The Spectacles of Age

On a pleasant day in the second grade, I looked up from whatever equation I was solving, assignment I was reading, or cartoon I was surreptitiously drawing to find, quite to my surprise, a haze before me. Try as I might, I could not discern any of the letters, numbers, or other symbols on the chalkboard. It was as though a fog had descended upon the classroom. 

Of course, the trouble was not with the climate but with my eyesight—which, as far as I was concerned, had quite suddenly gone fuzzy. I have no recollection of ever having to strain to see the chalkboard until this very moment, but for several days or even weeks thereafter, I remember doing little but straining. My inability to read what was written on the chalkboard led to the faltering of my otherwise stellar grades. I was no longer acing my tests, which evidently struck my perceptive teacher as so peculiar that she searched for some explanation other than a sudden failure of my intelligence: I believe she called my parents to let them know that she thought I might be having trouble seeing the chalkboard.

Such was my introduction into the ranks of eyeglass-wearers. 

In my recollection, my parents were taken aback by my teacher’s casual diagnosis of nearsightedness, though their surprise was myopia of a different sort: Since they both had worn glasses most of their adult lives, why on earth would they have expected their son to have anything resembling 20/20 vision?

With worries over my stumbling academic career in the back of my mind, I was taken to the ophthalmologist, who, after a few quick manipulations of the phoropter device, confirmed what I already knew: I had difficulty in seeing across great distances—such as from my desk to the chalkboard. For my parents, my unanticipated need to wear glasses must have been a bit humbling: a first sign that their son was susceptible to the same physical ailments or limitations as everyone else. 

When, on subsequent trips to the ophthalmologist, my nearsightedness was found to have worsened, my mother, ever eager to deny decline of any sort, gamely asked whether it might be related to my now wearing glasses all the time—which, of course, I had to in order to do my schoolwork and other basic tasks. The ophthalmologist was polite but never quite agreed with my mother’s contrarian explanation for my bad eyesight.

For me, however, my eyeglass prescription quickly became something of a calling card. Here was written evidence that I was different from my peers in a particular sort of ego-boosting way. You see, even in the second grade, I fancied myself an aspiring writer, and I associated writing with bookishness, and bookishness with the need for glasses. What sort of self-respecting writer had perfect vision? By the same token, my glasses granted me an instant exemption from those athletic activities that I neither enjoyed nor excelled at. It was a win-win.

As I grew up, I maintained a running list of favorite writers who were, more often than not, photographed while wearing their spectacles—proof not only of their need (like my own) for eyeglasses but of their apparent pride in being in need of them: Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, Stephen King, and P.G. Wodehouse, to name just a few. I came to regard as role models those rare glasses-wearing heroes in fiction. After all, Clark Kent made glasses essential to the maintenance of his secret identity, and the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd crafted a character whose glasses were his defining feature in such movies as Safety Last and The Freshman. Lloyd even called his creation “the glasses character.” 

Yet was I secure in my sense of myself as a spectacle-wearer as I let on?  Curiously, there was one significant exception to my enthusiasm for glasses: when I was being photographed. As a 12-year-old aspiring political cartoonist, I had the great good luck of getting the attention of my hometown newspaper. I was interviewed about my fledgling career by a reporter, and I was scheduled to have my picture taken in front of the drawing table in my bedroom. Yet, when the day came, I caved: I took off my glasses. My photograph appeared on the front page of the paper, but without my glasses. Who was I kidding? My father was interviewed for the story and said (correctly) that I took pride in being called a “nerd,” so why did I flee my nerdishness by ditching my glasses? Unlike my mother, I knew I needed glasses, but had I adopted her antipathy toward them? I persisted in this uncharacteristic display of vanity until very recently: I wore glasses all the time, except when having my picture taken.

Yet a recent appointment with an optometrist—my first such visit in decades—was a chastening experience. There, I learned that my vision had again declined and that my prescription, left untouched lo! these many years, was in need of a serious upgrade. There was no getting around it: The second-grader who could not clearly perceive the chalkboard was now the full-time writer who squinted to see the television set and, sometimes, the computer screen. It is time to face facts. It may even be time to add a pair of tortoise shell frames to the otherwise excellent caricature of me that accompanies this very column.  

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