I had chosen an impressive and chic optician when I had to get new glasses. My reward was a pair of glasses that I couldn’t see out of and were causing me to fall and stumble about the city. After a week, I dragged my bruised body to the sleek optician’s.

“Have you adjusted to the new glasses?” asked the optician.

“No, I haven’t. Look at me! I am a wreck.”

“You may be a wreck, but it is not the glasses. They are perfect. Have you gotten compliments? They are much nicer than your old glasses.”

“I can’t SEE! I am falling down stairs and I ran into a cabinet that was being moved. …”

“¡Buaf! You are certainly not trying hard enough. What don’t you want to see in your life?”
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I twitched. My bruises were throbbing, and the egg on my forehead from the collision with the cabinet seemed to get even more purple in indignation. My mouth opened to say something nasty besides “YOU!”  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I let the air whistle into my mouth, and I turned and walked out the door and down to another less impressive-looking optician’s.

I had met my match in a white-robed, highly efficient, sleek, and snobby optician. She insisted that to be able to see out of them, all I had to do was get used to my new glasses.

I left the store and rushed to the metro, then fell down the last three steps, having misjudged the depth.

“I am just in a hurry,” I thought.

 Running back to the office, I tripped up the stairs.

“Klutz!” Longed to be sleek, I told myself that I had to be patient and make my eyes SEE.

This went on for the work-week and the weekend. By the following Monday, I looked like I had been in a lacrosse goal cage without pads.

“Did you have a relaxing weekend?” my boss asked suspiciously. “You look, um, you look tired.”

 “I am trying to get used to these new glasses….”

“Ah! Very good, that can take some time.” Was he conspiring with the optician? He sent me to do some research at one of the government buildings across the city.

It was a sunny day, so normally I would have loved getting out of the office and into old papers.  But not that day: I fell getting on the bus, getting off the bus, and on a loose tile of pavement.  Still, my spirits do not dampen easily.  As I picked my wobbly self off the sidewalk, I noticed that somewhere, someone had watered geraniums, and I stopped to smell the clean sharpness.

I knew I had to get a move on out of the sun, so I hurried into the massive grey building. My eyes, already trying to adjust to the glasses, were now also trying to adjust to the comparative darkness of the interior of the building. I hurried up the shallow gray steps and past the rows of gray columns, then walked smack into a large gray metal closet that was being moved on a dolly.

I hit the metal cabinet with such force that it bounced.

“I am adjusting to these new glasses…” I tried to explain.

“Doll, if you couldn’t see this closet, you might want to think about getting a new pair of new glasses.”

Truer words had never been spoken.
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My dad was a neurosurgeon and a neurologist. I was a kid who had had fallen off more horses than a stunt rider and had had my head knocked around so much playing field hockey and lacrosse that my father told me: “If you ever have severe headaches later on in life, go to a neurologist immediately. You’re a prime candidate for subdural hematomas with all those blows to the head.”

Years after my last lacrosse game, I was working in Europe, and I started having brutal headaches; headaches that could have made my head explode if I hadn’t reverted to an old eye trick of keeping my eyes closed a bit longer than usual when I blinked. It soothed my eyes.  I also thought it made me look vaguely indifferent, in a cool way.

I got the name of a local neurologist who ran a series of tests on my head. All clear. So he decided I was under stress, and had me go to a massage therapist.

I was to go twice a week. Sweet. Except that the poor massage therapist would work on my back and neck for about an hour and ask, “How’s that? All better now. Right?”

I’d get up, the room would swim at me, “Uh-oh, no, not really…but thank you anyway.”
“Give me five more minutes, you’re neck is a mess.” He would beg, wiping sweat from his temple, “I can fix this for you.”

“No, please.”

And I would leave and the therapist would research different trigger points that could be causing my headaches. I felt guilty that I couldn’t get any relief from the therapy and naturally this stressed me out even more.

One day at work, I was thinking about what an ungrateful back and neck I had. I was in the computer department talking about when I could expect one of my programs, when one of the programmers pointed and said, “I’ll have that for you by next Tuesday.”

“Great, great,” I said rubbing the back of my neck, “….Hey, what were you pointing at?”

He jutted his chin out and raised his hand again toward the wall, “You mean the calendar on the wall…?”

“What calendar?”

