Always, my grandmother would peer at her newspapers through a huge, heavy, round magnifying glass.
No one ever dared ask her why she wouldn't wear glasses.
Asking might have implied criticism.
No one ever criticized my grandmother.
That would have been bad.
Did she find glasses ugly? Inconvenient? Uncomfortable?
Did some technician fail to fit her small round face, so like mine?
Or was it a matter of cost?
I look at my straight teeth in the mirror and wonder what sacrifices my grandparents made to pay for the braces I needed so badly.
Did my grandmother trade her eyes for my smile?
I have no memories of my grandmother, the retired children's librarian, ever reading to me.
But then, I learned to read to myself so early, and only my father continued to read to me afterwards.
My father, the unwelcome son-in-law, my grandmother had not a single kind word for ever, excepting only her ongoing praise for how he read to me.
I remember her having me read to her.
I remember her guiding me in what to read.
I remember her futile efforts to keep me from reading certain stories "too soon", and how many decades it took me to mature enough to understand what she had meant by that.
But I don't believe my grandmother ever read herself a book in the time that I was alive.
I remember reading her coupons for her in the store, far from the magnifying glass.
I remember when my mother began to need me to read the fine print on her coupons. I remember my confusion. The expiration was right there, why couldn't she see it?
I remember my mother's first glasses.
I remember how quickly she seem to go from not needing glasses to needing them all the time.
I remember my mother's frustration and my confusion in a restaurant, as she glared at the familiar menu that she could no longer read.
I remember the classmate who reached across the table to put her spare reading glasses on my face after months of hearing my pronunciation skills falter and fade. I remember how astonished I was that the Hebrew vowels were suddenly clear, that the problem had not been my brain but my vision.
I must trust blindly now, now that I cannot read to research my way through the insurance jungle of options and risks.
Trusting blindly has brought me sloppy exams, crippling expense, useless prescriptions, and tinfoil frames that don't fit anybody well.
I can count the books I read in a year on my fingers these days.
I keep forgetting that I can't see.
I keep forgetting that I need glasses.
Another friend intervenes, scattering cheap reading glasses around my home.
I keep forgetting where they are.
The experience of having to hunt for a prosthetic to do something that was as basic as breathing to me is perpetually bewildering.
I find myself half-hoping my eyes will get bad enough that I will need to wear glasses all the time-- but how would I know without the blind trust of another exam?
How do such glasses even work?
Do they magnify the whole world all the time, like a hearing aid?
Can glasses even help eyes whose ability to focus actually changes from day to day?
I can't trust, I can't research, I can't understand, I can't move forward.
My three year old son and I fight over my grandmother's old heavy magnifying glass on the field of his favorite board game.
"Get your glasses," my preschooler scolds me.
I put them on and a window to my own childhood opens.
Details explode-- an owl on a rooftop, a scene in a window.
I am lost in delight and wonder at a scene I have coached him through a dozen times without truly seeing it, without knowing that I wasn't seeing it.
And I am stunned by the question of how far this can go--
Of how I can be walking around all the time so unaware of that which I am unaware of.
