Sight for Sore Eyes

I’ve been on the shit end of the how many fingers am I holding up game since I was four-years-old. Unlike a lawyer who doesn’t ask a question they don’t know the answer to, you wouldn’t be asking me unless you knew I couldn’t get it right. No, I can’t see the top letter on the chart. I spent half a lifetime sure it was an el.

I've been looking for my glasses, grasping blindly on the nightstand next to me, listening for that hollow spectacle rattle, or searching on the sink next to the contacts, hoping not to trip over an unseeable obstacle since Ford was president.

Twenty/twenty vision is a thing no one in my immediate family can claim. My kind uncle became an optometrist in Manhattan, according to my mother, just to support us. She dragged my sister and me into the city annually to be reexamined, and then to share a street hotdog with her brother afterwards—an outing we always appreciated. Only then there were the unplanned trips.

“I’m going broke. Especially with you!” She’d point to me who went through several pairs a year. “What do you do, snap them in half? Rub them in sandpaper?” How she guessed, I’ll never know.

My eyes were particularly poorly. In first grade I was fitted for coke bottle, bifocal lenses. These were glasses with a bowl shaped, magnified cutout on the bottom for reading—an ancient type progressive lens. Mostly, old people wore them. And me, a kid with a pyramid of frizzy curls on a futile mission to make it all look good. I took them off, but it was hopeless. I was clumsy enough with them; blinded I was a bulldozer.

The kids teased me mercilessly, called me six eyes, tried to steal the glasses off my face in order to watch me chase an out of focus figure waving arms in front of me. Sometimes, the teachers intervened. Or, another kid feeling bad for me, would grab a ball from somewhere, cause a distraction, and sneak me my glasses.

By second grade, one eye began to wander and the headaches took over. When I was tired I couldn’t keep my eyes from following their individual leads. My uncle sent me to a pediatric specialist.

“Boy,” I remember him saying. “They sure look pretty, but they’ll give you problems for the rest of your life.”

“Headaches, right?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“Get tired reading? Seeing double?”

Yes, yes, and yes.  

He slapped a patch on the one eye and I took the bus by myself to his office where we “trained” weekly for two years—what I respectfully refer to as my pirate period. Cover this eye. What do you see? One or two? Cover that one and read this. Follow the bouncing ball.

I’m grateful. It did a good enough job. I became a writer and an editor, though I still need to look away every twenty minutes or so. As a party trick I retained the ability to turn one eye in at will, which never fails to elicit a delightfully cringy, “ew,” but also a second of panic in me that it will stay that way permanently.

At thirteen I convinced my uncle and my mother to get me contact lenses. Once I got over putting them in my eyes, it felt like someone had cleaned the window I’d been looking through. 

When they asked, “How many fingers am I holding up?” It looked less like a bouquet of fuzzy sausages and more like actual digits. My skill with everything ramped up when I could accurately see reflections. My makeup. My hair. My footing. I was on a gymnastics team and couldn’t believe how intricate the tricks I landed were when I was able to pinpointed the edges of the balance beam, rather than infer them.

I stocked up on contacts as well as frames. I took mine thick and speckled. No wireless ones. We needed something substantial to hold all that corrective power, they told me. With a healthy fear of being caught blind, I maintained the bunker full of supplies to show it.

In my twenties, they invented corrective surgery. I assumed I was too far gone, that my “chronic-something-opia” would preclude me. When I saw the price tag, I didn’t investigate any further. My regimen was as second nature to me as brushing my teeth, actually more so as I didn’t begin flossing until my late twenties. It hardly felt worth the risks or the resources.

A few months ago, after I’d had preventative surgery against a detached retina, I revisited my thirty year old calculus. I’m used to compensating for my eyesight, but I haven’t stepped onto a flight in the last twenty years without wondering which would give me the best chances. The lenses could melt into my eyeballs, but I could also lose my glasses on impact and be just as lost. I’d prefer not to acknowledge it, however I won’t be able to open my eyes underwater or through fire anyway. The only thing left to me is to order a cabernet and throw my blind faith to the plane and the pilot, instead.

Then there was the pandemic and the supply chain breakdown, showing me just how at the mercy of it my piddling vision is. When the apocalypse hits its zenith, I will run through my last box of lenses, that even now take a few weeks to show up. My glasses will all run through the sandpaper that seems to be embedded in my fingerprints as well.

More importantly, my eyes are aging and drying up like California before the rains came. I have a laundry list of pains I’ve suffered, but none quite as acute as an errant lens on the move inside my arid eye sockets.

All of which is to say, the surgery is scheduled. The fear of leaving it up to the mercy of a magic laser scares the crap out of me, but my gut and so many other people I know who’ve had it, tell me it’ll be worth it.

A few nights ago, I woke up in a panic, looking around my room. In various corners I saw far away twinkling lights of what I knew to be the clock and thermostat I couldn’t read. Was I giving something up, maybe? Could it be that the soft focus on details helped me do other things better? I reached out to my nightstand to grab my glasses and heard their clatter as they went over the edge. I did my ritual frantic patting the space underneath the bed, hoping to come up with them before I had to wake my husband.

Nah, I’ll be okay with the memories.