Toe in the Water

How to Make a Spectacle of Yourself

How to Make a Spectacle of Yourself

My father was always a bit longsighted and wore glasses when he had to read something. Late in life, it became so bad that his arms no longer had the length necessary to enable him to hold the newspaper at reading distance. He solved the problem by bringing home one of those big magnifying glasses with a handle that legend maintains Sherlock Holmes used so much. It served well enough for my father and he avoided an unwanted trip to the optometrist.

I had the opposite problem as a youth - I was shortsighted. After holding out until my mid-twenties, I gave in and allowed myself to be measured, inspected and gauged for a pair of spectacles. They proved useful for such things as driving and watching television.

For a while, I did suffer the occasional visit to be retested and, inevitably, to have new lenses, and it was during one of these occasions that my optometrist mentioned that our eyesight tends to become longer and longer sighted as we get older. This cheered me up no end.

“So, in my old age, I should have perfect vision,” I suggested.

He looked at me with a sour expression. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said.

Being who I am, I thought about this for many years afterward. It just didn’t make sense that you could be shortsighted, then get longer sighted and not end up with better vision. And, after a few more years, I had proof that the blasted optometrist had lied to me. There was no doubt about it - I needed my glasses in fewer and fewer situations. In the end I gave up wearing them altogether.

They still sit forlornly on my desk, gathering dust and. perhaps, dreaming of their golden years, but they aren’t much use to me now, even if I were to wear them. My vision has changed so much that they actually make things worse, not better.

About a year ago, I ran into an unexpected problem. My eyes overshot. Instead of maintaining themselves at the ideal position, they kept getting longer sighted and I was no longer able to read the small print on all sorts of items. Ingredients on food especially are printed so finely that I would have needed my father’s magnifying glass to read them. Andrea became my goto when I really needed to read something illegible (what would I do without her?)

In the end, she got fed up and bought me some cheapo reading glasses. I’d always wondered how they could sell these over-the-counter, one-size-fits-all glasses. Now I discovered that they’re just small magnifying lenses. Suddenly I can read anything again and everyone is happy.

It’s the little things that make one truly content with life.


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