I can see clearly now
My husband stepped on my eyeglasses one night a few weeks ago and mangled them to the point where a trip to the optometrist was in order.
It wasn't his fault. As usual, I had left them precariously perched on the arm of the couch and they fell to the floor.
The glasses were fixable, but the incident nudged me into a way-long-overdue eye exam. I knew what the outcome would be, and I'd been dreading it.
"Yep," the eye doctor said. "You're going to need progressive lenses."
"Progressive" apparently is the politically correct euphemism for bifocals because there is nothing progressive about my failing eyesight. My translation: You're older than dirt and now need glasses that officially make you a geezer.
I guess they call them progressive because without the telltale bifocal lines, they look like normal glasses but actually provide corridors of optimum eyesight for distance, close-ups and intermediate vision.
Still, it seems to me they should call them "regressives." You only need them when your eyesight is failing. Then again, maybe I'm just over-sensitive.
My trauma with vision began at an early age. I was the only one in my kindergarten class with glasses. They were cute little white horn-rims, stylish for the early 1960s, but they set me apart from the rest. My teachers saw my weak eyesight as a good reason to plant me in the front row of the class. (I later learned that my mother had told my early grade-school teachers to put me in the front because of my poor hearing.)
So when teachers assigned students to desks alphabetically, I messed up the rotation by requiring a front-row desk.
"Lynnette, this will be your desk," they'd order, guiding me to the front while the others whispered about why I was being singled out.
Since I never opted for contacts, I've had all kinds of glasses through the years - very ugly black horn-rims in fifth grade, mod wire-rims in the '70s, huge plastic spectacles in the '80s that dominated my face, and back to sensible wire-rims in the '90s and beyond.
I went through the "I'm not going to wear my glasses" phase in junior high because I wanted to be cool. My vanity forced me to squint to see the scoreboard at basketball games. I faked my way through pep-band tunes and math problems on the blackboard.
Some years later, I realized just how bad my vision was for long distances when my husband pointed out a field full of Canada geese. "Wow, those are small deer," I exclaimed (and I was wearing my glasses!) He rolled his eyes and told me I needed new glasses.
Now I'm getting used to my "progressives." I've had them for a week now, so the transition is still under way.
They said it would take a couple of weeks to get used to these new fields of vision, and they're right. I've endured nausea, headaches and sore eyes.
But there are some clear benefits. I can see street signs now. In fact, I can see a lot of things now that were pretty fuzzy before. A few days ago I was driving from our house into Whitefish and I saw strange lights on the horizon that I'd never noticed before. I wondered what was going on, then realized it was street lights in the distance. Apparently I'd seen them as pink, glowing blobs with my old specs.
And I now can read and thread a needle with my glasses on. Such bliss. I'm feeling more progressive each day.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com