How four-eyes first got glasses and found the world

I've been waiting weeks to get my new glasses redone.  The last few times I've gotten new lenses and frames, it has turned into a big deal.  There's almost always something wrong with them.  Last time, the lab misread the prescription and gave me +4 lenses instead of -14 because the doctor had written the minus sign and the "1" too close together.  This time, the axis of my astigmatism changed which made the world look very strange through unfamiliar glasses, off-kilter and dizzy.

I endure all this because I remember how glasses first opened my world.

"Get away from that TV set! You'll ruin your eyes!" my dad exclaimed every Saturday morning when I was tiny.

If it was winter, he'd be putting his boots on in the dining room, sitting on the chair under the phone. He could see me sitting on the ottoman approximately one foot away from the TV. I'd scoot back to the chair out of sight behind the wall with all the alacrity my three-year-old self could muster.

As soon as he stomped outside to shovel out the car, I'd go right back to the ottoman again. A few minutes or hours later my mother would notice me, and pull my father over again to straighten me out again. This went on week after week. Eventually, I grew up and became more articulate. As my parents conversed with me more, they were better cued into my perceptions. Now that I could read a little, we had more to discuss.

"What's that clock over there say? Can you tell me what time it is?" they might ask.

"What clock?" I'd reply. They thought I was being fresh, or a smart-alec as she put it.

Finally, one summer day, my father, who was sitting at the kitchen table, asked my opinion of something from where I stood next to the sink. He wanted to know how I liked a picture or a saying on the calendar on the wall next to him. I walked over to look at it, then turned to answer him.

"You can't see that from over there?" he asked. "You really can't read that?" He made me cross to the sink again. He held up objects and asked me to identify them. My mother stood nearby and I could see that their faces turned toward me to hear my answer and turn toward other each time after I answered. I must not have done very well, because the topic quickly turned to talk of doctor's visits. For days at home and in town they talked about how I couldn't see very well, how I must sit close to the television because I couldn't see, how I couldn't do well in school this way, and so on. They explained to me that they had made me an appointment to see the eye doctor.

I failed to see what all the fuss was about. I was just happy no one yelled at me while that Saturday while I was trying to enjoy my cartoons.  Otherwise, my life went on as before.

After a week or two, my mother took me several towns over, about twenty miles away. We sat in a pleasant waiting room. One entire wall had a mural of a wooded scene. I got up close and tried to touch the trunks of the trees. The room had the strangest fountain ever. Little beads of oil traveled along lighted fibers to make a pretty pattern, all gold and silver and sparkly. We waited there long enough for me to get in trouble with my mother. I touched the fountain beads and left hand-prints on the walls. At last, the eye doctor made me sit in a big chair in a dark room. He made me name letters on the opposite wall and he sat so close to my face that I could see his teeth and smell the tobacco under the mint on his breath.

Several weeks later, my Aunt Velma took me to pick up my glasses, I didn't see the point about going back, pretty fountain notwithstanding, and I whined about it. We got my glasses, I put them on and got in my aunt's car. I was so small and short that I didn't notice the change in my vision until we arrived back to my hometown. I couldn't see out of the car windows. Once when we stepped out of the car again -- Wow -- I saw the leaves on the trees for the first time.

I stopped and stared, transfixed by the tree. I thought all along that trees were only large blobs and had not realized that a tree has individual leaves, that each one caught the light and made little jewels of reflected sun in a thousand little points. That tree on our downtown block became the most perfect, beautiful thing I'd ever seen. For the first time, I saw the larger natural world unmediated by scanlines on a TV or printed dots of an eye-doctors wall mural.

My parents and aunt mocked me for weeks, years really, about how I suddenly stopped whining and complaining about the bother of getting glasses once actually tried them on. And that was how I became the only person in my kindergarten class to start school wearing glasses already.