Dear Dearest Mary,I'm new to glasses. A year? Year and a half?
Doesn't sound very new but as the only one in a family of five who didn't need them I thought my eyes were special. Made of tougher stuff. Thought I might need reading glasses when I was old, where old = some far-flung future where I am suddenly blessed with the ability to knit and the personality transplant needed to choose to craft instead of reading or writing.
But then reading was making me sleepy. I chalked it up to pregnancy. To being tired from work, life, baby, caring for my mother. Then to pregnancy again. Repeat.
When I finally stepped into an optometrist's office for the first time since my eldest brother hit my eye with a small hard ball (my fault for looking skyward trying to see where it had gone) -- I didn't just need reading glasses. I needed progressives which sounds really awesomely liberal but just means I'm three levels of blind.
Getting glasses meant the world was suddenly HD. This was cool -- the skyline suddenly went from wide watercolor to so sharp I actually heard Rhapsody In Blue when I looked at it. And also very not cool -- oy my face! I never worried about wrinkles, it turned out, because I couldn't see them.
Don't know how it is in Denmark by you, but here all glasses available are still of the skinny early Tina Fey variety. On her: Sex-hay. On me: Bifocal Betty. My husband kept asking me if I was angry. I wanted a pair of owls. Not chunky black hipster frames but ethereal floaty Ruth Bader Ginsberg's or a pair of in-your-face Lynda Carter's. And not just for fashion -- it's hard to get a progressive into a skinny frame which I learned the hard way. Those small glasses, my first pair, made reading in bed like trying to spy on your neighbors through a venetian blind.
These specs, above, are designer sunglasses. Purple frames. It's all I could find and what I'm wearing until the comet of large eyeglass frame fashion swings by this planet again.
And yeah, I totally look like your uncle Morty.
xoxo,
Me
