I See You!

It’s time for the spring eyeglass roundup here at the homestead. It happens at various times every year but is usually signaled by the fact that I find myself wearing a pair of clear safety glasses with bifocal magnifiers to read the newspaper.

While newspapers may be hazardous to the blood pressure, they seldom present eye-related injuries. It happens that these are the largest glasses in the pile and are the last ones picked. When I’m down to them, it means all the others have disappeared and need to be rounded up. 

They are too ugly to wear out in public, although I will admit that they are handy for driving since you can see both the dashboard and the road with them.  Usually, I just "estimate" about the things on the dash rather than try to juggle reading glasses while driving.

We are largely a no-glasses family, him due to contacts and me due to Lasik surgery about 10 years ago. After years of staring through bottle bottoms, I still maintain that it’s the best thing I ever did for myself and would gladly sell a child if necessary to repeat it.

I even have the list of children to sell already made out, but that’s another topic.

Surgery isn’t a panacea, though, and reading glasses still become necessary as we age. Unfortunately, reading glasses are much more feral than standard-issue glasses and they tend to wander off. Being somewhat parasitic in nature, they hitch a ride on any passerby and then jump off in unexpected places. Fortunately, they tend to congregate in places like nightstands, bathroom counters and coffee tables and we are able to return them to the stockyard in the kitchen cabinet.

We suspect that they sometimes breed, since previously undiscovered pair show up at times, often in styles that are obviously the product of slipshod breeding programs. No one, for example, will own up to having bought a pair that look to be straight out of 1955, with cat's-eye frames and enough rhinestones to make Dame Edna blush.

The problem with being an eyeglass wrangler is that you have to have some degree of althleticism as well as imagination to figure out where they might be hiding. The athletic ability, for example, is necessary to go after those that are encamped with the dust bunnies under the bed or deep within the bowels of the recliners in the den. It takes strength and fortitude to either crawl under or move the furniture to get to the nest.

The imagination comes primarily from trying to figure out how the heck they got to be in particular places – not the normal ones like suit jackets or briefcases, but mixed in with the holiday cookie cutters or on the very top of the television cabinet where you know you haven’t been for years. Did they crawl in there by themselves?

So it’s time for the spring roundup. One Saturday soon we will go through the house collecting them from their hiding places, then pile all the strays on the table, cull out those that are broken or too old or just too ugly to wear, even in the house when there’s nobody around and wait for them to wander off again through the spring and summer.

Of course, since they’re hard to see, I’ll probably be wearing an ugly set of safety glasses with bifocal magnifiers since that’s all I can find right now.