Eyes

If eyes are the window to the soul, what does it mean when my eyes must look out through bifocals?

So I'm having lunch today and a friend of mine needs a pain reliever out of the little first-aid box. "Which kind?" she wonders, and takes out a little packet which she holds under the light, directly over a table. Being the snarky fellow I am, I ask "What, you can only read over tables?" She laughs and tells the tale of how she discovered she needed glasses: how in her early twenties she always wondered why movies were never focused properly, and why anyone bought digital clocks when the numbers were unreadable, until a bit of night driving when she finally realized that she needed glasses.

For me, it was younger, but much the same. I was driving somewhere with Mom, who asked me what a sign on the right side of the road said (she was looking at something else). My answer was "How would I know? No one can read those things." Mom, whose eyesight stayed good into her forties, suddenly realized: at the age of 13, I already needed glasses.

Yeah, 13 was a fun age. I moved to a new neighborhood, started a new school, and got glasses and truly nasty acne, pretty much all at once. Puberty was a freight train straight to hell. Curiously, at exactly the same time I discovered theatre--so even though in my real life I was wearing neutral-colored, nondescript clothes, trying desperately to just blend in and not be noticed, I was also discovering that I was an actor, that I could stand in front of people and be noticed and even admired. That was the lifeline, the one thing that enabled me to survive.

The eyes, as they do, continued to slide, slowly. Each time I went to the doctor, the prescription was just slightly stronger. I tried variations on the eyeglasses, like those horrid indoor/outdoor glasses that would darken when you stepped into the sunlight; that only meant that they were a little too grey indoors, and not grey enough outdoors, neither one thing or another; and since they were made of glass rather than plastic, they were heavier and more uncomfortable and eventually started digging holes in the flesh of my face where they rested.

During college, I got contact lenses. True bliss, except for one thing: I couldn't get them in. When the doctor put them in, fine; removing them was a chore, but I could do it. But I just could not put the damn things in on my own. I sat there at the doctor's office in front of a mirror, trying and trying and failing and failing. In the meantime, this young girl waltzed in, sat at another mirror, popped in her lenses and waltzed back out. "Stupid girl," I murmured, and kept trying. The nurse was ready to declare that I couldn't do it and take my contacts back; I asked her to let me take them home overnight.

Much more time at the mirror, sitting at the kitchen table. Finally, Mom watched me for a couple minutes, then had an idea: with the left hand, two fingers hold the eye open while the right hand gets the contact on the eye; then use the left hand to grab the eyelid, lift it over the lens, and close the eye. The pressure of the closed eyelid would squeeze out the air bubble, and the lifting prevented the lens from getting caught and dislodged when I blinked. Pure parental brilliance, and now I could wear contacts.

All I had to do was remember to clean the contacts. Because that time when I didn't, it got bad. Ignored the whole enzyme cleaning process for weeks, then one night I was ushering for a show and noticed that each time the lights changed my eyes would feel a short sharp stab of pain. "Huh," I said. "Guess I should clean the contacts." I went home, cleaned the contacts, and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning I opened my eyes and shrieked with pain. The dirty lenses had actually scraped my corneas. I was in the dorms then, and had to get an R.A. to lead me like a blind man to a doctor's office, with big sunglasses on and my hands over my eyes.

But the eyes, they heal remarkably well. Remind me to tell you someday the story about the time I got a lit cigarette in my eye.

Now I wear "progressive" eyeglasses--the fancy-pants version of bifocals. With lenses getting smaller and smaller each time I buy them because that's the fashion, now I have these lenses where one region is for close, one region is for normal, one region is for distance, and the regions on the sides seem to just be for blurriness because that's all they ever really seem to do. It mostly means that I turn my head a lot, in order to look at something through the appropriate part of the lens; and sometimes when I drive and really need my peripheral vision, it's like I'm not wearing glasses at all.

I remember wondering when I was a kid: knowing that people's vision tends to get worse with age, maybe there would come a point when my original near-sightedness would meet up with my developing far-sightedness and I would have perfect vision again.

Yeah, it sounds stupid now, mostly because it is. I claim the folly of youth, and quite subtly the head cranes forward just a little so that I can look at the screen and see, really see, whether I'm spelling everything correctly. Does the screen need to be closer, or am I already discovering that new glasses will be required?