Can I vent? I’ve been peevish for days–made worse by the fact that I’m split on the object of my anger. I guess, mostly I’m pissed at myself. After all, we are all the captains of our own journeys. In particular I am usually the first to question “the experts,” but in this case, I failed myself.

Not long after landing in Michigan, Rick and I decided it was time for a refractory check-up. He hadn’t had his eyes checked in well over a decade. I was at that awkward age, where one’s vision begins to go. My eyeglasses were woefully out of sync with my vision. We were new in town, so felt lucky when we found an eye care professional we really liked–and he directed us to a local outfit for the purchase of our new eyeglasses.

The new glasses were marvelous. If you let that go too long, the return to vision is, well, eye-opening. And, I loved the frames. Like the last pair, they are progressives, which can be a compromise. In exchange for not having to carry three sets of eyeglasses, you accept some loss of acuity, on one end, or the other. In this case, the reading end was never as good as I’d have liked.

It’s been five years. In that time, we’ve been busy, mostly building and planting. During that time, some things have fallen by the wayside as is normal during a busy phase. But I recently realized that a lifelong reading habit had waned, in part because I couldn’t see well. I’d given up needle-crafts–sewing, crochet and embroidery. I decided to make an appointment for an eye exam. Rick asked that I set one up for him, too. I was pleased that he wanted an appointment. I’d noticed that, when reading, he’s been sitting in a funny position, his head tilted oddly–sometimes, with one eye closed. What was up with that? Rick reads a lot–probably averaging five hours a day.

Now, the reason we like our eye doctor was because he shared our view that underlying health and nutrition are essential to all health–including eye health. For many years he’d taught at an out-of-state college, and had returned to private practice when family issues brought him back to Michigan. His clinic was attached to an Herbalist shop–so we saw him regularly there, even though we didn’t frequently visit for eye exams. This past year he’d moved his practice–when the Herbal shop fell victim to the pandemic. When I dropped by the new location to make our appointments, he asked what brought me in, and I quipped–because I can’t see well enough to read. He checked my record and replied that it’d been five years since our last appointment…so it was time.

When we appeared for our appointments, the first thing he did was drop our existing eyeglasses into a fancy scanning machine. In both cases, he exclaimed, and then manually examined our existing lenses. “No wonder you can’t read! These glasses have no reading level at all–they cut it off to fit the frames.”

Rick’s weren’t quite as bad, clipped deeply on one lens, but leaving a small reading field for one eye. The reason he was contorted while reading was because his defective eyeglasses had dictated the only posture where he could see. In my case, I just flat out couldn’t see well enough to read, because that part of the visual field didn’t exist.

So, at whom should I be angry? The optical company that sold me the specs? But why did I wait five years? Why did I let the world of reading go by the wayside? I am, after all, an author! Why did we trust some store-front eyeglass purveyor when our eyes were desperately trying to tell us otherwise? Five years! Part of it was that I was just figuring that it was a part of aging. Needless to say, I’m not going back there for the new eyeglasses.

Next though, I need to have my head examined, to figure out why I let this go on so long. I can hardly wait to get the new glasses. There are a lot of books I need to catch up on.