“You Needed Better Friends” An Optometric Observation

See, I really do own glasses.
No need to see them on my face.

 This year—2020—marks fifty years of vision correction for me.[1] I recently had my annual vision check.[2] I was chatting with my optometrist and this recalled the days when I wore glasses.[3]
My glasses of that era could best be described as “heavy, thick, inconvenient.” Their thickness (due to my prescription) meant that optometrists would regularly tell me “no.” As in, “can I get wire frames?” No, I needed thicker frames to support those lenses.[4] Later would come the question of whether I could get contacts. “No, they don’t make them in your prescription.”[5] Heavy, thick lenses came with all sorts of problems.

My glasses were always either sliding or being knocked off my face. Grabbing my glasses because their weight was pulling them off a sweaty boy’s face was bad enough, but it seemed that anything that happened to me would result in my glasses going projectile, once into a campfire. The lenses were spared, but the frames were trashed. I had to go some days without my glasses. My father had been given tickets to a Red Sox game, and I went even though I couldn’t see more than about a foot beyond my face.[6]

Contacts, how wonderful!

The friend who bumped into me, sending my glasses flying, at least meant no harm. Thick glasses on which I was utterly dependent also made me a target. From third grade on[7] it seemed there were always bullies who would snatch my glasses from my face and hold them out of my reach.[8] Glasses weren’t only expensive, they were difficult to replace. If anything happened to them, I’d be lost for days. If I remember, replacement glasses took two weeks. Plus I couldn’t see. Taking my glasses away was a great way of making me panic.

When I mentioned this to my optometrist, she said, “children can be so cruel.”

“It wasn’t always children. Friends snatching my glasses from me persisted into my early twenties.”

“You needed better friends.” That was good diagnosis.

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1. Do I get a prize for that? Maybe new eyes, 20/20 without correction, also the ability to focus on close without reading glasses. You know, like normal 25-year-old eyes. I’ll settle for 30, I’m not fussy.
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2. This has grown into a series of visits, as now I see an ophthalmologist before I go to see the optometrist. I have old, very nearsighted eyes.
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3. Not that I don’t wear glasses now. I spend most of my waking hours with contacts, but I have glasses and wear them.
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4. Eventually with changes in lens materials, I was able to get wire frames. My current glasses are frameless, an impossibility for me in the 70s or 80s.
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5. I asked annually nevertheless. My gas-permeable lenses taught me I needed to wait for soft contacts. At one point, a friend asked if I had considered Lasix. It was, of course, not available in my prescription. When I was 40 an optometrist suggested it, although there was no guarantee of 20/20 vision and I would still have to wear reading glasses. Thinner glasses didn’t make it worth it.
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6. Baseball happens more than a foot away.
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7. Just do the math.
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8. Just to be clear, I wasn’t just the kid with thick glasses, I was the short kid with thick glasses. The short, chubby kid. The short, chubby, non-athletic, nerdy kid with thick glasses. My shirts might have all been concentric red and white circles. Yeah, I was bullied. (Note to my former bullies: fuck you.)
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