Foursight

Tuesday I lost my glasses.

I was trying to pick up saw logs (black locusts for the posts and beams of a house going up for Dennis & Sharon over at Dancing Rabbit) with the hydraulic forks of our big tractor (an Allis Chalmers D-17 if you're keeping score at home) and got a bit too close to our colony of beehives on a day threatening rain—and when the barometer plummets, so does the normally sunny disposition of our apiary.

Inconveniently, I got nailed on my right eyelid. In my haste to get the goddamn sting out (it can pulse additional poison into the skin even after becoming detached from the bee). I must have wiped my glasses off my face and never realized what I'd done until I had gotten back to the house (where there was a mirror), had carefully plucked the sting out of my eyelid, and had doused my face in cold water to help contain the swelling. Only after all that did I start to wonder where my glasses were, and couldn't find them anywhere in the house. Unfortunately, I couldn't find them anywhere near where I had been stung either—my brown frame glasses apparently blending easily in the field. Somewhere in the melee, my four eyes became two again.

Fortunately, it's not that big a deal:
a) I wear glasses mostly to drive or to watch movies. I've been nearsighted since high school yet my vision is good enough to function in daily life without optical assistance, so I generally do without. *
b) The prescription on my old pair (purchased maybe six years ago) was getting gradually out of sync with the shape of my eyeballs and I was getting close to needing a trip to the optometrist anyway.
c) I had a bad scratch on one of the lenses (I know this is a bit like saying it's time to get a new car because the ashtrays are full, but it all adds up).
d) Finally, when I told the story to Ma'ikwe the next day, her immediate response was joy—now she could help me pick up something more stylish (whatever that means).

* I had a inadvertent test of just how well I can function without optical assistance back in 1996. My son Ceilee (then 15 and not quite old enough for a driver's license) and I were canoeing in northern Saskatchewan and I lost my glasses when I flipped the canoe in a poorly executed attempt to run a set of rapids. While the only other loss I sustained in the mishap was a wounded ego, it was unexpectedly interesting threading our way through the North Woods lakes and islands for the remainder of the trip with a horizon that never got better than fuzzy. In addition, I had to drive 1000 miles home with Ceilee helping me discern road signs at 55 mph. Luckily, I didn't hit anything, or otherwise get pulled over for a traffic stop. Whew!

In recent years I've started to joke with process clients or workshop attendees that I'm at a stage in life where it no longer matters much if people wear name tags, because I can't read them without glasses, and I can't read my notes with glasses—and on the whole they're better off with my being able to read my notes than their name tags.

Maybe my next pair will be—shudder—bifocals. Hell, I'm 60 after all, and it would be nice to be able to attend live performances and to both see the stage and read the program without taking my glasses on and off. Or to be able to both see the road and a road map. Or to shift more easily between reading a book and reading the landscape when on train rides.

Who knows, maybe this time I can get a pair that repels bees, or at least have enough foursight to beeware. Or maybe I need better beewear. Or learn how to spell better. Or to better protect readers from strained punnery. It gets confusing.