by Bill Harrison

This is a bad idea, I think, as I slip my hard-shell glasses case into the pocket of my jacket. It's liable to slide right out of there. I'd just donned my sunglasses and placed my regular glasses in the case. At my age, I need the shades, as well as my SPF 75 hat, for this bright Sunday morning in San Miguel de Allende. My wife Nina and I are in a taxi on the way to a group brunch at Rústica, a favorite breakfast spot on the Ancha. As soon as we crunch onto the gravelly outdoor patio, we spot Bill K, our friend with the wild, wispy, white hair. He hands me a copy of his new CD, which I absently thrust into my jacket pocket, too distracted to yet consider the fate of the glasses case.

There's a congenial crowd gathering to celebrate Horace, the godfather of this weekly event, who's turning eighty. We greet old friends and meet new ones as we wait for a place to sit at the crammed bowling alley of a table.

"Mucho gusto, Laura."
"Hola, Maria."
"¿Como estás, Efrain?"
"Jugo de naranja, por favor," I ask the waiter hovering nervously at my elbow. "Y por mi esposa también."

I shake hands with Lance, a singer/guitarist who I last saw on a gig we played ten years ago at Navy Pier in Chicago. His hair has gone white and he seems to have shrunk a bit. I'm sure I look exactly the same as back then. Come to think of it, that gig was probably more than a decade ago. My sense of elapsed time is collapsing now that I've attained theoretical retirement age.

Well-wishers, most of whom are of a similar vintage, continue to stream into this rocky garden of mesas and mushroom-like sombrillas.

Horace, a former art photographer and god-knows-what-else, totters towards the table, hanging on to his wife Maria for dear life. He's a wizened fellow with arthritic hands and a noticeable tremble. He started this brunch tradition years ago, originally for a small group of fellow photogs. It's morphed into a gathering of artists, musicians, writers, craft-persons, and assorted partners, many of them expats from northern climes. Thirty plus people will ultimately make up this morning's unwieldy gang.

"Horacio! Good to see you again. Feliz cumpleaños," I greet him, with a clap on the shoulder.

Most of the folks present are a fun hang but, somehow, when we finally glom onto a couple of chairs, we find ourselves seated near a rather vexing individual who won't shut up about his YouTube channel. I feign interest for a while before I decide I'll either have to kill him with my butter knife or turn my attention elsewhere. I opt for the latter.

One sabroso breakfast burrito later, during a lull in the conversation, I unconsciously feel for my glasses in my pocket—and come up with a handful of CD. I do the Lost Wallet Dance, patting myself down in a low-key frenzy. Nope. My glasses are definitely not here. I surreptitiously scan under the table and behind me, where I'd been standing earlier. Nada y pues nada.

The schmooze is still in full swing when I rise, pretending to head off to el baño. I tread carefully, eyeballing right, left, and center until I practically run over a server. I ask if anyone has seen a black glasses case. She hands me off to someone with more authority (and better English) who tells me that no, nothing has been turned in.

Well, crap. I was right: it was a terrible idea to stuff my glasses into my jacket pocket. Now they're gone. I'm going to have to confess to Nina and a few of the others that I've committed this boneheaded mistake. You'd think that, at the age of sixty-six, I'd have learned to heed that warning voice urging me to avoid doing something so blatantly foolhardy. But no.

The hallway from the creaky elevator to Apt. 6J was a murky tunnel with barely adequate overhead light fixtures every few feet. One day in 1962, I discovered that, if I squinted just right, the lights transformed into ray guns shooting deadly beams in all directions—powerful enough to zap any bad guys lurking in the shadows. I controlled the intensity of the rays with my eyes: the tighter the squeeze, the more lethal the rays. Our apartment was at the far end of the corridor, a long tromp for my six year-old legs. Firing ray-guns at nefarious criminals was my prehistoric video game—a fun way to get from here to there.

My eagle-eyed mother, however, saw this behavior in a different light. According to family lore, my first grade teacher had recently moved me from the H section closer to the front of the classroom with the As and Bs. She must have seen me squinting to make out the hieroglyphics she scrawled on the blackboard. I imagine my report card contained an alarming note to my parents urging them to get my vision checked, pronto.

