Glasses

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses." ~Dorothy Parker


"My grandmother lived to be ninety-five and never needed glasses. She always just drank right out of the bottle." ~unknown


I am fifty years old now and wearing my first pair of glasses. I don't know that it makes me feel old (everything is doing that!) but it is making the world seem like a moonscape. The ground is too close and has rolls in it, the table tops are trapezoid shaped and leaning away from me, and peripheral is a fun-house mirror.


But it's not as bad today as it was yesterday. Even as I look to this computer screen, I am seeing the letters better than I was yesterday. I have no-line bi-focals and there is supposed to be a range in the middle of the glasses for looking at computer screens. Yesterday, it seemed like it was about half a pixel wide, but today I can actually see the screen pretty well. Yesterday, reading was difficult as well because the "sweet spot for reading" was at the bottom of the frame. Way at the bottom. Like one line of text at a time, just above the rims, bottom of the frame. It's still not great, but already it's getting better.


The glasses haven't changed. And, honestly, the glasses work best when I don't try to find that sweet spot. See, if I stop thinking about it, I realize my head tilts to just the right angle for best visibility through the lenses. If I think about it, though, then I start tilting my head like a bobblehead, trying to find the exact right spot where things become clear.


And then the sweet spot seems to get smaller.


If there's a meta-message here that applies to something beyond glasses, I'm not sure what it is. Probably something about "trust".


But not blind trust, because that that would counteract the glasses.