Here's Looking At You

For years, I have talked and written about the way I see the world: Through a lens. I started wearing glasses when I was five, so I don't have a lot of memories that don't have a filter of some sort, specifically the prescription through which I have viewed the unfolding events in my life. For most of my life, the second or third thing I do once I rise from my bed is to put glasses on my face. The rest of the day takes place with my safety goggles placed securely on the bridge of my nose. When I get tired, my left eye drifts in, and my corrected vision starts to blur. That's when I know it's time to pack it in, put my glasses on the dresser and call it a day.
Until it's time to do it all over again.
I get a little bunged up when I am asked to go more than a few minutes without my spectacles. Trips to the beach require a place to put my glasses. Sure, I'll take them off when I go swimming, but once I pop out of the pool or the waves, I want to know how I'm going to find my way home.
I wonder sometimes if I could. Find my way home, that is. The idea that everything around me becomes a blurry mass without my glasses is one I have never fully experienced, but certainly have been programmed to believe. It says right there on my driver's license: corrective lenses. I have wondered, more in my youth than now, if I were to be pulled over and not be found DW4E (driving while four-eyed), would I be immediately carted off to jail for scoffing so hard in the face of the law. I mean, there I am, operating a motor vehicle without vision enhancers. Poor vision and poor judgement is no way to go through life, son.
So each day goes by like my own private moving picture show, with my auto-focus on and now with the partition to make those little words on the page more meaningful. When I got my new glasses this week, I was amazed, as I always am, at how clean they make those things before I get my grubby hands on them. Pretty soon they are just another fixture and the nice folded cleaning cloth that came in my new case is abandoned for the utility of my shirt tail. This is the long haul, after all and I expect to be wearing these for at least the foreseeable future, which it turns out is also the advantage of wearing glasses for all these years: I can see the future. It's a big blurry mass, but I can see it.