My paternal grandfather, Al, died when I was in the third grade. Born and raised in Miles City, Montana, he’d been through many incarnations in his 76 years. Deputy Sheriff in Custer County, banker in Omaha, steel worker in Seattle, retired in Hayward, California. I remember him as a gruff, barrel-chested man who helped my father remodel our dank, concrete floored basement.
Together, they laid vinyl tile over the floor, making the design of a checkerboard and a shuffleboard court for indoor gaming. A stone fireplace filled half of one wall, just below ground-level windows. On either side of the masonry, my father placed a framework of two-by-fours, over which he nailed knotty pine planks. Grandpa Al’s job was to stuff fiberglass insulation into the cavities behind the siding and between the studs.
He wheezed a lot while he was doing this. A smoker all his life, my dad said Grandpa had emphysema, which slowed him down a bit. Slow enough that, a few months later, my father flew out to the Bay area to visit him in the hospital. Two weeks after that, he made a return trip for the funeral, bringing back several mementos for my sister and I. Mine was Grandpa Al’s Hamilton watch, gold-plated, with a rectangular face and Roman numerals. I proudly slipped the metal stretch band around my wrist and wore it to school, now independent of the wall clocks.
Soon after, bored in class while the teacher wrote sentences to copy on the blackboard, I pulled the Hamilton off, and began to fiddle with it. After winding the stem to keep it active, I pulled the case back over my hand, and discovered the cover was loose. Giving the edges a couple of mild tugs, I popped out the crystal. The glistening reflections coming off the concave inner surface intrigued me. I held it up to my eye, and looked through it at the words she’d written.
I could actually see them! Up to now, I had been listening to her as she read them out for us, memorizing them so I could reproduce them in my cramped, sloppy handwriting on the lined exercise sheet. Being able to see the sentences saved time and I finished way before my classmates, owing to my lack of care in trying to write neatly. While the rest of the class struggled with their long-hand, I continued looking through the small glass cover at objects around the room. A globe came into sharp relief; the alphabet, in capital and small black blocks above the blackboard, were now dark and clear, not fuzzy suggestions of letters.
“Albert, what are you doing!” I looked up to find the teacher hovering at my desk. “Let me see that. What is it?”
I tried to explain about my grandfather, his watch, the loose crystal, and the sudden clarity of my vision..
“Give it to me. You can pick it up after class.”
The year before, I had not missed one day of school. A model student, I rarely had disciplinary encounters with the dreaded Assistant Principal, who was reputed to have drilled holes in his paddling board for greater impact. When I went up to retrieve the magic Hamilton, the teacher told me, “I’m going to have to report this to the Principal’s office, Albert.”
But no visit ensued. Several days later, my mother announced I was not going in that day. Instead, we went downtown, to the Carew Tower, where a white-coated man with thinning grey hair combed over his shining scalp smiled as he reached out to shake my hand. “Can you show me that watch crystal, son?” he asked.
I excavated it from the case, and handed it over.
Lifting his wire-rim glasses to his forehead, he turned it over between his thumb and foreinger, humming a bit while he investigated its mysteries. “So, this helps you see writing on the blackboard?”
I nodded, still unsure whether this was some fearful extension of the Principal’s office. Frightening objects popped into view: a black leather chair facing a heavy set of metallic circles suspended from the ceiling, jars filled with clear liquid holding little wands with round lenses on the end. I couldn’t imagine what torture they might have in mind for me.
“Can you sit up there for me?” I climbed onto the squeaky leather seat and raised my hands up to the arm rests.
“What’s the first letter you can read on that chart?” he said, pointing vaguely at the wall.
“What chart?” I said.
The man sighed, and swung the metallic circles over my face. “Look through those holes there, please.” He clicked several levers, and pieces of glass fell into each hole, in front of my eyes.
“Now?” he asked.
“Wow!” I said. That’s an ‘E’!”
********
After that, another dimension opened for me in school. Sporting a pair of glasses in a blue translucent frame, I found the tasks much easier to accomplish. So easy that I got bored, and my grades plummeted. A “D” in handwriting – why bother trying to make it neat anymore, I can see what I wrote just fine now! A “C” in Social Studies, another in Art. Several months later, while I was home “sick”, my parents announced, “When you go back next week, you’ll be in the 4th grade.” I think third grade was tired of me.
