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Wearing glasses on a chain
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Wearing glasses on a chain
  I got my first pair of eyeglasses when I was 5. Mama let me pick the frames, and I got some pink cats-eye ones, with rhinestones. I wore them attached to a chain around my neck, to keep me from losing them. I wouldn’t have lost them. I loved those glasses. And I loved seeing. Mama was horrified when, on the drive home from picking the glasses up, we passed a brick building and I exclaimed, “There are cracks between the bricks!” Like lots of kids, nobody knew how bad my eyes were until I started school and couldn’t see the blackboard.  I have a school picture of myself, proudly sporting those pink, spangled, cats-eye glasses and a new home perm. Tragic. After that, Mama “helped” me pick out frames. She never did stop trying the home perms, though—my sister and I still laugh about how she’d give us one disastrous home perm after another, each time saying, “That last Lilt® (or Toni®) didn’t work right, we’ll try a Toni® (or Lilt®) this time.” Those first glasses had thick, heavy lenses, the kind that magnify your eyeballs and make you look bug-eyed. My lenses got progressively thinner and lighter until I was about 15 or 16, I guess, and no longer needed eyeglasses. My first driver’s license had no restrictions, and that blissful state lasted into my late thirties, when my vision and lots of other parts of me began a slow but steady decline.  I was working as a reporter at the time. I spent a lot of time driving in Houston, and had trouble reading my Key Map®, as well as difficulty seeing highway exit signs in time to actually maneuver to the correct exit. In residential neighborhoods, I couldn’t read street signs without parking on the side of the street and sneaking up on the sign, bent over and squinting.  The answer, of course, was bifocals, or trifocals—I tried both. In theory, they are an excellent idea, but in practice they present many challenges, the first being that when I walked, I was looking at the ground through the reading part of the lenses. The ground swam and wavered, and made me walk as if I was wading, picking my feet up too high and putting them down very, very carefully. It’s hard to look competent when you have to concentrate that hard to walk. Going downstairs in bifocals was a real event for me—friends suggested I sell tickets. And I had to take the bifocals off to eat. I was OK picking up a bite of food, but as it neared my face, it entered the bottom field of the glasses, and suddenly loomed at me in a menacing fashion. No one wants to be menaced by their lunch. And no one wants to eat lunch with someone who is startled by every bite she takes.  Contact lenses, one that corrected for distance and one that corrected for reading, were a better solution for me, once I adjusted to them. It takes a couple of days before you stop feeling like you’ve suddenly gone blind in one eye, then suddenly in the other eye. And I could wear pretty, non-prescription sunglasses again. Now that I don't have to drive in Houston, contact lenses are too much trouble. I still wear bifocals when I go out, because they let me drive and read. But I take them off as soon and as often as I can.  These days, I usually only want glasses for reading or knitting. As long as I’m not driving, I rather enjoy seeing the world in soft focus—it’s like snow, it makes everything look pretty. So I just bought a pair of new eyeglasses, just for reading. I wear them on a chain around my neck, to keep me from losing them. There are only a few problems with this arrangement: If you fall asleep with them around your neck, the chain may become very badly tangled in the back of your hair. If you’re wearing them when you decide to pull a shirt off or on, you may wander about with your shirt and eyeglasses all around your head, emitting muffled curses, until someone saves you. And if you’re wearing them when you brush your teeth, your glasses will swing out when you lean over the sink, and you will spit on them.  Otherwise, though, life with one pair of reading glasses on a chain around your neck is pretty problem-free. And I really like this pair of eyeglasses. They’re cats-eye frames, with rhinestones. This pair is black. I’ve matured a lot since kindergarten.  |
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