Foresight

Last night I was squinting from my bed at the TV. I had to ask my wife, who still had her glasses on, to tell me the score of the baseball game. "Three to six," she replied with the confidence of someone with assisted vision. This is a group of people that includes my immediate family. Wife and son both wear glasses. My brothers have both become optically enhanced over the past year or so. My niece wears her glasses when she has to. Ironically, my mother recently had a magic procedure preformed on her eyes to alleviate the need for spectacles, aside from the occasional up close and in tight reading experience.
It's nice to have the company, frankly. I can remember when I was barely old enough to start school and I was diagnosed with a "lazy eye." Part of this discovery came simply enough from the way I watched television from a foot away. I can remember being held down across the kitchen chairs to get the eye drops in that were supposed to help get my eyes to work together. My older brother and his friends were happy to have me bring home eye patches so they could play pirates. As a result of the popularity of the black patch with elastic, there was a switch to the flesh-colored adhesive type. This had the dual effect of cutting down on the number of pirates at our house and giving me the appearance, from a distance, of being a cyclops.
The patches and eye drops didn't cure me, and I was fitted for my first pair of glasses when I was five. I have been putting glasses on my face as part of my morning ritual for so long that I cannot imagine how to proceed without them. Unlike a lot of people I know, I don't ever lose my glasses. I know right where they are. If I'm awake, they're on my face. When I'm asleep, or swimming, I know right where they are.
And now my brothers' eyes are catching up to mine. Maybe someday there will be a surgical option that will get these glasses off my face once and for all, but I don't know how I could let that happen. I have looked at the world through four eyes for about as long as I can remember. I'm not sure if I'm ready to cut that in half.