5-4-Fri: Glasses

Lately, I have been choking on the spindrift of the perfect storm that is: getting older, needing the euphemistic "progressive" lenses in my glasses, having an outdated lens prescription that is making me crazy, and physically breaking my glasses frames.

So, my current glasses lens prescription is woefully out of date. I am squinting fiercely at everything father than 5 feet away. Not that I am any better close up since my flowering presbyopia makes me look like Geppetto trying to carve Pinnocchio's nose whenever I read a menu, text message, or anything, really, that is closer than the newspaper on the lap of the person next to me on the plane. To top it all off, last weekend my highfalutin "Ray-Ban" designer glasses frames broke because I looked at them wrong. As Patton Oswalt might say, "Oh, Ray-Ban, why is your beauty so fragile?" Looking ahead at the prospect of buying new and expensive bifocals that let me see clearly but don't make me look like grandpa I am oddly uncomforted by Wikipedia's reassurance that presbyopia is simply caused by the "natural course of aging."

Looking backward on my past spectacles as I try to select a new pair that are hip-but-not-hipster has been instructive:

1. George Bush Glasses. When I hit puberty, it hit back. Nestled in the cornucopia of hormonal changes brought to me by adolescence--right in there with head-gear braces, body odor, shaving, acute self-consciousness, and an all-pervading onanistic obsession with the opposite sex--was the sudden need for glasses. I couldn't see the blackboard. I couldn't see the Tee Vee. I was guessing at street signs. My father determined that I needed My. First. Pair. Of. Glasses. I went forth to the mall and selected a pair of depucelating frames made famous by George Bush the First: truly humongous, square plastic lenses tied into silver half-frames with fishing line. I marched into the middle-to-high-school transition looking like I was ready to be spoofed by Dana Carvey. Still, I will never forget the ride home in the car when I realized that one could see the leaves all the way up on top of the trees. The magic of optics! These bad boys stuck with me through a series of upgraded lenses and until I graduated from college.

2. Paper Chase Glasses. Naturally, by the time I was matriculating into graduate school I was a wiser and more stylish man. I needed new glasses big time--and not just because my eyesight was noticeably worse. I needed to get into something less repugnantly Republican and into something a serious Liberal Arts Man might proudly sport. Enter the equally huge but suave and deboner tortoise shell glasses. I always think of these as the type made famous by actors like James Stephenson in shows like "The Paper Chase." I felt fondly toward these glasses but recently saw a picture of myself from the era--not joking--in a button down oxford dress shirt, sweater vest, and these frames. Even I want to kick sand in my face.

3. Armani Glasses. Once I left academe and started toiling for the man in paid employ, I had the money to travel. And it was on a trip to Manhattan to visit my pal Alison that the tortoise shell frames went the way of the Dodo. In fact, one Saturday she forced me against my will to actually leave my glasses behind in her girl ghetto apartment on the upper East Side and, blind like Lear, stagger around the Big Apple with her to shop for new ones. Her exact words, I believe, were, "Leave them right here; in an hour you will never be wearing those damn things ever again." And so I got a pair of beyond-hip, matte black, ovoid frames from style-maker Giorgio Armani. I must say that people admired them and--like a member of an expecting couple asking if they could also moniker their kid with the cool name you and your spouse thought of first--a colleague at work asked after the exact account number of the frames and indicated that he wanted a pair, too. These were great glasses and died a spectacular death worthy of their virtuoso Italian progenitor: they split cleanly in half across the bridge while I was waving them to make a profound point to impress a hot date over wallet-breaking martinis in the lounge at the Mayflower hotel.

4. Ray-Ban Glasses. Which led me to buy my current pair of Ray-Ban frames in a desperate suburban 24-hour search for substitutes to Giorgio's masterpieces. Times, and styles, had changed since that fateful day in New York and I found myself in a narrow, rectangular frame of brushed silver that makes me feel as though I should really speak with a German accent. I have never actually liked them, though, and so I do not bemoan their demise. But I am not happy about the expense and trouble of searching for replacements. The task involves, among other things, standing in front of mirrors all day trying to ignore the fact that since I tried on my first pair, I have gained 75 pounds, grown an additional chin, and now need to make sure the frames match my greying hair as well as my lab-rat pink complexion.

5. Woody Allen Glasses. I am thinking of going toward the new retro-geek Woody Allen style lenses that are popular now. That way I can pretend that I am a scientist and/or a British spy from the '60s. Also, the bigger lenses give the optician room to fit in three different gradations of power. My Dad wore specs like these pretty continuously from the time he left boot camp until he was in his late 50s. I worry, though, that what seems cool at first blush in the style-permeated hot-house atmosphere of the store might end up in practice making me look like a drag version of my Aunt Alice at the beach from those old, square, color Kodak prints in the family photo album. In any case, I have to move on a decision swiftly since my broken and ill-patched frames are leaving me in a perpetual state of lightly nauseated disorientation.

PS - I am in the midst of borrowing and testing out my work's iPad in anticipation of buying one myself but I cannot tell if I am not liking its small size or if my miserable duck-taped glasses are prejudicing me against a blameless technology. Oh, and the 70s-style ballad "Belinda" by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby is a one-hit wonder unto itself; now playing on iTunes.