RSV PHILLIPPI
By Dennis Phillippi
fun. In other words, the nerds. Because I was a kid who read books for fun, I was often accused of ruining my own eyes by “always having his nose buried in a book.” It turns out I was just the last in a family of Mr. Magoos, destined to follow glasses wherever we go. Understand, we’re talking about the seventies here, a time when nothing in fashion, from pants to haircuts, was well thought out, and glasses were included. My glasses, due to the fact that when my eyes went bad, they did it with enthusiasm, were huge glass glasses. There were
You know us. You’ve seen us. You’ve pitied us. We are legion. The irritated middleaged man digging in his jacket pocket with one hand while fumbling off a pair of glasses with the other. no plastic lenses at that time that could compensate for my new state of vision. These weighty binoculars were constantly having to be pushed back up to the bridge of my nose. A hot day meant sweat making them ever more precarious. A rainy day meant looking at life through a misty vista. In spite of this problem, I still chose a life in show business. From a very early age, I was performing in plays, during which my fellow actors were blobs of color. There were few roles that called for seventies style glasses. Frankly, there were very few justifications of any kind for seventies style glasses. By the time I was in high school, I was doing stand-up comedy, also without wearing my embarrassing specs, rendering the audience all but indecipherable. It made the whole “Hi, where are you from? What do you do for a liv-
ing?” part of stand-up a nightly adventure. I met my wife after a stand-up show, and only found out much later that her friend and she had seen me playing a video game before the show, wearing glasses, and decided that I looked like a fly. That night, as always, I managed to get through my set without being able to see, and, afterwards, met the love of my life. More on that next month in this space. Since I found the glasses so depressing to wear, and felt they made a less than favorable impression, a fact borne out later by her relating her first impression, I didn’t wear them for the balance of our first night. The point is, I spent that evening getting to know her without being able to really see her unless she was within a foot or so. Luckily for me, she was game for being within a foot or so. A few years later, both of us got laser surgery, and, for the first time since about the eighth grade, we could both see. It was super nifty. It still is. Before the surgery the two of us would have to pick up an alarm clock and hold it to our face to tell the time. After the surgery we could read the closed captioning on a baseball game unaided. For the first time people could think of me as a nerd for other reasons. Eventually, we needed reading glasses, and I was okay with that. I felt like it lent me some unearned dignity. Recently, as predicted all those years ago when we got lasered, we have both started needing a weak prescription to see clearly at a distance. Just like that I’m in a new and even more bothersome second class. Old people. I see the way you young people look at me now. Okay, if I’m wearing the right glasses at the time, I see the way you look at me. I remind you, at best, of your father, and, at worst, your grandfather. What little cool I once had stored up drains away the second I get confused which pair of glasses I need to be wearing. No one thinks well of the guy who asks to be seated in the “well lit section” of a restaurant.
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here a many little indignities once we have passed the half century mark: the copies of the AARP magazine that arrive unbidden, the knowledge the I have known my doctor for longer than most of my friends, and now the lowest blow of all - I have become one of those old coots who has to carry not one, but two pairs of glasses. You know us. You’ve seen us. You’ve pitied us. We are legion. The irritated middle-aged man digging in his jacket pocket with one hand while fumbling off a pair of glasses with the other. Grimacing as our eyes adjust to using distance glasses to see the score of the ball game, while holding our reading glasses in case we get a text, or God forbid, have to try to decipher a menu in a dimly lit restaurant. Or the grumpy middle-aged woman trying to gamely laugh off the fact that she is wearing one pair of glasses while another is dangling from a lanyard around her neck. We are not a proud people. When I was a boy, I was the eagleeyed member of my family. It made me feel heroic to be the one who could make out road signs and read a map. At the time I felt sorry for my parents and siblings with their giant glasses. Then, along came puberty and unexpectedly, the need for glasses. Let’s set aside the possible connection between being a thirteen-year-old boy and having my eyes going south. Suddenly I was just another kid who couldn’t play baseball because of the enormous glass plates sliding down my prodigious nose. Sure, it came in handy as an excuse to not get elbowed in the face playing basketball, something I found less than interesting, but it also meant that I was forever lumped in with the Kids Who Wear Glasses. It’s an unappreciated second class. The kids who won’t be asked to play dodge ball. The kids who read books for
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THE EYES HAVE IT