For starters, I’m an idiot.
But let’s set that aside for the moment.
My eyes started going bad on my fortieth birthday.
Not around my fortieth birthday.
On my fortieth birthday. The day of. Literally.
I’m sitting in my office, trying to read a book.
All of a sudden, the page is blurry.
What the hell? I’m thinking as I push it farther and farther away from my face.
“Your eyes are changing,” the optometrist would later say.
That was a polite way of saying they were going to shit.
Which was a huge problem for me.
I’d always taken pride in my better-than-perfect vision.
Back at the Academy, good eyes were what separated front-seaters from back-seaters among prospective Naval Aviators.
You needed perfect vision to be Maverick.
Glasses? You got to be Goose.
Nothing wrong with being Goose, of course.
But everyone wanted to be Maverick.
Including me.
And I had a good run for those forty years leading up to my birthday.
My vision held strong.
Looking back, I probably took that for granted.
I remember going to the eye doctor once with my wife.
Her eyes had been crap her entire life.
She’d worn contacts all day and thick glasses at night.
We were at the doc’s office for a consultation on corrective surgery.
Yes, she was a candidate for the procedure, the doc concluded.
After doing so, she asked if I’d like to see what the world looked like through my wife’s eyes.
She directed me to a chair and swung these binocular-looking things attached to a long, swiveling arm in front of my face.
After turning a few dials on the binoculars, the doc said, “There. How’s that look?”
How’s what look? I asked. I can’t see a damn thing. It’s all blurry.
It was like being under water with your eyes open.
I could see color and light and random shapes but couldn’t make sense out of any of it.
“That’s how the world looks to your wife,” the doc replied.
No frickin’ way, I thought. No one’s eyes are this bad.
My wife underwent surgery a few weeks later. And emerged with perfect vision.
Welcome to the club, I told her.
Yeah, I was pretty flippant about it back then.
Not anymore.
I started with reading glasses.
The ones from the drug store were a little awkward but worked fine.
I’ll only need them occasionally, I thought. No need to spend a bunch of money on real glasses.
And, for a while, that was true.
Until I started needing them at work. And in restaurants. And on planes.
And then everywhere.
The worst part was having to remember to take the damn things with me.
So, I started staging pairs in various places.
In my briefcase. In my car. In my desk drawer.
Still, I’d occasionally forget them and have to borrow someone else’s.
I was out with a few guys from work. We’d all forgotten our “cheaters.”
We had to ask the waitress for hers.
We passed them around the table until everyone had ordered.
The waitress was amused.
We were embarrassed.
Eventually, I had to concede that glasses would be a permanent fixture in my life.
I sprung for a pair of trifocals.
None of those half-glasses balanced on the end of my nose a la Chuck Schumer, I decided.
And, I have to say, it was a pretty good look for me.
Glasses made me appear smarter than I was. Like a guy to be taken seriously.
I’d stare through them at people during meetings. And I could tell they were impressed.
Still, I didn’t wear glasses all the time. I only needed them for reading.
And then my distance vision started to go.
It took a few years. But, slowly, it did.
I couldn’t read street signs. I couldn’t tell who people were from a distance.
So then I was wearing glasses most of the time.
Which was a huge pain in the ass.
Glasses fog up. And get dirty. And slide off your nose when you sweat.
They’re not practical for any form of strenuous physical activity.
I got lost during a run through a centuries-old Portuguese city, because I didn’t have a map.
The map was on my phone, which I didn’t bother taking, because I couldn’t read it, because I refused to wear glasses on a run.
I was gone for more than two hours.
Stupid, frickin’ glasses.
So then I decided maybe I should give contacts a try.
I’d initially been opposed to them, because I was afraid to touch my eyeball.
It’s unnatural.
Then I was reminded my daughter had been doing it since middle school.
If a twelve-year-old could do it, I suppose I could, too, I thought.
The girl at the optometrist’s office with the happy-sounding name – Chloe or Kelsey or some bullshit like that – made it look easy.
She, too, had worn contacts since middle school and was able to whip them in and out effortlessly.
“See, you get them balanced on the tip of your finger, and then ‘Pop!’ in they go,” she said.
And, to take them out, you just swipe your finger across your eye and pull the lens from the corner.
Could anything be easier? she asked.
Okay. That did seem pretty simple.
Until, of course, I got home and had to do it on my own.
And then it was a disaster.
The contact would invariably snag an eyelash on the way in and get deflected from my face to the sink or bathroom floor.
Then I’d be down on all fours with a flashlight trying to find the damn thing.
And is it okay to wear a contact that’s been on the floor?
Is there, like, a five-second rule as with food?
Trying to get the lenses out was even worse.
This whole swipe-your-finger-across-your-eye thing was complete garbage.
All I managed to do was swipe my finger everywhere the lens wasn’t and thoroughly irritate my eyeball in the process.
It took a week of watching YouTube videos to finally discover the pinch technique that enabled me to get the lenses out reliably.
When I could find them, that is.
About once a week, the right lens would slide off my pupil and get stuck in the side of my eye.
I have no idea why.
The first time it happened, I assumed it had somehow fallen out of my eye and was lost.
Then, three days later, I’m standing in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee, when suddenly my eye becomes itchy.
I start scratching and rubbing.
And then out comes this deformed blob of silicone.
The missing contact: It had been in my eye all along.
I alerted the doc to my various misfortunes, who politely informed me it was all likely attributable to operator error.
So, I soldiered on. For almost a year.
Then, three days ago, the same thing happens.
The lens in my right eye goes MIA.
Shit. Here we go again.
I sit through an entire day’s worth of meetings unable to see anything that’s projected on the screen in the conference room.
Later that night, I pry my right eye open and ask my wife to shine a flashlight around.
See anything? I ask her.
Nope, she says.
So, knowing the stupid lens will probably work its way out in the next few days, I take the lens out of my left eye and start brushing my teeth.
And then my left eye starts getting itchy.
What the hell . . . ?
And out of the corner of my eye comes another deformed silicone blob – the same eye from which I had just removed a contact.
Turns out, I had put both lenses in the same eye.
I apparently hadn’t been paying attention that morning.
So, yup.
I’m an idiot.
I do miss my better-than-perfect vision.
But it’s gone forever.
And I do favor contacts over glasses.
So, I’ll keep wearing them.
But I’ll always remember that quote from the John Wayne billboard.
“Life is hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.”
So true, Duke.
So true.