Wearing reading glasses

by James K Sayre

Lynette Evan's recent article, "Beware of ducks wearing glasses," (The Chronicle, February 2) about the vagaries of reading glasses was very amusing. As an avid bird-watcher in my youth, I was dismayed when the far-away birds began to seem fuzzy. I was about 17 when my parents took me to a local eye doctor, where I received eye glasses with a prescription for mild astigmatism and farsightedness. After that, I wore glasses while driving, although I was careful not to wear them at the DMV for their vision tests... After a couple of decades, I gave up wearing glasses for driving; the freeway signs had become bigger and brighter and for serious bird-watching, I had binoculars.

At age fifty-four and a half, I finally had to start wearing reading glasses, so I began stocking up, buying them at thrift shops and rummage sales. I rarely paid more than a dollar per pair. I used the weakest magnification for about ten years, then finally had to move up to the intermediate strength. In 1997, in an essay entitled, "Reflections upon entering the age of reading glasses," I said that the hardest part of having to wear reading glasses was finding them... The perversity of life: you need to be wearing reading glasses to be able to see and find your reading glasses...

When the text on the small faraway television is too hard to read, I get out my 3X opera glasses and can then make it out just fine. I am thankful that I was born in the 20th century, when the technology for both prescription glasses and reading glasses was well established.

End.

Bottlebrush Press has maintained its presence on the Internet since 1996.

Return to the home page of Bottlebrush Press: The homepage of Bottlebrush Press

This web page was recently created by James Sayre.

Author's Email: sayresayre@yahoo.com

Web page last updated on 2 February 2008.