The Length of My Arms… (Reflections on Tomorrow’s Trip to the Eye Doctor)
I remember as a teenager that I had reading glasses. I have no idea what happened to them – when exactly I got them or when they disappeared. It seems to me that they were corrective, designed so that if I wore them I eventually wouldn’t need them anymore. By my mid-twenties they were gone…
In the summer of 2004 I took nine graduate hours. I’d moved out of higher ed jobs into the public school classroom and I was trying to become fully certified in special education. I’d always been a bit far sighted. I could read the billboards down the highway before anyone else in the car. But I needed a book to be a good 20 inches or so from my face in order to read it comfortably.
After I started taking classes for certification, 20 inches became two feet. Then two feet because 27 inches. Soon my arms were too short for me to read the paper…
I managed to spread my classes out so that I only took a course a semester for a time. Then in the summer of 2006 I took nine hours again. One of the classes was three semester hours in 15 days. At the end of the summer I visited an eye doctor and got my first pair of glasses as an adult.
My eye doctor tried at the time to convince me to get bifocals. I would walk around with glasses always on my face. And there, in the bottom half of them, I’d have the magnification I needed for reading. I got reading glasses instead.
Tomorrow I see the doc again. (I guess tomorrow has already come, since it’s after midnight.) It’s been two years and he sent me a postcard saying I should come in. It’s hard to ignore a postcard from a doctor. So I called and made an appointment.
I can still see everything I ever could. Well, most of the time. If I concentrate. If I don’t concentrate, then I can’t even find the raisins in my cereal. I suppose the time has come. We’ll see what tomorrow holds…
