One Thing or Another: The Vision Thing

It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

One thing you can say about aging is that it offers something for everyone. If your knees aren’t buckling yet, you might have stiffness in various joints; if your joints aren’t betraying you after decades of an intimate relationship, it might take you twice as long to get out of bed in the morning as it did way back in your 40s. Between the added weight most of us take on like an unwanted passenger and the silent creaking of bones that would rather stay on the mattress another twenty minutes, rising and shining can sound like the command of a drill sergeant.

My current top pick for most annoying thing about aging is my eyesight, or its slow, insidious blurring. I’ve worn glasses for many years. I can even remember wanting to, back in my 30s and 40s. There was something a little bit outlaw about wearing glasses in a culture that thinks we’re better looking without them, sort of like being gay until the younger generations decided it’s not all that interesting. The difference then was that I didn’t have to wear them. I could still read without them if I held the book or magazine a certain distance from my face and squinted at an angle.

Now I can’t read anything—anything!—without spectacles jammed down onto the bridge of my nose. Every time I want to read a recipe or instructions on putting a chair together I have to retrieve one of several pairs of drug store reading glasses I keep on hand. And sewing a button on a shirt? A form of torture that ought to be prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. But first, of course, I have to find them, which means countless circles around the apartment looking for glasses I’d set down two minutes ago, but that’s another item on the list: Where the hell did I put my glasses (or my keys or my phone or my mind …).

And why do manufacturers and copywriters insist on making it worse by typing things in ever-smaller fonts? How can I tell if what I’m about to eat won’t kill me when every word on the label is written in a size fit for a gnat’s eyes? Do gnats even have eyes? And those labels on aspirin bottles and every other over-the-counter medicine that could send you to the hospital if you don’t read the small print. It’s all small print!

I’m typing this with glasses on and the font zoomed up to 200 percent. There are times I want to rip them off my face and pull them apart in frustration simply because I don’t have any choice but to wear them, unless I never want to read again. Would that be such a terrible loss? Well, yes. I like reading. Sometimes I love reading. And there always seems to be something I’m required to read just to function in this world. At least I don’t need glasses for anything but text. I can still see the people in my life, and the road signs and the television shows I’d be better off not watching. It’s just part of getting older … anyone can see that.

Mark McNease is the Editor of lgbtSr, a website “where age is embraced and life is celebrated,” serving the over-50 LGBTQ audience. He’s the author of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries, co-editor and publisher of the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), host of the Live Mic with Mark podcast, and the co-creator and original writer for the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.