Where are my reading glasses?

How many pairs do you need not to always be searching for them?

One day, some 20 years ago, I suddenly could not see a telephone number in a Manhattan phone book. From that day forth, I was not ready for my close-up. No matter how many dime-store pairs of glasses I’ve bought nigh these many years, hardly a day goes by when I can find a pair of any reading glasses anywhere. I’ve done everything – hang them around my neck, placed them in various key places at home and in the office. I’ve even put them in raincoats and bathrobe pockets. And, yet, whenever I need a pair, they’re nowhere to be found. So, I pay the wrong total on the Chinese send-out, I miss a key word in an article, or often order the wrong salad from an eyeglass-less read on a diner menu.

Oh cruel fate, I thought! Yet, this continual search for definition led me to ponder if possibly this seismographic vision change coincided with the cataclysms of menopause, empty nests and the necessity for sensible shoes. Was this blurring a concealed and inspirational message from the Universe? A silent nudge for me to start to observe differently, to see the world from a different frame of being – a reminder of the forest for the trees. For all my lived life, so far, I had intended to focus on, obsess on, little things.  They meant a lot. They often kept me off track, like a train halting for a small pebble, I was impeded by an odd offhanded remark, a slightly off-color hair-dye job, an inconsistency in a movie. Detail, details, detailing.

And so I thought to take wisdom from this clear lack of clearness and accept it and try to take it in stride. "See the big picture," I said. Create a mantra that says, "I will not be forced off track or piqued by the little things — the tiny bugs that seem so big and that I allow to screw up the mechanism of my daily enjoyment of life."

On an ugly hair day, with a creased face returning home from the L.A. red-eye, and smelling of jet fuel, my husband (also vision deprived) opened the apartment door and said unrehearsed how beautiful I was – once was and now was. Honest. Suddenly, I understood the compensatory power of a diminishing close-up. The glory of the loss of acuity that I thought I had missed. I ohmmm-ed to myself an appreciation for the philosophical and psychological advantages of seeing-lite — of life from a distance. The forest. The whole picture. And on a cloudless night, I took off my +1.75 crutches to observe in the distance and so far away the moon, the stars, and the sky, so clearly.