The Vision Thing



By Tony Kornheiser



Sunday, September 15 1996; Page F01

The Washington Post 



I am sitting here, holding in my hands an object that has changed my life.



It's a pair of reading glasses my friend Nancy gave to me.



Suddenly, I can hold a typed letter in front of my face and read it without having to stretch my

arms out like I'm playing a trombone.



These last few years I'd noticed that it was getting increasingly hard to read books and

magazines the way I'd always read them before -- in the same room as me.



The only things I could read comfortably were highway signs from about half a mile away. If

you reprinted the full text of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on one of those signs, I could

read it -- depending on how fast we were moving, of course. The closer I brought anything

printed to my face, the more blurred the type became. It was like trying to read Chaucer

through a schmear of cream cheese. And it was getting worse. I was completely helpless with

small type -- like the nutrition label on a soup can. It aggravated me that I wasn't able to keep

track of my daily intake of riboflavin.



Last month I bought a watch. When I got it home I noticed it had a small dark spot on the

right side of the face that I must have missed in the shop. I rubbed and rubbed it with glass

cleaner, but it didn't come out. Then my daughter looked at the watch and told me it wasn't a

spot -- it was the date.



Nancy came to my rescue when she saw me attempting to type this column with my toes.

Handing me a pair of glasses, Nancy explained, "The mature eye has trouble making the

adjustment from looking long range to looking short range."



The mature eye had a ring of euphemism, much like "Relaxed Fit Jeans," which is what they

call jeans designed to fit middle-aged guys built like Mallomars. 



I put the glasses on and realized that if I'd been sitting any farther away from my computer at

The Washington Post, I'd have been at the New York Times.



"Wow," I said.



"Keep them," Nancy said. "I have loads of them at home. I keep a pair every place I run into

small type -- by the cookbooks, the phone books, the VCR. They only cost about $12 a

pair."



"Where'd you get them?" I asked.



"The supermarket."



Buying a pair of eyeglasses at the supermarket sounds to me like buying a haddock at a gas

station, but who am I to complain? For once, I was comfortably reading something smaller

than the top E on an eye chart. "What do they call these things?" I asked. "Adult reader acuity

enhancement devices"? 



"Old-people glasses," Nancy said. 



The thought of wearing "old-people glasses" actually doesn't bother me, since I've recently

had extensive cosmetic surgery, and I look fabulous! That's what I told the guy from

Washingtonian magazine who called me the other day and said, "We got a tip that you had

cosmetic surgery over the summer. Did you?" 



Well, no, I didn't. But I could tell they wanted it to be true. So I said, "Geez, you got me! I

had my eyes done, my chin done, and a blond-hair transplant. Now I look just like Vanna

White." I can't wait to see what they print.



I told my friend Gino about my new glasses, and he was delighted. This is not because he

loves and respects me as a friend and was happy that I'd found a way to see better, but

because he hates and resents me. He has been wearing glasses since he was 10, and he

cannot stand people like me who have had perfect eyesight and treat people like him as

though they are pitiably disabled, like someone with half a body who rolls around the street

on a skateboard.



There is a pecking order among the visually disabled. Gino has bifocals. But he thinks he is

WAAAY luckier than his friend, who has TRI-focals. He introduced me to the guy, who is

the Post arts editor. His name is John Pancake, and Gino asked me not to make fun of John's

name, because that would be a cheap shot. Anyway, John's glasses are indeed an amazing

thing to behold. They have two deep gouges running across the lenses, like they've been

strip-mined. The top third is for driving, the middle third for reading a computer screen, and

the bottom third for reading up close. They look weird, but I can "flatly" assure you, and I am

not being "flip," that they make John Pancake a much batter editor.



Anyway, getting back to my conversation with Gino, we were having lunch in a deli and I was

lording it over him about how, unlike him, I still needed glasses only to read, and it was no big

deal. 



"Oh, yeah?" he sneered, shoving his chopped-liver sandwich right up to my face. "Can you

see this?" 



I couldn't. I hadn't brought my glasses with me, because I wasn't planning on reading lunch.

The sandwich was a big brown blur. It could have been a hamster for all I knew. "What if

there was a big, fat, wriggling tapeworm coming right out of the chopped liver?" he said.

"Would you see it? Or would you just . . . EAT it?" 



He had a point. 



I hate the four-eyed geek. 



Now I wear my glasses for eating, too. 

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