Most people I know have a collection of something. Whether its baseball cards or baby spoons, bottle caps or back scratchers, we all tend to collect and categorize, catalog and classify our stuff until we’ve got every Beanie Baby or Dollie Doll ever made.
I have collections, but mine are made up of items I never knew what to do with in the first place, like socks that don’t match and bottles of mysterious cleaning solutions in the back of the sink. All of my reading glasses fall into that category. I could call it a collection except that I don’t know where most of my reading glasses are, which is the reason I have so many of them. Somewhere. The other day I found my favorite pair in the back seat of my car. That begs the question of why I would be reading in the back seat of my car, when I need to be in the front seat behind the wheel. In the meantime, I ordered another pair for my collection which I think are now sitting on a shelf at Lowes. Not sure.
So, with a little imagination you can imagine the nice collection I’ve built up over the past ten years, enough glasses to start my own Warbly Parker Store at the mall – with different styles and colors, a pair that make me look svelte and debonair and another that is held together with electrical tape. Gone are the days when I have one prescription that meets all my needs. Here to stay are my bifocals, that special breed of glasses that have a line right in the middle of everything you are trying to see.
I have a conspiracy theory about the invention of bifocals, by the way, and believe bifocals developed out of a need to dispose of all the broken shards laying around on the floor of a glass factories. As pieces pile up on the floor, eye glass makers began adding in some glass fragments a little at a time to get rid of the surplus, first around the edges of the lenses where they wouldn’t be noticed and then, every so slowly, more and more into the middle, creating what we now know as the bifocal. This shady sort of recycling process created a kind of visual dependency among the now squinting public, who like me lost their glasses all the time, perpetuating a never-ending need for another pair with a new mixture of broken factory shards.
Many years ago, before I came up with that theory, I began wearing contact lenses, and at first, I was ecstatic. My regular glasses had been rammed into my nose a dozen times playing basketball, and my parents finally decided it was going to be a lot cheaper for me to have contact lenses than nose surgery. I was soon to find out, however there were some down sides to wearing them. For starters they were hard and brittle and made your eyes drier than Death Valley. For another they were difficult to clean and expensive, but we can get into more of those details in a minute.
For the purposes of this story, it is important to note that when contact lenses first came along, they were made of hard glass that weighed in at about three pounds apiece. According to the little kid in the movie Jerry Maguire, the human head weighs about eight pounds, so with my new lenses in place, my head weighed in at an abnormally high fourteen pounds, which I feel is an unnecessary burden for a child but also explains why all of our old family photos show me slightly slumped over as if I couldn’t hold up my own head, which I couldn’t.
Another problem with the old contact lenses was that they were expensive, and so one didn’t have a collection of them in different styles and colors like shoes or designer underwear. You owned just one pair, and you cared for them as if they were rare and exquisite jewels. They were permanent, a lasting fixture, and were made so that once you put them in your eye, they stuck there with incredible suction. The pressure was just tremendous, and at night, when it was time to take them out, and you released them, they flew out of the eye like a cork from a champagne bottle and took part of your eye out along with it.
It is fair to mention that when something as small as a contact lens reports out of your eye socket, there is little chance of seeing where it went, or for that matter ever finding it again. This set up a kind of panic, an urgency for everyone in the vicinity to begin looking for it. If you watch a professional basketball game from years ago, the entire game came to an abrupt halt. Players, coaches, cheer leaders and even audience members fell to their knees to find a player’s missing lens.
To make matters worse, contacts were made a different color than the color of your iris so you could see them in your eye after you put them in. You wouldn’t put a brown lens on top of a brown eye, because you wouldn’t know if you had it in or not or or if that was just your own eye you were looking at. If you couldn’t tell, you might try to attempt to get your contact lens out and pull out your entire eye instead of just contact lens.
As a result, I chose the color green to go on top of my brown eyes. That would have been fine I guess, except that where I grew up, the carpeting in our house was mostly olive green. That meant that my contact blended in perfectly if one flew out and couldn’t be found without the help of the entire family getting down on their hands and knees, spreading strands of shag apart until someone yelled, “FOUND IT!”
I guess you could make a case for some family bonding going on down there on the shag, but in our family, it was mostly yelling and blaming and finger pointing and name calling, with some deep-seated blame thrown in for good measure. In the end though, when the contact was found, there was a kind of relief that came over all of us, a jubilation, as if we had all been witness to some kind of miracle. After all, just moments before one of the family members had been scorned and half blind, and now, with the restoration of sight in both eyes, there was healing and a renewed sense of community and family cooperation. Over time, one family member seem to develop a remarkable skill at finding contact lenses, and it was a position that held some esteem in our family, and that person received got you special privileges like more ice cream, fewer chores and vegetables, and more time on the couch watching TV.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to fast forward to a time at college when I had been working late in the art building. It was in the middle of winter, colder than a Parking Meter, and as I left the building to head back to the dorm, I was hit full in the face with a blast of arctic wind and lodged a small meteor under my contact lens causing me to scream as if I had been stabbed me in the neck with a cattle prod.
After removing the lens out of my eye, I carefully cradling it in my hand for a quick run back to the dorm. However, in the continued litany of things that were inconvenient about hard lenses, one had to keep them moist or they would crack. So, in that effort, I carefully placed the lens in my mouth …and then, through a series of malfunctioning brain signals, I promptly swallowed it.
I know. I’ll give you a second here to recover.
Now, let’s state the obvious and say that swallowing glass is something you learn as a child to avoid. It’s an early and easy lesson I think, so that I knew immediately that the flesh along my esophageal passage was going to be shredded as the swallowed lens sliced and diced its way to my stomach. Finding my way to the campus clinic, I stumbled in and, afraid to talk for fear blood might spurt out, I wrote my predicament down on a piece of paper for the nurse.
“Oh, no problem,” she told me without blinking, “happens all the time to college students.”
“Is there something I should do? Do I need an X-ray or MRI? Can you look down there and see if you can see it?”
“No, you’ll just have to watch for it,” she answered.
“Watch for it whe…?” I started, but caught myself, knowing this was not a question I wanted an answer for. And frankly, it’s not a subject I care to go into here either except to say that I did eventually find the little hard lens and was able to see and study again on renewed and remarkable level.
I think the lens, having travelled through my entire digestive system, was so thoroughly rinsed and disinfected that I gained a kind of visionary attitude about life, and an accompanying supernatural clarity and precision in my course work, beyond what one would expect from 20/20 vision, and finished that semester with a B average. In effect, both my sight and my universal visionary acumen became one. I began to see life as a journey little contact lenses make rather than the product of an end result.
I’d like to say that I’m thankful I don’t have to wear hard contacts anymore, and that the experience has taught me to be thankful for the ever-growing collection of eyeglasses I have, but it hasn’t. I still can’t find any one of the five pairs I’ve left around here and there, but then, I don’t’ think I have to worry about looking for them…aaa… there, if you know what I mean.