For medical school, we were told to buy a microscope. With my thrifty father, raised in eastern Montana during the Great Depression, I headed downtown to a store specializing in lab equipment. He steers me to the “Used” section, where I find a monocular scope for one-third the price of new. Planning to become a psychiatrist, I suspect I will have little interest in spending time staring at slides of organ slices stained purple.
Once I get to school I discover that most of my classmates have brought with them shiny new binocular scopes, which to me are four times as hard to adjust as my single lens scope. Not only do I have to dial the lens up and down, but also move the two eyepieces the correct distance from each other, as well as separately adjust the focal length of each, while fiddling once again with the depth of field. I learn that my two eyes are sufficiently disparate in their acuity that I am unable to get all the adjustments to line up sufficient to eliminate a persistence sense of two, not one images. And wearing my glasses makes it even worse. (I have the same problem with binoculars.)
But I do discover during these frustrating forays into the world of illuminating tiny, unseen vistas that, without my glasses, my vision is keenest closest to my eyes. Anything between three and seven inches becomes enlarged, sharply focused. Removing tiny screws from watch back, excavating splinters no one else can see, and reading the finest print, illegible to most – these are my superpowers. As the years go by, and presbyopia worsen for us all, I have not lost this skill.
I am fearful that one day, I’ll visit the optometrist, and she’ll tell me I need cataract surgery, that my worn and cloudy lenses must be replaced. If that happens I will lose the one bright spot in my struggles with severe myopia.
The struggles include managing the multiple devices I accumulate to help me see. A partial inventory starts with the three pairs of glasses which now contain increasingly outdated corrections, and which I should throw away. But I spent labored too long over finding just the right frame, to say nothing of the money spent procuring them, to simply toss them in the garbage. So now they sit, dust-covered and stained from sweat, in the bottom bathroom drawer.
Then there is the multitude of “sunglasses” which I am continually discovering and sometimes throwing away. The problem started when I returned to cycling, and need protection from the wind as well as sunlight. Bike commuting through the city, I needed to be aware of cars behind as well as all around me. So I purchased tiny mirrors to place on the left lens, which required discovering shades with the correct curvature to allow me to spy on whomever might be sneaking up behind me. They also came in handy in triathlon races, in which referees roam the course on silent motorcycles looking for races who are riding too close the athlete in front (drafting is not allowed.)
Living in the not-always-sunny Pacific Northwest, I needed various shades of lenses to better see when biking in fog, rain, clouds, deep forest, or at night: clear, yellow, brown, reflective. Then there is the problem of riding in a hunched-over “aero” position (“time-trial) when racing triathlon. Normal frames block the view forward, so glasses without an upper element to the frame are mandatory. This problem was “solved” a few years back when snap on visors were introduced to aero helmets.
I grew tired of changing lenses each time I went outside, so I invested in “transition” sunglasses, which start out clear and darken when exposed to the sun’s radiation. I have two with a lower bifocal section (these I use for cycling and running outside), and two without (these for driving when I wear contacts with one near vision lens), all the same brand and style. I have one pair of non-transition dark lenses with a bifocal section.
And skiing – visibility is even more critical (despite my earlier protestations to the contrary) than when biking. So ski goggles must come with at least three interchangeable lenses: yellow, and rose for differing low-light conditions, and several shades of dark for the intense or angled sun on clear days in the spring or dead of winter.
By now, I’ve lost count of the various “glasses” I have just for the sports I do. The rest of the time, I rely on (sigh) four more types of glasses. I own the two classic pairs of, one with transition lenses (darken in the sun), and one without. There are contact lenses, both for near vision (a different one for each eye, one “near”, one “far”), and a set for seeing well beyond five feet, but not close up. In the latter case, I have three additional types of reading glasses. One which is oddly shaded, supposedly to reduce computer screen glare. Another standard set, correction +2.75. And the third, my favorite, are readers with progressive bifocal correction – the lower I look through them, the closer I can see.
So adding them all up: four pair transition sunglasses; one bifocal sun; five standard sun; two helmet visors; two ski goggles; four swim goggles; three different sets of contacts; two standard glasses; three readers. Twenty four different ways to look at the world, and those are just the ones I routinely use. Every time I open a drawer, there’s a chance I might find a buried set of something from another epoch of my life.