And so, I called the neurologist and the massage therapist, who was wildly relieved. Then I saw an optometrist and he confirmed my diagnosis: my eyesight had changed dramatically, but at least my brain was intact….well….
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No one wants to say it out loud, but looks are important. When I was showing horses in the 1970s my large frames glasses did not look great under a hunt cap. I convinced my parents that I should get contact lenses when I was maybe twelve years old.

A barn is a great place to be raised, but for a pre-teen with the contact lenses of the 1970s it caused a few problems: four to be exact.

When I scratched my cornea the first time, Dr. I. tsked and scolded me: I had to be more careful washing my hands and not rubbing my eyes.

“Can I still ride with this?” was all I really wanted to know.

“Sure you can, but will you be able to see?”

That was a good question. Two good eyes are needed for depth perception, especially when judging distances to a jump.

“Sure. I’ll be able to see. Plus, my horse has eyes.”

This sounds like bravado, and it was.  When I was at a horse show, I paid very close attention to my trainer when he said how many strides we should be getting. I watched other horses go and imagined myself jumping the same course with my mare.

But the eye hurt. It burned and it did all sorts of unsavory things until it healed. And Bam! On went the contact lens and Bam! The other cornea was scratched.

Dr. I was most unhappy.

“Now, child, I told you to be careful…you’re not going to stop riding, are you?”

“No sir.”

“Well, wash your hands.”

Cold water and darkness were what felt best to my eyes. I had to wear the ugly glasses. Whenever I saw pictures of myself, my confidence waned.

My parents insisted that I wear photo-gray lenses that changed color according to the amount of light available. I thought they were kind of cool – when I didn’t have to wear them at a competition.

All told, I scratched my corneas four times in two or three years. My eyes hurt so much – and I refused to tell my parents – that I started to close my eyes slowly at the top of a fence. I did it on purpose and only when I had a very clear mental picture of what was going on.
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Even now, when I see a picture with my eyes closed, I feel my eyes water a bit.

My oldest sister was the first person I knew who had contact lenses. Hers were hard lenses, and occasionally, one would pop out of her eye and we would all stop, drop, and peer at the floor.  Meanwhile, the person standing closest to my sister would lightly frisk her for the jumpy lens.

By the time my third sister got contacts, they were soft lenses, and they came with all sorts of accoutrements. Back then you had to make your own contact lens solution. When you left the optician’s office you had a gallon jug of distilled, a small plastic bottle, a bottle of saline tablets, a contact lens case, and a “boiler”, or contact lens disinfecting unit.

The contact lenses were put in their case with home-made saline solution and placed in the boiler, which was then filled with distilled water. The lenses were to be boiled for one hour.
I don’t know how many times my sisters and I accidently let the water boil off in the machine and in the case, leaving little chips of lenses.  Awkward explanations had to be given to our parents.

It was a huge step when Bausch and Lomb started making prepared saline. Such a luxury! AND they started making wetting drops. So soothing!

The disinfecting unit evolved, too. It was a relief when the boiler unit was replaced with a slim boxy device that was plugged in and turned itself off. It even came with a case for when you had to travel.

The trimness of the case, though, did not guarantee safety. One of my sisters brought her bag of contact lens care items with her to France. She had a proper adapter, so she proudly set up her contact lens disinfecting area in her room. She plugged adapter and unit into the French plug, there was a sudden flash, and flames burned a burst pattern on the elegant wallpaper of her room.
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She was forced to boil her lenses in an inelegant pan of water for the rest of her stay.

By the time I got my second pair of glasses, I was already a bit jaded about the whole process. The quiet and reassuring elegance of the optician’s seemed a bit less impressive as I browsed through the glasses for the maybe thirty seconds that we had to wait before an attentive optician asked my mother if we needed anything.

“We’re here to pick up my daughter’s new glasses.”

I was horse-back riding and my parents thought it was best that I had a spare pair of glasses. Two of my older sisters wore contact lenses. I was lobbying for lenses too, but I was told I was too young to wear contacts, so a second pair of glasses was a necessity.

I sat down at the compact and optimized optician’s desk and marveled for the maybe fiftieth time about how everything had a home in such a small space.

“B-r-z….B-r-z-u….here we are!” the optician jollied, and he pulled out my new metal framed glasses from his drawer full cushion-y glass cases, lined up like file folders. He looked at them a second with pride and then turned, motioned for me to take off my old glasses, and gently set the new glasses on my face.

“There you are! How are they?”

“Wellllll, they feel alright, but I can’t see out of them.”