Before I knew what was happening, I was given the first of countless pairs of glasses. The frame was heavy nondescript plastic, the lenses thick as goggles. Except for a brief period experimenting with contact lenses in my forties, I've had a pair of spectacles affixed to my face every waking moment of the past sixty years. The bones behind my ears are permanently gouged from the temple tips of every pair I've ever worn.

The other squirts at Public School 24 in Queens teased me about looking even more like the nerd I already was. Soon, though, many of them acquired their own glasses and had to quit giving me and the other early adopters a hard time. I was finally able to tell the lowercase Bs from the Ds and to make out the fine print on boxes of Cheerios and Wheaties. Call me Four Eyes if you must, but my world now had a fresh coat of Technicolor sharpness I'd never previously known.

Wearing specs had certain other advantages. In third grade, I'd occasionally sneak out of the house with my nylon Superman costume hidden under my school uniform. In class I was Clark Kent, mild-mannered pipsqueak. At a strategic moment, I'd ask for a hall pass and run to the boys' room. Once inside, I'd tear off the glasses like George Reeves (the only Superman I knew) and mime ripping off my school clothes before leaping out the window in pursuit of bad guys. (Bad guys were a central theme in my life at this point.) Glasses were an essential ingredient of this transformation from grade schooler to superhero.

I suspect my glasses might have slipped out of my jacket pocket in the taxi. Without my overpriced continuous-focus lenses nestled in their extravagant (yet subtle) Spanish frames, I'm dead in the water, blind as a bat, lost in space, and other clichés as well. I still have my prescription sunglasses but they'll only get me so far. I should be chewing up the scenery in the wake of this potentially disastrous turn of events, but somehow I'm not. I'm...calm? Earlier iterations of me would have been shaking his fist at the heavens, cursing a blue streak, and pacing around the house like a starving panther. I'm surprised by how not freaked out I am. Perhaps I've finally learned that barking at the moon does nothing to help matters here on Earth. It's only taken half a century to develop this ability to maintain some semblance of peace during adversity.

The visual acuity in each of my eyes was never that bad. My problems seeing stemmed from astigmatism and hyperopia. I could leave you to Google those terms, but I'm not that kind of guy. Astigmatism is caused by a misshapen eyeball. Eyes are supposed to be round; mine are tiny gelatinous footballs. This shape warps the light entering the eye via the lens, which then hits the retina at a distorted angle, causing objects both near and far to appear as though they're being viewed through a rain-soaked windshield. Hyperopia, aka farsightedness, is a condition in which the distance between one's cornea and retina is too short to refract light coming into the eye accurately. This abnormality messes with one's ability to focus on anything close. Between these two issues, I couldn't see much of anything without my corrective lenses, close up or far away. And one of the primary symptoms of both conditions is squinting. Mom was spot on about this one.

"There. Now how's that make you feel?" asked Dr. Sirota, the optometrist who'd just pulled off my glasses while I was sitting in his waiting room. I'd recently noticed that my current prescription wasn’t cutting it anymore. Trusted friends, including my roommate, swore by the results he produced and had warned me his methods were a bit unorthodox. Dr. Sirota believed that correcting patients' vision to the 20/20 standard was unnecessary and possibly harmful.

"You only need to see as well as you need to see," was his philosophy. In the 1980s, I needed to see close (reading), medium (reading music on a music stand a few feet away), and far (driving etc.). Sirota still had my glasses when he called me into his exam room. He sipped from a cup of tepid lemon water, the only liquid he claimed to drink.

"How are you doing without your lenses?"
"Not great. It feels strange."
"That's because you've gotten used to the over-correction in this prescription." He paused for a moment, then brought his face too close to mine and exclaimed, "You're an idiot!"

I wasn't as taken aback as I would have been had I not been told to expect this behavior. This, of course, begs the question as to why I'd agreed to make an appointment with this eccentric doctor to begin with. Trusted friends, including my roommate, swore by the results he produced. I was an impressionable lad in my late twenties. Discernment wasn't my forte. Who was I to argue?

What followed was one of the weirdest eye exams I ever experienced before or since. It seemed that Sirota was offering me lenses guaranteed to worsen my vision. When my new glasses arrived a month later, I discovered that the lenses Sirota had prescribed left me with lack of clarity at every focal distance. Yet, I was still gullible enough to doubt my own eyes, as it were.

