Better Or Worse

 Recently, over dinner, I confessed to my wife my longstanding fear of getting my eye test wrong. Not the letters themselves. I try my very best. It's those moments when the doctor is making all those adjustments to the phoropter, asking those all important questions: Better? Worse? Number one? Number two? It is during this interrogation that I feel my heart begin to beat faster as I try to make all the correct discernments regarding the lenses being flipped into and out of my line of vision. I understand that the doctor is trying to find just the right set of optics for my tired old eyes. But this is for my prescription. It will go down on my permanent record. I don't want to be stuck with the wrong glasses until I make it back to that chair once again.

You might think that someone who has been wearing corrective lenses since he was five years old that this experience would become more or less a formality. Starting way back in Kindergarten, when I was first diagnosed with a "lazy eye," the care and feeding of my sight-bulbs has been a source of mild trauma for me. This began with the patching of my good eye, and the use of drops to try and get that weak one to live up to its stronger neighbor on the other side of my head. That never happened, and so I became the bespectacled one of three sons. As a child who often found things with his enormous head, there were many trips to the optometrist to get my mangled glasses bent back into usable shape, and my frame style remained essentially unchanged for all those years because we had a volume discount on left and right temples that seemed to snap off every few weeks. 

And all this time, I have never imagined that through some combination of exercise and patience that I might someday reclaim all the sight that I could have without any correction. Surely all the times someone has snatched the glasses off my face and asked if I could see them, I have been able to answer truthfully, "Yes." It is not as if all the light in the world winks out the moment that my face is free of sight assistance. Nor does the world swim into an indistinct blur. It is as if the eye doctor has just twisted the nob to a not quite so good combination of lenses. I have, on a few very rare occasions gone for more than a day without glasses. I do not ever, as my wife does on a relatively frequent basis, lose my glasses. I have misplaced them now and again, experiencing that zen disruption of needing my glasses to find my glasses, but knowing it's really still a memory issue, not one of sight. Which is better, I think. Not worse. 

After all these years, there are still lingering questions tossed my way about getting contact lenses, or having lasers shot into my skull to repair the wrongs that nature played on my vision so long ago. But I don't pay them any mind. I wear glasses. It's part of who I am. For better or worse.