The Dog Ate My Glasses

I discovered I might be wearing the wrong reading glasses.  I might have been wearing the wrong prescription for more than a decade.  I’ve been using glasses that are designed for reading a book. I have long since stopped reading books. I read my computer screen.

Wearing the wrong prescription is all the rage: My chum The Doctor has been wearing her contact lenses the wrong way round. She’s been wearing the lens for distance in the eye she uses for near vision and the lens for near vision in the eye she uses for distance vision. “What idiots” she thought, when her monthly disposable lenses started to arrive with labels on them saying “L” and “R”. It took her a year to get round to going to see her optician to explain that she thought her sight had got worse. She had to sit through the indignity of being told she was wearing her lenses in the wrong eyes. It wasn’t her sight that was the problem.  It’s a good job she’s not a surgeon.

What works best when the optician loads different lenses into the impossibly uncomfortable “is that better or worse” glasses, as you sit in the dark and glare at the inviable alphabet on the wall, may have a marginal benefit when sitting in the calm of the examination room. It can offer a worse outcome in the world at large when all the moving parts are moving.

After my first close encounter with a bus the optician gave me a serious talking to about the importance of wearing glasses on a daily basis. Through the “better or worse” test, we settled on a prescription and off I ventured. The startling change in my daily life was that I could no longer walk down the road without feeling dizzy. It was just like the head rush after a deep drag on a cigarette.  Feeling wobbly on your feet does not help when navigating your way around traffic. Whatever the benefits of staring into space in my new glasses, daily life just got a whole lot harder. So it came as a relief when the Sisters’ dog ate my glasses.

My glasses have met their end in many different ways over the years: In a moment of absentmindedness, the Sister accidently grilled a pair of dark glasses, thinking they were fish fingers. I left a pair in a pizza restaurant where no one ever found them. I like to think that there is some clever opportunist walking around in my glasses feeling as dizzy as I did in the glasses I had before the dog ate them. I have left them in a Thai taxi and of course, I have sat on them. I have even trodden on a pair while looking for them after I dropped them.  None of it was worth breaking into a sweat over. I’ve given up on prescription glasses.

There is one type of glasses I’m addicted to. Just about everyone else I know loves them too. Dark glasses are the must have specs. It seems counter intuitive, so If you’ve ever wondered why people who can’t see much favour the tint, it’s to keep out the glare. It’s why I like to wear my dark glasses in the rain.

I’ve developed a scarcity mentality about dark glasses. A few weeks ago I bought a pair I didn’t need to add to the already enormous collection. All of them are different and all of them have a different association. Just like anyone who has a lucky pair of pants, I like to think my tints can create just the same feeling of wellbeing.  I choose carefully, depending on just how lucky I feel!