Four-Eyes

I’ve worn glasses since kindergarten, and I’ve gone to school with a lot of the same people for twelve years, as a result of being in a special program for nerds. Um, I mean, Gifted Children. I think the funny thing about that is watching all of the kids who called me four-eyes join me in blindness one by one. Before, I was one of the only kids with glasses, but by the end of twelfth grade the majority of my classmates wore either glasses or contacts. Mostly contacts, actually, though I’m not sure why. More fashionable, I guess.

In elementary school I went through glasses quickly. I was allotted one pair a year, so for the first few months of each year everything would be in sharp clarity. Every year I would realize anew that trees were composed of leaves, and cement was made of little rocks. Lawns were blades of grass! I knew all of these things when I got up close to them, but from any real distance it was easy to forget. The last few months of each year would be spent in a kind of blurry agony, pushing my glasses into my eyes trying to tell what the teacher had written on the board.

During these years of rapidly deteriorating sight, I determined that I would be blind by the age of twenty and would have to be led around by friends. Either that, or my lenses would be thicker than a guest on the Richard Bey show. None of this happened, of course, because at the last minute my vision’s rapid decline reached a nearly level plateau and now I only need glasses every few years.

I can’t remember my first or second pairs of glasses (I think I picked the most boring glasses possible, in hopes they would be virtually invisible and only I would know whether they were on or not), but I do remember my 3rd grade glasses. At the frame shop, my parents cajoled me to get something interesting, and spinning around in the rows of frames, I finally settled on The Apple Glasses. The Apple Glasses were a gentle bluish color above my eyes, a peachy color below them, and on the front, where the stems connect, were two red apples with green leaves, one on each side. Lovely! After that pair, I just got boring, boring ones until recently, when I wised up.

That part about the frame shop made me remember the most annoying thing about being a glasses-wearer. Okay, when you go to pick a new pair, you try on a bunch of frames either without lenses in them, or with fake lenses, and look in the mirror. Am I the only person who has a problem with this? I think not. When I look in the mirror through the lenseless frames, all I see is an awful blur, until my face is nearly pressed into the glass, whereupon it’s extremely difficult to tell if I look any good in ‘em. Geez.

Recently, my glasses and I have come to an understanding, following a harrowing battle with a pair of contacts. Now, my reason for getting contacts was a vain one, but not, I think, the usual vain one. See, my vision is bad. It’s very bad. It’s off-the-scale bad (you know how if you have perfect eyesight you see 20/20? Well, my blindness progressed from 20/40 to 20/100 all the way to, I’m not sure. It’s off the scale. I’d guess 20/800 or 1000.” “Oh.”) My lenses are thick, and consequently, they shrink my eyes smaller than I think is really necessary. If I got contacts, people would fall into my big beautiful eyes and never get out. At least that’s what I hoped.

So I got contacts, and my doctor was impressed with my bravery as he held open my eyes and poked his fingers and various plastic objects in them. He said some people faint when he does it, but I’ve always preferred having other people pull out my teeth and put in my eyedrops and take out my splinters and things of that nature. I’m a wuss when it comes to doing those things myself, though. I almost changed my mind while I was sitting in the chair waiting for him next to the full-color poster of Things That Happen To Your Eyes If You Wear Contacts. I took forever learning how to poke them into my own eyes, and I finally left, armed with various solutions and containers.

There were two good things in the few months of contact mayhem that followed. One was everything being huge. My glasses shrink things, so now (after twelve years) I was finally seeing things normal size again. My hands were enormous. My 7” records, which had seemed so small before, were now giant and bulky. What was with the gigantic print in all of my books? The other nice thing about contacts was my new inability to judge distances. Things curved towards me menacingly, and I was forever falling off curbs and down stairs. I felt just like the dad in Back to the Future, one of my main heroes. I stumbled around everywhere and got weird headaches. Then, once I felt okay in the contacts, I’d pop my glasses back on (you know, at night) and everything would be tiny and would spin at the edge of my vision. Wearing contacts made me realize that both contacts and glasses were terrible, and I hadn’t realized about the glasses before.

Finally, after three consecutive days of not being able to wear my contacts because I had scratched my eye with them, I just quit, and wore glasses from then on. Oh, except I tried again a couple months ago, managed to scratch my eye and decided that I always have been and always will be a four-eyed creature. What a relief.