“What do you mean you can’t see? Just look!”

I moved my head around the room and it was like seeing through a wave at the beach.

“Nope. I can’t see. Everything is all….ooooh! They’re making me dizzy!”

He practically snatched them off my nose, and then started adjusting them. After a few turns of a small screwdriver and some polishing he slid them back on my face.

“Now?”

The same wavy motions as I turned my head.

“No! Please!”  I took them off and handed them to him.

Chagrined doesn’t even start to describe the poor man’s state. He prodded and poked at the glasses and at me. My mother sat watching this show.  Finally, she reached for the glasses case with the carbon copy order tucked neatly inside.

“No wonder the child can’t see! This is her older brother’s prescription!”
​

Our family’s glasses came from Waldert’s.  We used to go to the shop on East Avenue, and although I loved the efficiency and the order of the place, I didn’t like the idea that I needed what they were selling.

The front walls of the shop were lined with tidy shelves of glasses. There were leather chairs and low tables with magazines to read while you waited, that is, if you had to wait, because there always seemed to be someone at the ready to help you.

Waldert’s was a long, narrow space with pale yellow wood paneling; the carpet had just enough design to help line up each optician’s table top left leg on the border of the rug. It was the uniformity of the place that made me feel so secure.

The tables were lined up in row on each side of the thin room – there was maybe only two tables’ width as a corridor down the center.

Each desk had swinging parts to adjust to the optician’s needs. There were the cubbies under the glass top that held high-end glasses, and drawers for clients’ glasses. On a small swinging platform, there was a magical machine that heated up the arms of the glasses so they could be adjusted. A box of tissues on the table and a refill in the upper right drawer were mandatory. A mirror hung from a hook on each table. So clever! Hanging the mirror on a hook to save table-top space! This appealed to me a great deal as a child, and I am still a sucker for clever storage ideas.

Into this organized, categorized, and immaculate world I walked, my eyes blurring the neatness together into a gentle haze. I got to sit across from the optician and feel warm plastic slide over my ears. My eyelids lowered so that I did not have to look into his face, I missed the early miracle, and answered, while still looking down, “Yes, yes, they feel fine.” But I felt ashamed that I needed glasses.

I walked out of the shop with my mother, head down, stepping around the rug’s pattern. I opened the door for my mother and followed her outside. After taking two steps, I stopped.

“Oh!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? There are LEAVES on the trees! I mean, I can see EACH leaf! This is really gonna be good, this seeing things!”
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As the youngest of eight children I often got to go along to the doctor with my siblings.  The eye doctor’s office was a familiar stop, cozy in a heavily paneled dark wood.

I had seen Dr. I. lean forward on his rolling leather-topped stool and peer into my siblings’ eyes and had wondered what he saw there, usually while he worked a small mint in between his cheek and jaw.

I had always been the extra child until this visit, when my eyes were to be examined. I was maybe eleven years old.

As I rested my forehead on the curved piece of metal, I understood the purpose of the mint. The cool smell pierced through the mild anxiety at having someone so close to my face.

“Yep, another one with her father’s eyes! All right, another with glasses for you! What’ll that be? Six children with glasses? Well, at least her teeth look good, Mrs. B.!” 

A very long time ago my sister and I were playing at our friend’s house across the street. Our friend was my sister’s age and she had a brother who was a year younger than I was.

The boy was playing with his little metal airplane. The airplane was on a string and he was standing with one arm up in the air, swinging that little plane around his head. Up and around the boy’s head went the tidy craft, mesmerizing, until my sister got up from what she was doing, turned, and walked into the little plane’s path.

She went down fast, hands covering her eye. Our friend screamed for our mothers. The boy stood with the string in a spaghetti pile near the grounded plane.

“She fine, she fine.” The little boy said.

Clearly, my sister wasn’t fine and mama took her straight to our ophthalmologist. He was a neat man, small and impeccably pressed. I was perched on a metal chair and my sister was stiff and formal in the big chair in his office.

“Well,” the doctor started, “there is a sliver of metal in your eye, my child. You could go to the emergency room in the hospital, or, if you think you can sit very still, I can take out that sliver of metal and I will give you a stick of Fruit Stripe gum. What’ll it be?”

“I’ll sit still,” my not-yet-in-kindergarten-aged sister decided.

She got that stick of gum and she earned my admiration, because I knew I could never be that brave. 
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