Looking Good

Yesterday as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, I was caught in a conundrum: Before I go to the dentist, I always floss, brush and rinse my mouth so that when the hygienist or the DDS gets his hands in there, it they will be working with a clean slate. The problem was, I wasn't going to the tooth doctor. I was going to the eye doctor. How should I properly prepare for this exam?
I blinked and then probed for any excess sleep in my eyes. I appeared rested and relaxed, with a nice pair of optics for presentation. Then it occurred to me that I might spend some time cleaning my glasses, since that chore had evaded me for the past couple of days. I am much more conscientious about it than I used to be. The story goes that once, at a very early stage of my glasses-wearing, I was at the circus with my family. I complained to my mother about not being able to see, at which point she offered to wipe my lenses clean for me. The trouble was, I had already been hard at work at just that, by licking them clean. After finishing a mound of cotton candy. The sugar had crystallized and I was now looking through a confectionery kaleidoscope. Bonus points for my mother who eventually returned a pair of usable, mostly clean glasses to the face of her young son.
In the intervening forty years, I have learned not to clean my glasses with my tongue. I have also made a point of using a soft cloth other than my shirt tail to get those spectacles at optimum clarity. Most of the time. Then I started thinking about my friends who insist that I am cheating myself on those trips to the dentist. Why bother making your mouth a sterile field before you go in for a cleaning? That's what you're paying them for, after all. I held my glasses up the light. There were a few smudges, but nothing that resembled crystallized sugar, and so I decided to throw caution to the wind and glasses on my face.
As I sat in the chair, I felt the usual tension about what that line on the bottom of the chart read, and whether one was better than two, or two was better than one. When it was all over, I got a pat on the back for "doing such good work" with my lazy eye over the past year. Then, since the doctor's ten-thirty was running a little late, he asked how my glasses were holding up. I told him they were fine, but I noticed that I had been shoving them back up my nose a little more than usual lately. He offered to tighten them up a touch, and when he handed them back to me, he apologized for any fingerprints he might have left on them.
"Here, let me get that for you," he said, reaching for my glasses one more time. He went to the back room and came back with his special cloth, explaining that he used just a mild hand soap to get rid of any smudges or stains. When I put them back on, it was like a new day. Everything had a sharp edge, and my eyes didn't wander around any of the drops or smears. The lights were on and I was home.
Walking back to my house, I enjoyed the sights of the neighborhood, and felt a twinge of remorse as I realized that I it would be another year before my glasses would be that clean again.