Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Checking In With Grandma


I picked up some spectacles the other day. Kaiser mentioned I had $150 credit towards a new pair of glasses, so I thought I'd get some, and maybe have enough cash left over to get me some sort of random Procedure. I haven't bought glasses for a while. $150 doesn't even get halfway around your face.

I've worn contact lenses since I was a teenager. In the sixties, getting used to contacts was an ordeal of the first order. They were thick and rigid and putting them in was like dipping little hubcaps in hot sauce and stabbing them onto your eyeballs. An hour is about all you could stand of that, and you were expected to bump that up by fifteen-minute increments every day until you either went blind or nuts or got used to them. It was painful, but pain was no match for teenage vanity. The first time one of the hubcaps slid off my cornea and began to travel across my eye, I flew into a panic. Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in? Ultimately, I got used to them, although if an eyelash wedged in underneath it could cause me to fall off the sidewalk, weeping.

Over the years the product became lighter and thinner and gas-permeable and altogether more bearable. I never went over to the soft variety. One day at a softball game, a towering fly came to me in right field. I yelled "I got it I got it I got it" and deftly snagged the ball with my eye socket. That got the runner to third and me to the emergency room, where the immediate task was retrieving my contact lens before my eye swelled shut so tight they'd have to send in a team of spelunkers. Do you know that the average emergency medical cabinet contains tiny little toilet plungers for just that purpose? The doctor pries your lids open and takes the little plunger and goes doink and there's your lens.

So there have always been difficulties with the contacts, but it's a pretty good system overall. After you turn forty, something needs to be done about the close-in vision, so instead of bifocals, they give you one lens for distance vision and one for reading. Your eyes and brain duke it out and finally work something out amongst themselves. But then after another fifteen years or so, you discover you're kind of an old lady and things dry up, including your eyeballs. Now the contacts are starting to get a little cranky. It's nothing like the hubcap debacle, but towards the end of the day they begin to feel a little like Ritz Bits, salty side down. This is when I decided it might be prudent to get a spare set of $150 glasses, maybe just for the evenings, and three hundred additional bucks later, I have some. They're tiny and light, with progressive trifocals, and they work amazingly well. I can see everything very clearly as long as I'm peering out of the correct part of the glasses, and soon I hope to have mapped out which parts work where. I haven't put my contacts back in, to my surprise, and may have just become a four-eyes again, after forty years.

It's not that I don't think I look dorky, but maybe I just don't care as much. I did take a quick glance in the mirror. That's where Grandma lives. I don't check in with her often, but maybe I'll start. She was a sweet-faced old lady.

17 comments:

  1. My god... Gas permeable were an IMPROVEMENT? That's exactly what my eye condition requires and getting used to those was pretty darn uncomfortable. My heart goes out to you.

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  2. Aww. I love your photo - yo are even looking off where your grandma's sweet face is.

    I knew I was in for some fun with:
    "$150 doesn't even get halfway around your face"
    "Hub caps in salsa!" HA!
    Very funny AND sweet!! Love where Grandma lives.

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  3. A bit off-topic, darlin', but don't have your email address handy. I'm seeing a woman interviewed on local news who wrote a book about being the first female mail carrier; it's called POSTAL BLUE IMAGE by one Miss LaDuke, think her first name might've been Edie.
    Hugs,
    Jimmy

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  4. I remember when you used to gross Michael and me out when we were little by touching your eyeball! I did the same thing by taking out my contact in front of some friends from the village in Tanzania - they were so astonished!

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  5. That's not gross! I'll bet you're remembering when I touched something else.

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  6. If that's the grandma face you're heading towards you got nothing to worry about. My grandfathers both looked like major wrinkled grumps which is why I strive to smile as much as possible while I'm still "young".

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  7. We must be "of an age", as when I was 16 I wanted hard plastic discs in my eyes so badly that I put my girlfriend's, then told my Dad what I'd done...got new lenses the very next day! Used to store them in my pockets, left in the left, right in the right (pretty clever here!) whenever I found them bugging me too much. Absolutely to my optician's and my amazement, no damage done...maybe had to do with having no brains then either!No sense, no feeling!

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  8. What a sweet face... both of them!

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  9. Susan: holy cow. Pockets? I had to work for my contacts; my mom sensed an opportunity and began assigning chores at 75 cents an hour until I had the money to buy the lenses. That was a better rate than babysitting, of course, and she relented when I got halfway and paid for the other half herself. In a way, I won. I did a crappy job on the chores.

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  10. Mind you I haven't had my coffee yet, but after I read the blog, with tears of laughter in my eyes, I had to scroll back to the first picture because I totally missed that it wasn't your grandmother !

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  11. Now, you see, THAT'S what I'm talking about.

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  12. I decided I had to get hard contacts in 1976, when nothing else was available. When the optician put the first one in my eye, I passed out and was unconscious for a few minutes in the chair. Somehow I woke up and let him put the second one in, because I thought it was the only way I could ever look acceptable.
    One day I walked into Elsie's, a sandwich shop in Harvard Square, wearing my salsa-dipped hubcaps, and they were sweeping the floor with this green sawdust and I dropped to my knees, clawing at my eyes and wailing.
    They gave me what passed for "soft" contacts then, which worked better than the little discs of flint I failed to tolerate.
    Everything was fine until I hit 42, and then I couldn't see jack out of them. Yeah, that'll work, having one eye focus near and the other far...does that work for anybody??

    So now I delight in getting ever more hip and severe glasses frames. My new ones are lizard green with scales. True. They debut in August, when my insurance plan reboots.

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  13. Oh, Murr I laughed until I cried this time. Those darn contacts - I didn't experience the hard ones:

    "Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in?"

    LOL!!!!!

    I gave up the contacts after about 20 years of a good relationship with them. When I needed bifocals, I gave up the fight and bought decent eyeglasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses. I like it better than those late-night Ritz-Bits annoying the heck out of me and my eyes.

    Funny!

    You look great!

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  14. Oh, Murr I laughed until I cried this time. Those darn contacts - I didn't experience the hard ones:

    "Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in?"

    LOL!!!!!

    I gave up the contacts after about 20 years of a good relationship with them. When I needed bifocals, I gave up the fight and bought decent eyeglasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses. I like it better than those late-night Ritz-Bits annoying the heck out of me and my eyes.

    Funny!

    You look great!

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  15. Mind you I haven't had my coffee yet, but after I read the blog, with tears of laughter in my eyes, I had to scroll back to the first picture because I totally missed that it wasn't your grandmother !

    ReplyDelete
  16. We must be "of an age", as when I was 16 I wanted hard plastic discs in my eyes so badly that I put my girlfriend's, then told my Dad what I'd done...got new lenses the very next day! Used to store them in my pockets, left in the left, right in the right (pretty clever here!) whenever I found them bugging me too much. Absolutely to my optician's and my amazement, no damage done...maybe had to do with having no brains then either!No sense, no feeling!

    ReplyDelete
  17. My god... Gas permeable were an IMPROVEMENT? That's exactly what my eye condition requires and getting used to those was pretty darn uncomfortable. My heart goes out to you.

    ReplyDelete