I Can See Clearly Now

For most of my life now I have worn corrective lenses. I discovered a need for them when I was about six years old, visiting my grandmother for Christmas in her rambling old Victorian home on the outskirts of Clearwater, Nebraska. My dad had several brothers, most of them tall men with long wool overcoats they hung inside the front door.

Being a child, and short, and as I would later learn, as nearsighted as Mr. Magoo, I bumped into the rack of coats. Promptly and politely I apologized to it. When I realized I had just spoken to an inanimate object and not one of my uncles, I quickly looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Not that I would have seen them – they would have appeared as a fuzzy blur somewhere in my peripheral vision.

Welcome to the world of myopia, a genetic gift handed down through my mother’s side of the family. Apparently the gene for nearsightedness is so dominant that when scientists observe it on the DNA helix, it can be seen brandishing a small sword that it uses to wipe out its competitors, which are the genes for the eyesight of a hawk. You can see just how dominant the myopia gene is at a family reunion of my mother, her siblings, and my cousins.

Especially if there’s a gathering that takes place late in the evening, when the eyeglasses start coming out. Not readers (I now have those, too), but the thick-lensed spectacles we wear around the house after taking out our contact lenses for the day. After a few glasses of wine, to really get the party going, we’ll start discussing diopters and astigmatism in order to determine which one of us truly has the poorest eyesight. Unfortunately, the winner is also the loser, the poor chap whose eyeglasses have the thickest lenses.

Not that I’m complaining. I am thrilled to live in an era when myopia doesn’t have to be such an obvious flaw as, for example, the decision to wear Mom jeans or black nail polish. Thanks to contact lenses many of us with defective vision can proudly stand side-by-side with our eagle-eyed peers and no one has to know. Unless a hair or speck of dirt touches our eye. Then we’re blinking madly like Andy Kaufman’s “Foreign Man” character.

But even the near-perfect solution of contact lenses has its hazards. The most notable one occurs when you mistakenly put in the wrong lens. I am careful to put the right lens in its proper half of the case, the one where the lid has a giant R stamped on it, but every so often I get distracted.

What results is this: the next morning, filled with optimism and coffee, I put in the mixed-up contacts. Sometimes I don’t notice immediately what I have done. But it’s obvious once I start tooling down the road and can’t see anything clearly. My first thought is, I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a stroke. My second thought is, even with corrective lenses I’m stumbling and bumbling around like Mr. Magoo. Oh Annie, you’ve done it again!