Bits And Pieces

Bifocal Blues

     It all started with the emptying of an innocent woven wastepaper basket.

     A fairly snug trash container, it is made of straw with nasty little ends that have protruded from time to time into my hands.

     This time a splinter, infinitesimal in size stuck into the fat and generous part of my thumb.  Just a tiny piece, mind you--and here lies the trouble--if it had been a foot long and a yard wide I could have located it and bravely tweezed it out.

     "I think I've a splinter in my thumb," I announced casually to Pop that night.  "I can't see anything but I sure can feel it."

     Now over the last few years I've been breaking in a pair of bifocals and have managed by a certain elderly tip of my head to read the price tags on the racks of dresses in the stores where we gals go shopping.

     "Is that twenty-nine ninety -five, or thirty-nine ninety-five," my friends who wear their glasses in their purses will inquire--and I manage my sighting squarely down each side of my nose and rearing my head back to read the numbers on the tag.

     But the splinter I couldn't see.  Pop, whose 20-20 vision has slipped a bit since his arms have shortened up (so he says) couldn't see a thing at first glance either.

     I was busy bathing my splinter in dishwater when he returned with a needle, alcohol, tweezers and a magnifying glass son no. 1 uses for his stamp collection.

     He peered and he probed with his glasses off and on.  With the magnifying glass and without.  We found the bit of wood finally.  Well, son no. 2 found it actually, but then he only needs glasses for distance.

     Isn't it heck to get old?  Shucks, mentally you may feel as quick and alert as a 20-year-old, but it is the body machinery that slips a cog or starts making itself felt after 40 that is so frustrating.  Just to mention that you wear bifocals ages your mental outlook about 10 years, especially if the effort to see through them has you stepping around a little line constantly.

     Take the basement steps which I whizzed up and down, washbasket piled high with clothes and newspapers depending upon which way I was heading, I take them at a more cautious rate now due to two reasons: one is bifocals and the other is the dog.

     Sheba likes the steps and spreads her ungainly Bassett length along one, usually the fourth from the top so a foot placed in the wrong spot and whoops! I don't know where I'd be but I'm certain Sheba would be among the missing.

     So I make sure the dog is not descending, ascending or reclining when I trod the steps' treacherous length.

     There are no bifocals made which will let the wearer float gracefully down a staircase.  Give me more than two steps in the direction of China and I descend with chin resting on chest, my neck vertebra thusly being pushed out of place.  Now I hold a handrail for support, not just touch it fleetingly with fingertips--I really hang on because steps have this habit of fluctuating a bit, a disturbing movement either slightly up or down depending on how the glasses move.

     Moving stairways are not much better except once on and anchored to the hand rail you're bound to get there and be nudged, none to gently, off at the bottom or top.

     Glasses are attractive these days, frame-wise that is.  What with the Harlequin look exaggerated slants and tilts, bejeweled and tinted metal and plastic, frames can actually add to a gal's charm.  I'm just speaking about the sneaky glass they slip into those bewitching eye framers.

     "The telephone book is the biggest help to my business," our eye doctor said as he adjusted with a series of clicks and snaps a gadget for testing eyes to my nose.

     "After people call the wrong number a few times, mistaking the three for an eight they come in.  Seems we get a lot of extra appointments right after the new phone book is released every year."

     Actually I wouldn't be without them.  Glasses I mean.  Well in the first place I couldn't recognize my best friend at six paces without them.  Anyway they do wonders in hiding circles or should I say, bags under the eyes and give you that wide awake alert look even if you do sorta doze behind their protection.

     Bifocals, trifocals, all artificial aids to bolster the sagging eyesight of middle age.  But I've an idea the phone companies are cooperating with the eye doctors since we've all been switched to digit dialing we don't have a chance.  No letters now, the whole thing is numbers.

     It isn't just numbers that bother me though.  Pop can see things clear as crystal at a distance.  Things like the "antique" sign over a new shop so that he can increase the car speed so my nearsightedness can't see the possibilities of stopping until too late.

     All works out though, I can read the fine print, so I can whisk a purchase out from under his nose before he can spot the price on the tag. 

Written March 28, 1963