Glassers

I was one of those kids who memorized eye charts in school, in fear of needing glasses. I managed to escape a visit to the optometrist all throughout high school but all of that ended in college. In college, I was found out. It was a fall afternoon at basketball practice and the team was…

Toothpaste splattered the mirror. I brushed the vomit taste off my tongue. I had hurled after riding a rollercoaster with a corkscrew turn. My cousin Taylor entered the bathroom. He smelled like his coconut tanning oil. His white T-shirt unevenly bunched over his thick right shoulder, bulked up from years of playing tennis. He stepped…

Just before graduation from basic training in the Air Force in 1971, I learned what my next base was and what my AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) would be. My job was my second choice, Medical Service Specialist. I’d asked to be an air traffic controller to be around airplanes and very disappointed after that…

I still take my glasses off occasionally and look at Christmas trees, just to see the sight I did before glasses. In 1992, I decorated my private-duty patient’s little Christmas tree, feeling like a 40-year-old kid. The next day, my patient was in her bed, and I was in the chair on the other side…

At home, I ran through the house to stand on the back porch looking north at the Ball Brothers factory, hundreds of feet away. I saw every leaf on every tree for miles around (well, almost miles), every petal and color on every flower, all the rocks in the railroad beds. I said, “Mammaw! I…

In January 1961, my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Singer, recognized that I needed glasses from watching me squinting constantly. She sent a note home, but my grandmother didn’t get me tested until school was out. I don’t know why she waited so long, but I finally saw an eye doctor in June. I sat in the…

I didn’t get to use this technique until I was 25. I was working on my doctorate, and I was teaching part-time at a community college. I was talking about some essay or short story, I don’t remember what, and I took off my glasses to make a point. My moment had finally come, and…

I didn’t start wearing glasses until I was a junior in college. I probably needed them for a year before that, but I always made excuses for my poor eyesight. I was in college, so I argued that my eyes were just tired because I was, even if I had slept for 12 hours the…