About a week ago, I was semi-traumatized when I arose from an evening nab taken after a terrific three hours of picking and grinning (I’m not into noses; I carry a guitar) at Gallery II’s First Friday extravaganza. I awoke to find the loose lens in the prescription eye glasses I bought seven years ago totally gone from its frame in my shirt pocket and from the face of the earth!. “To a hot place with this,” I said to no one in particular as I set the damaged frame on the end table and toddled off to the bed chamber for a long winter’s nap.
The search began in earnest — more accurately, in my house — the next morning. Over the next five days I searched for the missing lens everywhere I had been since coming home about 8:30 that night and found nothing. I even used my year-old Oreck vacuum in a place I’ve not vacuumed since 1998: my living room. The hope was to pick up the small bits in the hopes of revealing, and recovering the lens. I shook the sheets and quilt in the bedroom anticipating the sound of wayfaring glass (or prescription plastic; I don’t know) against the hardwood floor. No sound. I dug my hand into the deep dark recesses of the big easy chair where I had napped Friday night, That was profitable: I pulled out an assortment of subscription renewal cards for The New Yorker magazine, some used paper napkins, about 25 crunchy Cheetos that I had not consumed over the years and three errant pennys. But I didn’t pull out the lens. And I didn’t eat the Cheetos.
Late into my teens I discovered I had a slight right eye vision shortfall. I could see pretty well from my right eye, but I couldn’t close my left eye and read through the right. Without glasses at all, I can see and read most anything more than three feet away from me that’s reasonably large. But close-in I NEEDED the left-side lens.
I couldn’t afford new prescription glasses. Why? It’s my career choice. Apparently God chose a life of semi-poverty and celibacy (for about the last 10 years) without having to pray for hours at a time before breakfast and after dinner. I am a freelancer; I carry a guitar.
Still, I knew I’d have to settle for drug store reading glasses, and Wednesday after a full day at my part-time job and AeroKnow Museum, I visited CVS Pharmacy at Sixth and South Grand and purchased same: magnification 3.25 because nothing less would do.
And “do” they did to a lesser degree than hoped. Reading glasses seem to focus at a point fairly close to the eyes, and don’t work beyond that point. They worked find for reading a book or computer screen, but I soon discovered it was best to leave them in my shirt pocket most of the time. Still, it was a fair return for the dollars spent.
Friday, I was leaving the bank drive-through after buying a bank check for a payment to a company that wants ONLY bank checks that are made of paper and not boomerang-stuff from me. My truck (a loaner from part-time employer for the past two years) has a window winding handle with a little plastic knob that disconnects if the left hand operating it while the right hand steers the vehicle is not perfectly placed. Without major downforce on the knob while moving the handle, the knob breaks off in the hand, and the force often sends it thusly into the map pocket directly under the handle or the driver’s-side floor.
If I hear it bounce onto the floor, immediate search and recovery is required. Why? Because though it seldom falls far from the handle, it could roll under the accelerator or brake pedal and complicate my life BIGtime by preventing full travel of those pedals when full travel is demanded. So after not finding the knob in the map case, I began groping around the floor near my seat as I drove to the next stop light. While stopped, I found something I had not seen since last Friday at Gallery II: the lens to my prescription glasses! After some silent huzzahs and acknowledgements of gratitude to The All-Seeing One, I groped a little more and found the knob-errant, put it back into the socket on the tip of the handle and finished closing the window.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’ve not yet returned the lens to the eyeglass frame with the big hole on the left side. I’m posting this blog wearing my reading glasses. In a few minutes, I will clean both lenses of the prescription glasses after securing the loose element with a rubber band stretched over the extreme left side of the lens and frame to maintain compression and keep it from falling out.
It’s all better now. I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.
Live long . . . . . . . and proper.
