The men in my family have all worn glasses since about the age of thirty-five. I have an uncle who started when he was in college. My dad checked-in during his middle thirties. It's just an expected thing. We all pretty much keep our hair and lose our eyesight, I guess. I wonder if that's a choice anyone would make.
As a pilot, I had my eyes checked every two years. "Read the bottom of the chart, Mister Hiatt. As far down as you can go, please." "Chicago Eye Chart Company, Chicago Illinois, Six-Owe-Six…" "That'll be fine, thanks."
Curiously, while I have always been able to read the chart, I have always had terrible luck with the little machine they make you look into when you get your drivers' license renewed. At intervals, I have found myself staring at the pilot chart on Monday and into the driver's exam machine on Wednesday of the same week. I would pass with flying eyes and be told I needed glasses to drive. When I would protest, some kindly old manager-type would give me an envelope to cover one eye and ask me to read one of the driver safety posters on the other wall. Having done that, I was good to go for another four years on the road.
I never figured out whether I should be worried or grateful or how I should interpret all of this. But consider all of this, the next time you watch an airplane fly over, or someone headed toward you at sixty miles per hour.
One doctor told me that I'm probably getting caught up on the glare of the various lenses and mirrors. That minor scratches or dust is what I'm picking up on inside the machine, and that's why I can spot traffic at my ten o'clock and six thousand feet, but not tell which pair of lines is darker in the machine. I don't know, but I don't trust 'em.
Which brings us to glasses. I now wear glasses. As I sat in the chair, trying not to be distracted by the dust and scratches in the various headgear and eye-calibrators of my first real eye exam in years, at one point the doctor pulled the whole thing away from my face and showed me. "Here's what you're currently seeing" and replaced it all, with "…and here's what it could be". I was convinced.
But I know myself well enough to know that I needed an all-or-nothing, all-in-one solution. If I had to carry around driving glasses and reading glasses and sunglasses it would just increase the chances that I would at some point have the wrong pair. So, I got no-line bifocals, with the automatic tinting when you go outside. I get distracted by seeing the edge of the lens, so I got Aviator -style frames, with a little bigger lenses that give me more glass to look through.
I think I wish now that I hadn't gotten the no-line bifocals. My problem is that I'm not yet smart enough to know where and how to look at things. If I had a little line there, etching out a window of close readability, I think I might be better off, today. As it is, they tell me the more I wear my new glasses, the faster I will get used to them. I put in about six hours that first day, and another twelve or fifteen the next. It's been at least eight hours every day, since.
It still feels weird. It's scary looking down at the ground I'm about to walk on and seeing it move away from me. Stairs are an issue. But I'll get it, eventually. For now it's difficult to work facing the computer screen and knowing I have only some percentage around where I'm focusing that I can actually see clearly, quickly fading away as I move up or down, left or right of that mark.
Funny how we adapt to our changing realities, isn't it? People think they could never save ten percent, then they end up taking a ten percent pay cut and… getting along fine, more or less. Things change, circumstances change, technologies change and realities change.
Hey, maybe all of this head-turning counts as exercise, huh?
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