Visual clarity is eye-opening experience

Everyone who knows me knows I can be a little fuzzy sometimes; a little out of focus. But it was getting worse.

My typos were getting stranger and more frequent. I misspelled my own name and, once, assured my editor I wouldn’t kiss my deadline.

Friends signed the check for me when I went out to eat, not because I’d had one too many glasses of wine, but because I couldn’t read the tiny print. (I understand I’m a big tipper.)

I ran out of excuses the day I stood in the toy aisle at Target, staring at a box that held the new “Call Girl” Barbie.

I was shocked. Call Girl Barbie? I waved the doll around while I went on at some length about how I had known it was only a matter of time; how I knew it would come to this one day; that hadn’t I said all along that Barbie dressed more like a street-walking tart than a nice girl who was also a veterinarian, teacher, nurse, rock-star, pediatrician and stay-at-home-mom?

My disgusted teenager grabbed the box. “MOM! Will you put your glasses on,” she said. “It’s a ‘Cali Girl.’ You know, like California girl. Geeze.”

Oh. Never mind.

Where are my glasses, anyway?

I buy plenty of drug store reading glasses but I’m always misplacing them, leaving a trail of spectacles, like clues, to mark my “Where’s Waldo” path around the city. Once, prowling through an antique store, I found a pair of my glasses and a notebook on a shelf where I’d left them the last time I’d been there.

So, with a lot of irritated encouragement from the children who were tired of holding things across the room so I could read them, I made an appointment to have my eyes checked.

It only took a few minutes in the darkened examination room to point out what should have been obvious: I need three different lenses to see the world clearly. I need a little help for objects far away, a little more help for things not so far away, and a whole lot of help for anything closer than my outstretched arms.

With my usual tendency to overdo things I had skipped the traditional rite-of-passage transition to bifocals – that stigma of middle age – and moved right ahead to trifocals.

Lucky me.

Prescription in hand, I spent an hour trying on frames for my new glasses, putting my hair up, pulling it back and finally letting it go wild (which is how it ends up anyway, no matter what I try to do with it.)

I finally picked a pair of trendy titanium frames I thought gave me a sort of Diane Keaton look.

I was warned that it would take a couple of weeks to adjust to viewing the world through three separate lenses. And for the first few days I constantly cocked my head like an eager robin angling for the best view of the worm. I took exaggerated steps up onto the curb. I held onto the rail and took the stairs very carefully, aware that stylish glasses wouldn’t help if I pitched headlong and landed in a crumpled heap at the bottom. I would still look like a dork to anyone who was watching.

I hated the things. But I persisted, because I had paid retail – something I try never to do – for the designer frames.

But then, late one afternoon, when the sky was as dull and gray as lead, I caught sight of myself in a store window as I walked down the street. It definitely wasn’t Diane Keaton staring back at me.

Rather, bent against the rain, huddled over the heavy stack of books in my arms, my bulky coat flapping around my legs, I looked like Donna Reed. Not the perky Donna Reed from television, but the drab, spinsterish Donna Reed from that scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” where we see how dreary and sad life would have been for everyone if George Bailey had never been born.

I paid retail for that?

I don’t think so.

The sporty little designer frames are in their case at the bottom of my purse. They’re going back to the store and I’m going back to reading glasses that help me see what’s right in front of my nose. I’ll just squint at things across the room.

As for what’s down the road, what lies ahead, I’ll take my chances. I don’t think it pays to see that too clearly anyway.