And that spring, returning to the “Knothole League”, I found that getting a hit was more than (literal) blind luck. Before, my wild swings at the blurry baseball rarely succeeded. Now, I had a fighting chance. As long as I my glasses didn’t break.
My eyes kept deteriorating, so every year I needed another exam, and another trip to the Wenstrup Brothers optical shop for new lenses, sometimes even frames. By the ninth grade, I discovered wonderful games I could play by taking off my glasses. Driving at night, oncoming headlights became, not bright flares, but stellate discs, multiple bright spikes radiating from a central core. At a distance, one spike, much longer than the rest, would start out pointing east. As a car came closer, the line would rotate, picking up speed until it pointed due north as the car passed by. Cool!
At the annual Christmas pageant, while everyone else listened to the choir warbling through carols, I would take off my glasses and contemplate the tree on stage. What had been many flickering pinpoint dots of light wrapped around the fir branches, now became a phantasmagoric scene of overlapping blurs, red, green, white, and blue. Blinking my eyes, they’d starts to dance and smear into one another. Very cool!
In 1960, I joined a summer swim team, at age 11. We practiced Monday through Friday, June through August. Swimming laps for over an hour in chlorinated water left our eyes blood shot and blurry. In addition, I could see no better underwater than above, so I risked banging into the wall. I began to count my strokes so I would know when it was coming up.
I was never a good swimmer; I collected a shoebox full of red (2nd place) and white (3rd) ribbons from dual meets which featured four to six competitors in each event. Larger events, the end-of-the-season championships, left me watching the finals from the stands.
But I was surrounded by outstanding swimmers. I swam with collegiate champions, NCAA winners, and Olympic gold medalists. Through them, I lived vicariously, as they suffered through year-round two-a-days, miles and miles each week which turned their hair bleached green, their eyes a web of tiny veins from constant chlorine irritation.
In 1969, those who had qualified for the USA national championships in Louisville returned with not only the usual swag of tee-shirts and caps, but strange, dangly objects like translucent versions of the eggs Silly-Putty came in, cut apart with the two halves held together by rubber straps. The first swim goggles, ubiquitous today.
The elite swimmers could now practice even more without the eye irritation which had plagued them. And goggles gave me a new world under water. For those of us with severe myopia, some prismatic combination of the refractive properties of plastic and H20 produces a miraculous correction. Everything becomes visible, at distances of 50 meters or more. I could finally see where I was going when I swam!
The habit of counting strokes had become ingrained, second nature by that point. To this day, I count each and every arm entry. I know how many it takes to go 25 yards, 25 meters, 50 meters, all the way up to (wait for it) 2000 meters. It happens automatically in the background of my consciousness. I can sing songs, plan trips, even do arithmetic while swimming, and not lose count. One of my many useless skills of which I am quite proud.
The same time swim goggles appeared, I fell in love with skiing. My sister had waitressed in Sun Valley over Christmas break, and the next year, my father, an inveterate sportsman, dragged the whole family out to visit her and learn how to ski. He got hooked, and six months later, purchased acreage in the new resort of Snowmass-at-Aspen. I’ve spent the last 54 winters there, learning where each tree, gully and drop-off lurk.
Our first winter skiing at Snowmass, I learned how falling snow could cloud our vision while schussing down hill. Ski goggles existed, and worked well to keep wind from making eyes tear up and the sun from blinding them. But their single pane construction and lack of ventilation meant internal fogging during a snow storm. Not only did they fog up, but the cramped space behind the goggle lens crimped my glasses, to the point I was better off skiing with nothing at all.
About the same time as Speedo developed modern swim goggles, Bob Smith, a Sun Valley orthodontist, revolutionized ski eyewear. First, he made the goggles bigger, to accommodate glasses. Second, he used foam across the top, letting air flow in while keeping snowflakes out. Third, he added a second lens. Double pane construction altered the temperature differential between the outside and inside, reducing the chance of fog. This was a miracle. I now could see as well during a snowstorm as on a bright sunny day.
Hooked on powder skiing, I spent the winter after my medical residency skiing every day in America’s Mecca for deep snow, the Champagne Powder of Utah’s Little Cottonwood canyon. By that time, some goggles had internal fans, even better at clearing out moisture.
Smith couldn’t eliminate all disruptions to visibility. Powder flying back at me – “face shots” – became an occupational hazard that winter. I learned that, just like swimming, perfect vision is not mandatory for an accomplished skier. On a slope where I know every turn, when the snow covers all obstacles, and is so deep I reach a terminal speed, it is possible to let my legs do the driving.
********
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 steered me to the “Used” section, where I found a monocular scope, two-thirds off. Planning to become a psychiatrist, I suspected I would have little interest in spending time staring at slides of organ slices stained purple.
Arriving on campus, most of my classmates brought with them shiny new binocular scopes, which to me are four times as hard to see through as my single lens scope. Not only do I have to dial the scope up and down, but also move the two eyepieces the correct distance apart, as well as 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 persistent sense of double exposure. And wearing glasses makes it even worse. (I have the same problem with binoculars.)
But I discover during these frustrating forays into the world of illuminating tiny, unseen vistas that, with my naked eye, I see best close-up. Anything between three and seven inches becomes enlarged, sharply focused. Removing tiny screws from a 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 worsens 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 the one advantage I gain with severe myopia.
********
My struggles with vision include managing the multiple devices I accumulate to help me see. A partial inventory starts with three pairs of glasses which now contain outdated corrections, and which I should throw away. But I labored too long finding just the right frame, to say nothing of the money spent procuring them, to 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 buying and sometimes throwing away. The problem started when I returned to cycling, and needed protection from the wind as well as sunlight. Bike commuting through the city, danger might come from the rear, from cars behind as well as all around me. So I purchased tiny mirrors to place on the left lens, which required shades with the correct curvature to allow me to spy on whomever might be sneaking up behind me. They also came in handy in triathlons, in which referees roam the course on silent motorcycles looking for racers who are too close the athlete in front (drafting is not allowed.)
Living in the not-always-sunny Pacific Northwest, I need lenses to better see when biking in fog, rain, clouds, deep forest, or at night: clear, yellow, brown, reflective. Then there is the dilemma when hunched-over in the “aero” position (“time-trial”). 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), and two without (for driving when I wear contacts with one near vision lens), all the same brand and style. I have one pair of standard 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. I own two classic pairs, one with transition lenses, and one without. There are contacts, a different one for each eye, one “near”, one “far”, and another set for seeing well beyond five feet (but not close up). In the latter case, I have three reading glasses. One is shaded blue-grey, to reduce computer screen glare. Another regular pair, +2.75. And the third, my favorite, has a progressive bifocal correction – the lower down I look, 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 view 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.
********
Even with two dozen or so aids for my eyes, I still have little confidence that I can recognize and discern what I’m looking at (except for those three to seven inches right in front of me.) I often joke, “Vision is highly over-rated.” If it were all that important, why do we have eyelids? Any time we want, we can shut out the light of the world, return to our thoughts and other senses.
Take hearing, for example. We don’t have shutters for our ears; we are continually bombarded with oscillating air pressure, converted to physical vibrations of ear drum and three little bones, then to nerve impulses and finally, interpreted by our brain as “sound”. Unlike sight, it’s always there, ready to intrude.
In addition to my close-up vision super power, my hearing is also quite acute. I’m always having to tell other people what was said, on TV or in real life. It’s as if, in those years before my vision was corrected, the visual cortex in my brain gave part of its space to auditory reception and interpretation. While not as potent as a blind person’s hearing, I do find myself relying on my ears as much as my eyes.
When cycling in a group, I get a little irritated when someone behind calls out, “Car back!” Yeah, I know, I think. Been hearing that for 20 seconds now.
I often wonder what my life would have been like, had I lived 200 centuries ago. Would I have been picked off early by a pack of wolves I never saw, or would I have saved my clan, hearing them sneaking up on our camp before anyone else?
I close my eyes, and see myself sitting by a fire as the sun sets behind the bushes, wrapped in a musty wolf skin. I tilt my head back, eyes closed, and shake the thinning grey hair off my ears. Children and grandchildren surround me, waiting for the word.
“It’s quiet tonight. Go sleep in peace, I’ll keep my ears open for you.”