No, really, that’s not just a title, I really want to know. Do you know where they are? Because I can't find a single pair of them.
For about the 10th time since I turned 40 and have had to rely on reading glasses to read stuff, I had a spontaneous disappearance of all reading glasses in my house and car.
It’s the freakiest thing. Perhaps you’re old, too, and this has happened to you. You have reading glasses of all sizes, shapes and colors sprinkled all over the house, just waiting to be picked up when you find you can’t read a recipe, or see which buttons to press on the house alarm to ward off an embarrassing visit from the police, or read a text from your daughter that she needs $5 for a gym locker. (Squinting without glasses you might think she heads SS for a gum hooker.) You purposefully put a pair of glasses in your car glove box, another in your purse, one on the nightstand, one in the kitchen drawer, one at the computer. The rest you flung like confetti while standing in the center of the house, hoping that some will land in the couch cushions, which are a perfect place to find a pair of glasses in a pinch.
One day, you leave one pair of them on a restaurant table, but - hey, no problem. You’ve got 97 other pairs that you got in your Christmas stocking or that your mother-in-law picked up for you at Marc’s for 99 cents. They’re everywhere, right? Wrong.
You go home and they are all AWOL. Even the Extreme Emergency Only pair, the big gold aviator glasses that your son found on the track one day and brought home to you like a bag lady's kid. If reading glasses could drink Kool-Ade and commit mass suicide at the same time, they would and did, I think, in my house a number of times, including this past week.
Being 51 and not having a pair of reading glasses is the pits. You might as well be blind as a bat. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear well or think reasonably when I can’t see.
Reading glasses and the need for them doesn’t make any sense. I understand eyesight about as well as I understand teeth. I tried to have my orthodontist explain to me how braces work (it’s not as simple as you think. They’re not just moving your teeth around. There is bone constantly growing around your teeth and it’s insane). I’m a semi-intelligent woman and I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
Same as when my eye doctor told me I would need reading glasses. I was 48 and he said, “You’re going to need glasses soon.”
“Oh, honey, please. I’ve had glasses since the 2nd grade and contact lenses since 9th,” I told him, trying to sound superior and mature while sitting behind the Batman mask eye-looker-inner-thingy.
“No, I mean you’re going to need reading glasses for on top of your contact lenses. To read,” he said.
I don’t understand how a person an be near-sighted and far-sighted at the same time. I don’t understand why every actor who plays the president has little half-moon reading glasses. I don’t understand what happened to all of mine that I paid dozens of dollars for and they just disappeared.
I do understand that not being able to find my glasses and making one of my offspring hold a restaurant menu across room, tilted up toward the light, officially makes me my mother.Labels: eye doctor, eyesight, losing glasses, orthodontist, reading glasses
