Glasses

This past weekend, as many of you know, Laura and I had our wedding. This isn't to be confused with our getting married, which happened nearly two months before at a local courthouse. I'm not going to write today about the wedding or getting married; instead I'm going to write about another recent life change that some of you noticed this past weekend: me wearing glasses.

Growing up I was the ocular oddball in my family. Both of my parents wore glasses, with my dad being nearsighted and my mom being farsighted and having an astigmatism. Those opposing traits didn't cancel out for my sister, who ended up nearsighted with an astigmatism. Perhaps Rachel could clarify in the comments below, if she wishes, but I'm pretty sure she became at an early age one of those people who struggles to read the big E on the eye chart without correction.

Meanwhile, I went through my teenage years with 20/20 vision, like a positive genetic atavism. I also went through my twenties without wearing glasses or contacts, though in hindsight I'm sure I had lost my 20/20 vision no later than by my mid-twenties. But I soldiered on anyway because I thought I would hate wearing glasses and I didn't want to give up my delusion of superiority. That delusion ended this February—while waiting outside the Justice of the Peace's courtroom to get married, no less—when Nick and Bobby, the two witnesses for Laura's and my marriage, got to talking about their wonderful uncorrected vision, and it occurred to me, with plentiful examples given, that the world wasn't in actuality becoming blurrier every year but that my vision had deteriorated quite a lot. Perhaps the proverbial slow-boiling frog experiences a similar realization of how water doesn't naturally become bubbly over time.

The next day I scheduled an appointment with an optometrist. This was OK by the JP and the advice he gave the previous day, when he explicitly advised against Laura getting her eyes checked but said nothing about me doing the same. Later at the eyeglass store, I learned to no great shock that I had an astigmatism—hence the vertically-aligned blurriness I see everywhere—and also to some mild surprise that I'm nearsighted as well. I picked out some glasses by relying on the salesman's advice to get square frames for my round face, and anxiously went to the store the next day for pickup.

The result has been entirely positive. My earlier fears of hating glasses proved unfounded, probably because with corrected vision I've gained the ability to do many more things. Using a computer no longer gives me eyestrain or headaches—ditto for reading books—and I can read blue neon signs at night without problem. Also, nighttime bike riding is a lot easier, as I no longer depend upon my sense of smell to avoid running into stuff.

We'll see how I feel about glasses as time goes on. A lot of people who wear glasses seem to hate them, or resent having to wear them, and move on to contacts or surgery. Also, I worry about the heat of the looming summer months and being able to keep a pair of glasses on my face without sweat streaming down the lenses. We'll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the strange neural effects of having corrected vision after having gone without for many years. Perhaps the strangest is how whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel certain that I'm still wearing glasses even though I'm not. I see phantom frames in my peripheral vision and feel phantom temples on each side of my face. Sometimes in a groggy half-woken state I go so far as to clutch at my face to remove the phantom spectacles, before realizing my mind is playing tricks on itself.