"Just give them a try," Sirota admonished. "You'll adjust and find that your life is greatly improved. You'll be, as the philosophers say, 'a man of great vision.'"

That's not what happened, of course. My roommate, who had previously lauded this crackpot, nearly flunked his state driving test because he couldn't see well enough to execute all the required maneuvers. I got headaches trying to read a book or focus on street signs while driving. These glasses did not improve my life in any way. Next stop: LensCrafters, a local chain of optometry stores, where I scored a serviceable pair of glasses in two weeks and nobody called me an idiot.

I text the cab company as soon as we leave Rústica.
"I think I might have lost my eyeglasses in the car this morning. Would you ask the driver if he found them."
"Hello. Again. I'm going to ask. One minute."
"Gracias."
"That car is traveling to Guanajuato. I have no communication. As soon as it arrives. To your fate I ask. He hadn't reported any glasses. But I review."

I can't help but laugh at the dispatcher's mangled English. My Spanish is equally flawed, so I'm only mildly tempted to feel superior. Ninety minutes pass. I try again, thinking that if I ask in Spanish things might go better.

"Por favor, avísame si nuestro conductor de esta mañana encontró mis anteojos."

The dispatcher doesn't respond for the remainder of the day. Crap. I'll have to sit tight until the driver returns to San Miguel. My thoughts start spinning in solution mode. I'm off tomorrow but will have to figure out what I'm going to do about seeing my psychotherapy clients Tuesday and beyond. Which would be worse for them: my being unable to focus on their faces or showing up on their computer screens with ridiculous dark shades?

That evening, I realize I'm partially disabled. Unless I'm in daylight, I'm basically blind. Squinting won't help me now. The bad guys have all been vanquished; the enemy is within. I feel a sudden increase in empathy towards my wife, who is deaf in one ear and has significant hearing loss in the other. Without hearing aids, she's isolated from everything and everyone. Chances are that our impairments are only going to worsen as we age. This sneak preview of our destiny makes me muy uneasy.

If my regular glasses are truly MIA, it's going to take some time (several weeks, probably) to order a new pair from a local optometrist. That's a fate I'd gladly pay dearly to avoid.

Monday morning at 9:11, I text the cab company:

"Buenos días. Se tienen qualquier información sobre mis anteojos?"
"Hello. Bill. Good morning. If I find his glasses. He later takes them."
"I really need them so thank you very much."
"I get it. He is still outside San Miguel. He will arrive in a couple of hours."
"Thank you!!"

Nina and I head back to Rústica to see if they might have found my precious specs in the meantime. I confer with Eduardo, the manager. He shows me the security video footage of us entering the restaurant, which is pretty creepy. Video from during brunch shows nothing out of the ordinary.

Finally, just shy of noon, I receive this message:

"Hola Good afternoon. The driver arrived in San Miguel. Hello. Mr. Bill."
"Did he find my glasses?"
"He has them. But now it's going to another service. The idea was to leave them in Rústica in passing. Later delivery."
"Gracias a Dios," I say to Nina. "That was a close call."

An hour later, we meet up with Martín, the driver we last saw Sunday morning.

"Tengo algo para ti," he teases, handing me the glasses case.

I make sure the glasses are inside, then clutch the case with both hands. It's not going in any pockets this time.

"Muchísimas gracias, mi amigo," I say, handing Martín a two-hundred peso note.
"De nada, de nada."
"Soy tan viejo que olvido donde pongo mis anteojos."
"No, todavia no. Tu eres joven."

Martín is well aware that I'm way beyond any pretense of youth. Managing the world while half blind for just 24 hours was an eye-opening shock. Living with a disability, albeit temporarily, forced me to see the fateful slide toward dependence and vulnerability as inevitable. No me gustó.

Once we arrive home, I wipe the lenses clean, restore my glasses to their rightful place on my face, and think:

No se puede escapar el destino de los años.

**************

Bill Harrison is a psychotherapist, writer, and former professional bass player. His memoir, Making the Low Notes: A Life in Music, was published by Open Books Press in June 2023. His other work can be read in After Hours, Allium, Another Chicago Magazine, Bass World, Counseling Today, The Intermezzo, Sledgehammer, Under the Gum Tree and elsewhere. Bill lives in Chicago with his poet/therapist wife and a rambunctious Bengal named Jazzy. All three of them spend part of the year in San Miguel de Allende.

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