Seeing double
I should have known it was coming. I keep saying I’m almost 50. I keep flipping my glasses up to peer at restaurant menus. The print on product labels gets smaller and smaller. But it still snuck up on me.
I went to the eye doctor on Friday and the verdict is in: I need bifocals.
While the doc was talking to me, it didn’t really sink in. It was only when they sat me down with the optician to pick out frames – “which need to be deep enough to accomodate the graduated lenses” that I got it.
I didn’t take it well. Cindy, the poor optician, kept showing me frame after frame, only to have me discard them on the counter with barely a glance at myself. I felt like she was very far away, speaking to me from a distant room.
“They just…I just…I don’t…” I said, flopping my hands over, discomfited.
“Oooh, those are cute on you!” said a bright-eyed elderly woman all dressed in lilac as I regarded myself balefully in tortise shell rims.
“I just don’t think I’m in the mood,” I muttered, grabbing my handbag and heading for the door.
“Oh, I understand, honey,” said Cindy. “These things take time.” She nodded understandingly as I stood by the front door, trying to flee my newfound sense of being truly, definitely middle-aged.
I have a feeling they have seen this before. They know.
Hope is not closing your eyes before difficulties, risks and failures. It is knowing that if you fail now, you will not always fail and if you suffer, you will recover. It is knowing that life is good and love is powerful and the future is full of promises.
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Suebob's Red Stapler 
At least they don’t have lines in them! I’m always amazed at how far eye advances continue to come. It wasn’t that long ago glasses were made of glass.
I was thinking that. If my glasses were made of glass, they’d be as thick as Jerry Lewis’s in The Nutty Professor
After I turned 40, my eye doctor would always say how amazed he was by my near-vision. He’d test me on it and then right the results in my file with an exclamation point and say, “no way it should be this good at [insert current age here].” But recently, I’ve started to have to hold things further away in order to read them and the other day I was on the phone with someone who needed me to read a number to him and it was excruciatingly slow going. (The guy actually started calling out numbers when I’d pause. “8, is it 8?” As if the problem were that I’d never learned numbers.)
So I feel bad about the fact that I am one thousand years old, but I also feel bad that next time I go to the eye doctor, he will not write an exclamation point in my file.
And by “right the results,” I of course meant “rite the results.” We would have a whole ceremony and everything!
English is hard. And stupid.
You should work on your numbers. Then you can work up to the letters of the alphabet.
Get the light weight metal frames with no frame on the bottom. I’ve been wearing bifocals since I was 10. They take time getting used to, but you can do it.
I may have to get the Xanax first.