Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: Have you seen my reading glasses? Barbara Wood's Dispatches from the Home Front: Have you seen my reading glasses? (November 16, 2005)

By Barbara Wood

Special to the Almanac

Until recently, I've always felt that I'm taking this growing older thing pretty well.

I don't mind that my hair has gone completely gray; although after decades of being a brunette mistaken for a redhead it is now a little odd to be mistaken for a blonde. I'm probably just paying for the repressed bad attitude I've always had toward blondes.

I did decide to give up playing soccer with men, but only so I could spend more time gardening, not because I didn't want to compete with 30-year-old guys any more. I still manage to run about 20 miles a week (jog slowly, actually), so the rest of me must be holding up all right.

And then I went to the eye doctor because my vision didn't seem all that sharp. Sure enough, my contact lens prescription needed updating. When I tried the stronger lenses I could see clearly for the first time in years.

Until, that is, I tried to read something. It seems the correction for my distance vision made it completely impossible for me to read without glasses. My arms just aren't long enough to hold things far enough away to focus.

I can't even properly see what I'm eating any more.

It seems this should be an easy-enough problem to solve -- reading glasses. Of course the "not being able to remember where I've left anything" problem meant it took lots of reading glasses.

I had needed low-power glasses to read for several years, but never to the point that squinting wouldn't do the trick as well. I had survived with about three pair.

But now that I really, truly, can't read without my glasses, three pair is not nearly enough. Nor is nine pair. I try to keep a pair by my reading chair, at the breakfast table, at my desk, in the bathroom, beside my bed, in my backpack, in my car, with some spares for when I misplace the others. Plus the pair I keep on a string around my neck.

But, you guessed it, I often still can't find a pair when I need them.

Unless you have this problem, you can't imagine its consequences. I can't make a phone call because I can't read the numbers on the keypad, much less read the little screen that tells who is calling.

I can't read what the shampoo bottle in the shower says because as far as I know they don't make reading glasses for the shower. I need reading glasses at the grocery store to figure out how much something costs.

Recently, I think I suffered the height of reading-glasses-related humiliation. I went to the fire station to vote on Election Day, with a pair of reading glasses tucked into the neckline of my sweater. (I can't seem to find the pair I wear around my neck.)

By the time I walked the five minutes to the polling place, however, I had lost the glasses. In order to read the ballot and vote I had to borrow a pair of reading glasses from a poll worker.

And by the way, if you find those glasses, I'd really love to have them back. They were black plastic with with flowers painted on them; one of my favorite pairs.
Barbara Wood is a freelance writer, photographer and gardener from Woodside. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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