I can see clearly now…

True confessions time:  I have terrible eye sight.

Now everybody says they have terrible eye sight, but I really do.  Oh, it’s definitely not as bad as it could be.  I mean, I don’t have bifocals yet (knock on wood) & my eye doctor (whom I visited just today) said my macula are immaculate.  But for some people, glasses are just helpful.  For me, they’re absolutely necessary.  

I don’t have a bedside clock, for example.  I just wear my watch to bed.  It’s big & ugly, but it has indiglo & I can bring it right up to my nose without waking up all the way. And this is handy because I’m constitutionally unable to go back to sleep unless I know what time it is.  I can’t explain it; I just know I have to know.  So I wear my watch to bed.

When we’re lying in bed at night with our books & screens, and my husband wants to show me something on the iPad or in a magazine, he can’t just tilt the screen & say, “Hey, check this out.”  He has to reach over & put it about six inches from my nose.  

Driving?  Ha.  I was at the wheel on a rainy Saturday recently & I pulled off my rain-spattered glasses so my husband could give them a quick wipe for me.  We made it about half a block before we decided that perhaps it was better for me to just look through the rain drops than have dry glasses.  Safer for everybody.    

It wasn’t but a few days after that when I was giving my glasses a quick wash.  I opened the towel & discovered them in two neat halves, the nose bridge snapped clean through the center.  I had a minor moment of panic.  The last time I’d gotten new glasses, I’d had my old pair made over into prescription sun glasses.  Which promptly broke.  Did I have a back up pair?  How old were they?  Lord knows I didn’t want to go back to contacts.  I know they work for many good people, but they always make me feel like I’m wearing a scoop of sand in each eye.  They’re definitely special occasion wear.

Happily I found an old, sturdy pair buried in a drawer.  And when I say “old,” I mean it.  I think I was dating my husband when these frames were in daily rotation.  (We’re having our 14th anniversary this summer.)  Luckily, the 80s had already taught me some important if harrowing lessons about trendy glasses by the time I bought this particular pair.  These frames were classics.  I’ve been wearing them for a month now, & have actually received a handful of compliments on them.  

But I deserve new glasses.  It had been a solid four years since my last pair, & my rule is every three to five.  So I’ve been doing some serious frames shopping, only to rediscover this tragic fact:  It’s about as hard to find good glasses as it is to find good jeans.    And finding decent jeans that flatter your body & don’t cost the earth?  It’s a certifiable miracle.  (Am I right, ladies?)  So I finally just today pulled the trigger on a new pair.  I think I like them but it’s hard to tell.  I had to take my glasses off to try them on.  I’ll have to let you know in a week to ten days. 

So how about you?  Do you panic when you blow out the knee of your favorite jeans or break you five-year-old glasses?  Or are you already in the car heading for the mall with a smile on your face & a song in your heart?  What’s the last important-to-you item you had to replace?    

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