I Need Glasses. Again.

My eyesight's been poor since birth, but for the longest time as a kid I gave that flaw short shrift. Just hold the book closer was my motto, and it worked well enough; when school forced me to lift my head, I could always sit right up front and kid myself it was to ingratiate myself with the teacher. Well, it did have that effect. It also let me see the blackboard.

My parents had their doubts that all was well in the sight of little Kenny, but little Kenny did his damnedest to dispel them. Little Kenny did NOT want glasses, no matter how badly he might need them: he knew that glasses were a one-way ticket out of the land of popularity and into the land of Nerd.

And so little Kenny exerted considerable effort into making his eyesight appear better than it was. He was aided and abetted in this effort (at first) by the unthinking gullibility of eye-doctors. Why they would unfailingly perform their arcane vision tests by getting little Kenny to cover his bad eye first was a mystery for the ages, but one our myopic hero was happy to exploit. Presented with a vision chart, left eye covered, he would read off three or four lines and take a stab at the fifth, memorizing as he went. Then he'd cover his good eye and...

Little Kenny was not stupid: he figured somebody was suspicious. It wouldn't do to just rattle off the chart he'd memorized as if everything was hunky-dory. So he'd insert pauses for dramatic effect, purposefully "guessing" at a few of the smaller letters, even getting some of them wrong. Not too wrong, though. A C and an O look similar enough, after all.

This strategem worked faultlessly...twice.

Did little Kenny get too smug? Perhaps. Or perhaps his stepdad was perceptive enough to see right through little Kenny's unseeing ruse. One day John took little Kenny out for a ride. Several blocks away from home, he pointed out a sign and asked what it said.

Now, it wasn't as if I could read that sign. But I'd read it at some point in the past, and I could recite it no problem. So I did, figuring that'd be the end of this mad obsession people had with turning little Kenny into a Nerd.

It wasn't.

Several klicks further on, in a part of town I'd never seen before, the request to read a sign was repeated.

"John, what is this with the signs?"

"Just tell me what it says." I think he actually framed it as a reading/comprehension test. Smart man.

Blind boy.

Little Kenny was back to the eye doctor posthaste. And this time, at his parents' urging, the eye-doctor covered his right eye first...

We moved to London the same year. Either transition alone could have been overcome. If I'd stayed where I was, I would have gone to great pains to make sure everyone knew I was still Kenny, just Kenny-with-glasses. If I'd moved without getting specs, I would have simply made new friends on the strength of my personality. But no, I moved and got glasses: INSTA-GEEK!

It didn't help much that I really needed glasses. My first few pairs were of the Coke-bottle, nose-denting variety. It might have been possible to get thinner lenses, but I doubt it: at least one of my prescriptions had to be prepared in, and shipped from, Taiwan. I'm pretty sure those glasses cost upwards of $400 a pair. In early '80s dollars.

You'd think I'd have taken better care of them. But then, you'd also think I'd have appreciated these things that let me see. Truth is, for a long time I deeply resented wearing them. I would have preferred to remain near-blind.

And so the glasses were subjected to all manner of indignities. At least two pairs were eaten by dogs. (Did you know that dogs like to eat glasses?) Other pairs bore scratches in short order, and I was forever forgetting to clean them: the dirt would accumulate almost to opacity before I'd think to give 'em a wipe. Dozens, scores of times I've been asked how can you see out of those things? Same way I could see without them. Piss-poorly. But who needs to look at the world? The world inside my head was so much more interesting.

My antipathy towards glasses melted away over time, not-so-coincidentally in lockstep with the attitude of society at large. Apparently some people choose to wear glasses nowadays. People who don't even need them. That would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. Likewise, my glasses themselves have become considerably more stylish, thanks in large part to my wife, who once ran an eyeglass store and has an eye, so to speak, for what looks good on me. My two most recent pairs have been Transitions, by Essilor--built-in sunglasses, in other words, and I swear by 'em. You would too, if you'd lived my life of where did I put those sunglasses? ah, screw it, I'll go without.

But my yearly eye tests are still a source of some stress. My eye doctor isn't: she's really nice (and pretty too, but I'm not supposed to be able to see that, I don't think). The tests themselves, though, still feel like exams I have to pass, if only because my glasses are not cheap. Repeated assurances do little to calm my nerves: a little of little Kenny persists in muttering half a grand and all you get is a little better vision? What a ripoff.

I don't like the tests, though. Any of them. Which is clearer, one or two? Or three, or four, or eleventy eight? Fer Chrissake they all look the same. They're all blurry. Some of them maybe a shade more or less blurry, but it's hard to tell in the three point eight microseconds you've got. What a pleasant surprise it would be if lens 42 suddenly brought everything into sharp clarity. Never happens.

I don't like eye drops AT ALL; I positively loathe the sun that Dr. Apfelbeck insists in placing three millimeters from my eye; and if there's a term stronger than hate for the peripheral vision test, that's the term I'd apply to it.

For those of you who have never had the experience of a peripheral vision test, all you have to do is click a little clicker when you see a flash of light. They do it one eye at a time, the other one's covered, and you're supposed to stare at a center circle--no cheating and moving your gaze--and then these lights flash. Some of them are unmistakeable, some of them are so dim you're not sure you actually saw them, and a few of them flash off in a spot you're not supposed to be able to see if you're staring at the circle in the center.

I have tunnel vision...not literally, in that I can see some things on the periphery, but a brain-induced state of tunnel vision that mimics the real disorder. Tell me to stare at a single spot and if I concentrate hard enough, that spot will be damn near all I see. Actually, "concentrate"'s probably the wrong term, because I fall into that tunnel vision state without thinking about it. I have to think about seeing things off to the side. And so this test is torturous for me. I'm required to balance my unmoving center-circle gaze against the knowledge that little dots of light are flashing all around and I need to click when I see one. The urge to look off to the left or right even a little is overpowering. Then there's those dim flashes: was that a light? I'm not sure. Do I click? Did I see that? If I click and that wasn't a light, I fail. Maybe that was a light in my so-called "blind spot" and if I click it, they'll believe I'm cheating. Or maybe I was supposed to click there and if I don't, it means I have no peripheral vision at all. Damn it, stop setting me up to fail here.

I've looked into laser surgery: I'm not a candidate. My retinas or corneas or something are too thin. It's too bad, really. As much as I'm terrified of the procedure, if I could undergo it I wouldn't have to stand for these horrid eye exams every year.

Occasional gripes aside, I'm pretty much okay with my glasses now. I kind of have to be. They're the first things on in the morning and the last things off at night. Without them, the world blurs such that I can only assume the Eva-shaped standing four feet away from me is in fact my wife. I have heard of people who have "lost" their glasses while they were on their face. It's just the sort of thing absentminded little Kenny would specialize in, were it not for the fact that it's immediately apparent whether or not Kenny's got his specs on.

For much of my life, I assumed I would eventually go blind. I had plenty of time to come to terms with that, but it turns out that barring some unforeseeable trauma, I'll remain a seeing person. My vision's been doing odd things (or at least odd to me) over the past decade: sometimes getting a little worse in one eye, sometimes getting a little better in the other, something I had long thought impossible. Every change of any magnitude necessitates another pair of glasses. I'd really love it if a pair could last longer than two years, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards...