The year before, I had not missed one day of school. A model student, I rarely had disciplinary encounter with the dreaded Assistant Principal, who was reputed to have drilled holes in his paddling board. When I went up to retrieve my crystal after class, 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 to school 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, Albert?” he asked.
I quickly excavated it from the case, and handed it over.
Lifting his wire-rim glasses to his forehead, he turned it over several times, humming a bit while he investigated it’s 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. The room was filled with frightening objects: 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 in that chair for me?” I dutifully climbed up and raised my hands up to the arm rests.
“What’s the first letter you can read on that chart?” he said, pointing vaguely in front of me.
“What chart?” I said.
The man sighed, and swung the metallic circles in front of my face. “Look through those holes there, please.” He clicked several levers, and pieces of glass fell into each hole, right 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 each day 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 to school next week, you’ll be in the 4th grade.”
And that spring, returning to the “Knothole League” baseball games, 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 kept my glasses from breaking.
My eyes kept deteriorating, and every year, I needed another exam, and another trip to the Wenstrup Brothers optical shop for a new set of lenses. Sometimes, even a new set of frames, as my face grew with the rest of me. By the time I got in the ninth grade, I discovered the wonderful games I could play simply by taking off my glasses. In the car at night, oncoming headlights became, not blurs, by stellate discs, multiple bright spikes radiating from a central core. At a distance, one bright spike, much longer than the rest would start out pointing east. As a car came closer, the bright line would slowly rotate 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 green 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!