Smudges

Ending up having to wear glasses has been one of the biggest adjustments in my life. I like my glasses but hate the change in vision which showed up on my doorstep at the ripe old age of forty. But I've got 'em and wear 'em and try to always remember to take 'em along wherever I go.

Like any decent intelligent hard working American boy I grew up committed to not doing the dumb and annoying things my parents did. (I was, unfortunately, not smart enough to index and study all the things they did right but, somehow, always remember the crap I didn't like.) Somewhere on that interminable list of things that drove me crazy was dirty glasses. It seems my Mom was forever asking my Dad how he could see through his dirty glasses, covered with every manner of smudge and spatter. And, once pointed out, I could see the smears and splatter as well and found it rather disgusting in an adolescent sort of way. Even now, when I'm talking to someone and their glasses are all smudged up I want to send them to the restroom. "How can you see through those things?!"

And so it was the other morning I had another of those stinging moments when I find genetic history rearing it's ugly head. "What's wrong with my right eye?" I wondered to myself. It couldn't be the glasses. Never. I had washed those and looked at them just, what?, two or three days ago. Has it been a week? One look and I had to wonder, "How do you see through those things?" My right lens looked as though I had sustained a bird strike coming down the hallway. The other was significantly coated with what I can only imagine to be dog slime. And there you have it. Suddenly I had fallen into the trap: A nasty piece of parental history repeating itself.

Glasses all washed up and ready to go, my right and left eye are now safely returned to their right and proper yin and yang. And, too, at least I caught the problem before my wife had to ask me how I see through those things. Sunglasses next.