Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Suddenly, it's all come back into focus

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Brooks Peterson

Monday, November 12, 2001
Suddenly, it's all come back into focus

Life is a funny business. During our stroll through our time on this old orb, it will variously inspire us, amuse us, terrify us, infuriate us.
   And sometimes it just drives you nuts.
   Take the case of the missing spectacles. Please.
   I have had, well, an issue with glasses for the last few years. During my last visit to the ophthalmologist, the doc made official what had long been obvious to me: It was time for . . . bifocals.
   This obviously was one of those passage things (thank you, Gail Sheehy). For two, three years now, I've been forced to whip off my specs every time I wanted to read the paper or take care of other up-close-and-personal stuff, then slap 'em back on for driving and other big-picture pursuits.
   This was annoying to me - and even moreso to my loved ones. My incomparable Aunt Shirley, whom we lost not quite two years ago, was never one to hold back on such matters: Every time we met, she would ask, sometimes with a bit of an edge in her voice, when I was going to get my bifocals. Soon, I'd mutter, soon.
   "Soon" came last Thursday. About midmorning, in the midst of slapping together the next day's editorial page, I completed a task, reached for my specs . . . only to find they had gone missing.
   I mean, seriously missing. I turned my office upside down, but to no effect. I wandered forlornly through the newsroom: Had I left them at the Xerox? At the coffee machine? Maybe in the restroom. Maybe . . . Ah! The coffee shop! I'd been there (relatively) early in the a.m., and had bundled up some trash and deposited it in the appropriate receptacle. Ya think?
   Celina, the wondrous lady who presides over our culinary destiny, granted me access to the trash baskets. Like a berserk Egyptologist on an archeological dig, I sifted carefully through the debris, only to find . . . nada.
   A line from antiquity kept popping into my mind: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
   Why didn't I just get my spare glasses, you ask? Because, er, I don't have any spares.
   Life with bifocals
   I did, however, have a prescription - the one I had gotten a millennia or so. So I hot-footed it over to one of those eyeglasses-in-an-hour establishments, picked out a pair of, uh, serviceable frames, and after a decent interval with the pleasant staff, was back in business.
   With bifocals.
   Now, I had for years heard all the bifocal horror stories: You'll be falling all over yourself (and others) until you get used to them. Watch out for the curbs. And above all, give yourself plenty of time to get accustomed to them.
   Having no fallback position, I gave myself about 30 milliseconds to get myself and the specs accommodated to one another.
   It hasn't been all that bad, especially when you consider the alternative: Living in a word that looks like a French Impressionist painting, all fuzzy and hazy and undefined. There's a place for that sort of thing - in museums and in the homes of gazillionaires intent on establishing their bona fides as major culture mavens - but not in the workaday world in which most of us must toil. And in any case, while pastoral landscapes, Parisian nightlife and/or still lifes may look great in soft focus, it really doesn't flatter Corpitos and environs.
   So: I made my way back to work and returned to . . . well, to whatever it is I do. Then, for no particular reason, my gaze fell on the cookie tin that currently rests atop my portable CD/stereo, and what do I behold but . . . my old glasses, with a triumphant glitter in their lenses.
   I've got a theory. You may think that my own obliviousness was to blame. I, however, think not. I think my glasses slipped through a portal into a parallel dimension, just like in "Stargate." And they partied all day with those socks that are always disappearing from our clothes dryers. Then they slipped back in, waiting smugly for me to discover them.
   At that point, I might well have gone ballistic - but I reined in my emotions. At that point, the last think I wanted to do was make a spectacle of myself.

   Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com


Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com

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