My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

The Way I Can’t See It

This is a story of loss and denial. It begins in Colorado, on the freeway. I am looking for an exit called Drake Way. I notice I am hunched forward, squinting, barely going 40. All around me, drivers beam hate rays into my car. At precisely the moment at which it is too late to veer out of the exit lane, I note that the sign above me does not say Drake Way; it says Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway. This is not good.

I go to my optometrist, who hesitates to up my prescription. She says that with a stronger distance correction, I’m going to start having trouble with what she calls “close work.” Apparently she has mistaken me for one of her patients who assemble microchips or tat antimacassars by firelight. I tell her she should go ahead and change the prescription because I don’t do close work.

“Do you look things up in phone books?” she asks. “Use maps?” She means, Do I read small print? She means I’m going to have trouble with small print. That I’m suddenly, without warning, old and enfeebled. Nonsense, I insist.

She shrugs and gives me a pair of stronger lenses to try. Then she hands me a bottle of lens drops, points to the label and asks me to read it. This puzzles me, for any fool can see there’s nothing written on that label, just tiny lines of decorative filigree. I study it harder. It is writing. “Do not use while operating heavy machinery?” I am guessing. “Now with more real fruit? Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway?” I hang my head. It’s time to read the handwriting on the wall, which I can most assuredly do—provided it is neatly spaced and billboard-sized. I am old and my eyesight is going. She says to cheer up, that I don’t have to get bifocals, “just a pair of reading glasses.” In my book, reading glasses are not cause for cheer. They are cause for depression, or regression, or diphtheria, I don’t know exactly, because I can no longer read what’s in my book.

There was a time when I wanted to wear half-glasses, the way young children want to have crutches or braces until the day they actually need them. Today I do not want to wear reading glasses, not at all. Reluctantly, I wander over to the local drugstore.

The packaging on the reading glasses shows kindly white-haired people in business suits. The eyeglass company has gone out of their way to dress the models like functioning adults, as though people who need reading glasses can still contribute to society, when everyone knows they just sit at home tatting and reading telephone books. I can’t go through with it. There has to be another way.

At home, I do an Internet search for “presbyopia.” This is a mistake. The websites that turn up have names like SeniorJournal or Friendly4Seniors.com. One site informs me that “presbyopia” comes from the Greek for “elder eye.” I don’t appreciate this, not one bit. I’m not elderly. I’m 43. Besides, I know some Greek (spanakopita, Onassis, that word you say when the appetizer ignites), and “presbyopia” doesn’t sound like any of it. I believe someone made up this “elder eye” business, someone cruel and youthful, with four-point lettering on his business card. I look up the etymology of “presbyopia” in my dictionary, but alas, someone has replaced the words with lines of decorative filigree.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m not getting bifocals or reading glasses. I’m going to leave my contacts under-corrected and get a pair of distance glasses to wear on top of them, for driving. I figure I’ve got another five or six years before anyone calls me Elder Eyes. You could say I’m in denial. Or you could write it on a piece of paper, and by God, I’ll be able to read it.