Blur
The top five signs I need glasses:
1. I keep mistaking ubiquitous-in-Colorado cars with ski racks for police cars.
2. I was behind a car and thought I saw an Irish Setter in the back seat. It turned out to be a girl.
3. Every piece of lint or fuzz on the carpet is a spider, until proven otherwise.
4. Repetitive squinting, to the point people believe I have permaglare.
5. Was that Osceola or Oneida I just passed?
I think everyone has an aging milestone. It could be a certain age, an event like a high school or college reunion, or the day when the zit cream is replaced with wrinkle cream on the shelf of shame in the bathroom cabinet. For me, it is getting glasses.
I had glasses in the past for a very mild astigmatism. My glasses were more about playing a part than having a true medical need. They were a prop I’d slide up and down my nose at the college library, Paris on the Platte, or Denny’s. Paired with a clove cigarette, I was ready to power my way through any discussion on the art of making the perfect mix tape or spontaneous road-trip planning.
During one of my many early-20s moves, my glasses were lost and I never bothered to replace them.
I can’t ignore the glasses issue any more. I’m looking forward to the day when I won’t mistake children for dogs, or dogs for children. When I drive through an intersection and spot a white 4 door sedan with a ski rack, I won’t have to check my spedometer or make sure my hands are in the ten and two-o-clock Good Citizen position on the steering wheel.
Lint will lose its power to make me scream and take off my shoe in a threatening manner.
Life will take on the crisp finish it had in childhood. It isn’t often we have a chance to regain something we silently lost over the years, so I should embrace this milestone and conjure up something else to dread. The AARP membership application, anyone?
What are your aging milestones?
I had my first real aging milestone this week. My sister phoned to tell me a friend we went to college with who is two years younger than me is now a doctor. A real practicing physician. Younger than me. That was a first.
(If it makes you feel any better, when I was in my early twenties, we were driving through some countryside and I looked out the car window to see what I could have sworn was a lion, roaming the plains of Oklahoma. Turns out it was a haystack. Went in for an eye exam shortly after that.)
Mine aging milestone happened a couple of years ago when I went to the doctor for what I thought was an ear infection. Turns out I have “profound hearing loss” in one ear. Admittedly this probably has more to do with all the loud music I used to listen to and talking incessently on my cell phone but it made me feel really old anyway!
You better have those glasses before ever coming to my house or you’ll think the floor is covered with spiders… I hate when the girl at Starbuck’s calls me Ma’am.
Steph
I knew I was getting old the last time my husband took me to the movie theater and I was disgusted by what all the young ‘uns were wearing. My mom was ALWAYS disgusted with what I wore as a teen and I always swore I would be cooler than that when I was old…sigh.
My aging milestone is a lack of metabolism. Oh wait. I was born with that.
How about the remaking of movies from when you were a teenager? Like Footloose?
I can’t stop talking about how expensive postage stamps are these days.
wow, so many to pick from. But my most recent came in the mail today. A save the date card for my 20th reunion. And unlike my wife’s reunion that we just went to which was her 20th high school; this is for my 20th college.
OUCH!
It seems like just yesterday I was vomitting I mean studying in it dorm.
just read that last comment. It doesn’t read well because I’m typing on my phone.
Why?
Long story.
The ouch part comes not only with aging eyes but the cost of fashionable frames, which then need unlined bifocals, which then need anti-reflecting lens,which also need to be scratch proof not to mention being transitional so that they magically turn into sunglasses. Add that all up!
One showed up the other day as I shook my head in disgust as two “teenage” boys drove up our street at mock 10…I think that used to be me, but several years and two kids later, I’m on the other side.
Megan—just wait until a kid you used to babysit is a doctor! I forgot about that one…