Getting glasses

The fateful diagnosis was given to me when I was 9 years old.     

My parents, suspecting something was amiss, took me to a specialist. The doctor tested me, furrowed his brow, then tested some more. Without the consent of my parents or me, he put my head up against a cruel-looking contraption that caused my vision to suddenly distort. 

After finishing his macabre tests, the doctor turned to me and abruptly said, “You have a touch of myopia.”

I knew from experience that having a touch of something wasn’t good, such as when I caught a touch of chickenpox or that touch of measles.  

I didn’t know what myopia was but figured that anything that ominous sounding had to be fatal. Steeling myself, I asked quietly, “How long do you think I have?”   

“It depends,” said the doctor.

“On what?”

“On whether or not you get glasses to correct your near-sightedness. I saw you tearing around in the waiting area. A kid with your vision who runs around all the time like that will bonk his brains out if he doesn’t wear glasses.”     

It suddenly dawned: my condition wasn’t terminal. The only problem was that I needed glasses. What a relief. 

My relief was to be short-lived. I was soon ushered into a special room to pick out the frames that would hold my corrective lenses. The horrors.

There were no stylish glasses available in Brookings, South Dakota, in the late 1960s. In photos of me from that era, I am always wearing dorky-looking brown plastic glasses. Indeed, my fifth-grade school photo is now a dictionary illustration of the word “dork.”

The eye doctor was wrong about one thing, though: correcting my vision did little to cut down on the number of bonks to my noggin. The trouble is, my glasses often came between the bonk and the noggin, resulting in broken frames.

We weren’t exactly the Rockefellers of dairy farmers, so this meant a lot of in-home glasses repairs. I became an expert regarding which types of tape held best and quickly ascertained that glues — even the famously powerful model airplane glue — were totally worthless.

Photos of me taken during my grade school years reveal a chunk of tape holding my glasses together either at the bow or the bridge of the nose, sometimes in both places.

Wire-rimmed glasses came into vogue about the time I entered high school. Wire-rims were a boon for me. Not only were they nearly impossible to break, but a guy could also adjust them himself. Simply crank here or torque there and ta-da, just as good as at the optometrist’s.

The Space Age brought with it the marvel of self-tinting lenses. This was both good and bad — good in that wearing such lenses gave a guy sunglasses whenever he needed them; bad in that a guy with a set of such lenses is often tempted to use his acetylene cutting torch sans face shield.

Take it from me, spatters of molten steel never come off your lenses without a struggle. And when they do, they always leave behind a permanent and bothersome crater. And by the way, tempting as it may be, do not try to use the aforementioned acetylene torch to braze your broken wire-rim glasses. The results will not be pretty.

I tried plastic lenses once, but they took on a reddish hue when they darkened. For a couple of years, I went around literally looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. My wife’s opinion is that I had always been this way and that my lenses had nothing to do with it.

It recently became apparent that I needed new glasses, with the main hint being the fact that one of my bows broke.

I no longer fear the optometrist, no longer worry that at the end of the exam, he will shake his head sadly and hand me a white cane. Heck, I even joked with him a bit. When asked how I thought my eyes were doing nowadays, I said, “OK, I guess. But I think you will find that I’m a bit more Presbyterian.” 

He returned the favor at the end of the exam, quipping, “I must say, you have immaculate macula.”     

My wife came to help me pick out my new frames since such decisions are above my pay grade. After perusing the selection of frames, I found a set that seemed sturdy and had been tastefully coated with a brown compound, perhaps plastic.

I put them on and showed my wife. “Good gosh,” she said. “Do you enjoy going around looking like a dork?”

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at [email protected].