by Daney
Vision—not the lofty kind but common old eyesight—has been on my mind a lot lately. It started at the end of a delightful visit with my friends in Marin County. I left early for the San Francisco airport, knowing that I don’t see well at night. I wasn’t too far down the road when it became clear that daylight is not all that enlightening either. I couldn’t read the signs.
Thanks to kind fate and very good directions from Linda and Bob, I arrived at SFO without harm to self or others. I also was armed with an ironclad determination to do whatever it took to get my eyesight corrected. That led to cataract surgery and a lot of decisions about what kind of lens to have inserted, when to do the second eye, etc. It seems there’s no perfect solution or, if there is, I haven’t found it.
After having one eye corrected, I waited eagerly for my new glasses to arrive. Already I could see more clearly than I had in years. With the new spectacles I would be as sharp-eyed as a kid again, I reasoned.
The day finally arrived, the technician finally quit fiddling and I put on my glasses, waiting for the world to spring into focus. It did not.
What gives? I closed my left eye and could see perfectly with my right. I closed the right eye. Same deal. Each eye worked perfectly on its own but they definitely weren’t cooperating with one another.
It’s gotten better since then but I still see better one eye at a time. Maybe there’s a lesson in this. I’m definitely grateful that I can see so much better and I’m wondering if the disjointedness will help me see the angles we often overlook when we’re focused on the straight and narrow. Flannery O’Connor’s biographer said she looked at the world as if there was a film of acetate over it, slightly skewed. (I’m paraphrasing.) I would certainly be willing to sacrifice an eye for a grain of her genius!
