I was telling my sister Deb something the other day that sounded comically absurd, at least to me, the moment it came out of my mouth.
“I really like my new glasses, except for I don’t see all that well with them,” I said.
She obviously found that humorous as well; at least she laughed. Then again, we Lundeberg kids do tend to be easily amused.
Anyway, regarding these spectacles, I elaborated thusly.
“I like how they look, and they’re really comfortable, and I see fine for, like, driving, but the prescription changed slightly, and now I have a really hard time reading things written on paper, like the page proofs I need to check at work; I can see my computer screen more or less all right. The doctor told me I was borderline for needing bifocals, but with my old prescription, I could still read OK — with my glasses, not my contacts; that’s really hard — and I decided not to get bifocals this time, but maybe I should have. Now I’ll need to wait a couple years for my insurance to pay for them.”
I, like Debby and three other siblings, am fairly nearsighted and have been since childhood. My first pair of glasses, an awful tortoise-shell design, came in the seventh grade, serving to make a horrible school year worse. Two years later, I was deemed grown up enough to get wire frames, which I liked a lot better; made me feel like my hero, Reggie Jackson.
Later in high school, after I was shifted from the outfield and third base to my most natural position, catcher, I had a pair specs like the Kansas City Royals’ Darrell Porter. And then finally, as a senior, I was allowed to get contact lenses, the “hard” ones that prevailed in 1980 (technically, they were described as “gas permeable,” but trust me, they were as hard a Dorito and at times about as comfortable in the eyes, but at least I didn’t have to wear glasses anymore).
I wore the hard lenses for five years, then tried the soft lenses and, through a collection of mishaps, managed to ruin a couple pairs of them in about three weeks. Furious at myself and out of discretionary funds for any other lenses, I just wore glasses for a decade, even playing my first two old guy baseball seasons in prescription goggles a la Chris Sabo.
At 32, I decided to give soft lenses another try, and let’s just say things have gone a lot better the second time around. As previously mentioned, I can’t really read with them anymore, but then I could never read great with them anyway, at least for long periods, such as at work, because my eyes tend to get dry and scratchy when I do. But the contacts work great for sports, mowing, etc., and I just use my glasses at work.
Occasionally, such as Thursday morning, I will be too lazy to put my contacts in before going running. Invariably, after a couple miles, my glasses — I use an old pair for running — will become uncomfortable, even if I use Croakies to hold them in place, so I will take them off and stick them in my pocket, rendering my surroundings very blurry.
On Thursday, my shorts happened not to have a pocket, so I set my glasses, and my shirt, alongside the logging road I was running on and just had to hope I would be able to spot them on my way out.
Thanks to the shirt also lying there, I did. Without the shirt, it would’ve been really tricky.
Guess when I run in glasses on cooler days, I better make sure I have a pocket.
