going on. Eventually, more of my friends turned out to need glasses, and it ceased to be such a curse.

Of course, then came the braces on the teeth. But that’s another tale.

So, for most of my life I have needed glasses, or corrective lenses of some sort. It’s worked out okay. I don’t mind glasses, although I tend to take them off and forget where I put them. But, last summer, I noticed some other changes in my vision. Driving at night was becoming difficult. This became a problem since I am often the driver on the way home from various nights out. Because there are few cars on the road late at night in Maine, it was tempting to just keep on being the designated driver.  

Eventually, I realized that I could not keep on doing that, and so now someone else has to drive home, and I get to party into the night, secure in the knowledge that I will not be the one behind the wheel. I like that change.

But I know that I am approaching the point – no, I am at the point, where I will need others to drive me places. I’ll need transportation. I have several good friends who live in Manhattan, and I have always envied that non-car lifestyle. They all walk everywhere, or take the subway, a bus, or hail one of many available taxis.

There are many trade-offs, living in the suburbs. No one made me live here. It was a choice, until recently, a good choice.  But now I see that transportation will be an issue. Oh well, as Mick Jagger so cogently put it, “what a drag it is getting old.”