When I was little, really little, my oldest sister had to get glasses. Her eyesight was so bad, she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her. For years, she wore glasses, until contact lenses became popular and affordable. I can still remember the day she got those – – she was a teenager, and she’d hog the bathroom we girls shared for hours trying to get the hard glass lenses into her eyes. Then again at night, taking them out.
Fast forward many years, and I’m at the eye doctor with my other sister, helping her pick out frames for reading glasses. I remember making a comment to the woman helping her about how both of my sisters have bad eyes but mine have always been perfect.
“Just wait,” she said. “It’ll happen to you. It happens to all of us.”
Well . . .
Okay, so now I have to wear reading glasses. My eye doctor told me to just go ahead with the kind you get at the drugstore because they’re inexpensive, until they no longer work, then he’ll give me prescription lenses.
So now here I am, someone who needs glasses to use the computer, read a book, read ANYTHING. But I can’t use them to see everything else. So I’m constantly looking up and over them at people, or the television if I’ve got the laptop in my lap while the news is on. I can’t see to walk around the office with them on, but have to use them when I get to where I’m going in order to see what I went there to get.
Which means I’m always taking the glasses off.
Which also means I’m finding myself in different places when I need them. Which has led to – – glasses everywhere.
I’ve got two pair on my desk at work.
I’ve got a pair on the coffee table, to use when I’ve got the laptop on.
There’s a pair in the kitchen, if I need to read a cookbook.
Whenever I have to go to a meeting, I slip a pair into my pocket.
I have two pair in my purse, I dunno why, but I do.
I’ve still got the last laugh, though. My oldest sister, the one who’s had contacts since she was a teen? She’s had to upgrade to bifocals, so she can read.
The Velvet Zebra 