Here's Mud in Your Eye

This morning I settled down comfortably to do the Sunday New York Time's crossword puzzle. However, I find it increasingly less fun to do for the simple reason that I need reading glasses. A five-letter word for "dyed-in-the-wool" (total) is not the same as "died-in-the-wool" (chops)!

Last spring I spoke to my ophthalmologist about this. Dr. Stan is a parent of one of my former students and has been my eye doctor for quite awhile. I joked easily that it was getting more difficult to read ingredients on labels and asked if I was ready for bifocals. Without batting an eye he said, "You're not there yet. You'll know you're ready when it's no longer amusing but annoying."

Annoying happened this past summer. Caveman and I were trying to find our way into downtown Chicago to meet a cousin. He was driving, and I was the navigator. For some reason, Caveman does not trust my driving skills when visiting new, large cities. If I make even the slightest shift of the steering wheel, it will elicit the stiffening of body parts (arms, legs, back - get your mind out of the gutter) and a roaring of his voice. However, his brother will drift through Chicago freeway lanes with no signal while turned to talk to those of us in the backseat. Caveman will not show even a feeble token of discomfort or acknowledgement of honking horns. Instead, he will carry on an animated discourse on the stock market and ever-increasing gas prices, thereby encouraging his brother to turn towards us with his own ideas on how the economy is going to hell-in-a-handbasket (and no doubt drifting through lanes along the way while Satan himself is honking his horn and yelling, "Get off of the road, You Nut!).

But I digress.

My job as navigator was to look at the map for the street we wanted and let Caveman know where to turn. The problem? In order to read the map, I had to take my regular glasses off. Then I had to put them back on to see what street we were on, then take them back off to find the corresponding street on the map. Of course, by the time I put them back on and realized where we were, we had missed the turn and now were on a one-way street trying to find our way back. Hence, the whole process started over again.

So, here I am today faced with the certainty that in a couple of months, I will be the proud new owner of some bifocals. I will mark that occasion with some four letter words.