Flashback, part 92 of n

I don’t remember exactly when I first got the glasses. I want to say it was around third grade or so. Brown plastic frames with a double bridge, plastic lenses with a reddish-brown slight gradient tint – just the thing for maximum 80s nerdery. Largely unchanged for years, replaced for about six months with contacts until the pinkeye problems became too big to contain (oh, the problems of non-disposable lenses and heated cleaning)…

But after about five or six years, the insurance changed, and suddenly I could get a new pair of glasses every year. Spring of ninth grade, it was a less-rimmed but still hugely thick pair with a gray tint instead of that nasty red-brown (but still no high-index lenses and SO ridiculously thick). Tenth grade, it was a black plastic pair that I wore for a couple of years – because in eleventh grade, I got prescription sunglasses for the first time. Standard aviators, which might have almost looked cool on anyone else at all. And then, summer before college, finally some semi-trendy round-ish glasses with high-index lenses to keep them from being coke-bottle thick.

I replace them the next year with another pair almost just like them – and then discovered disposable contacts and the prospect of not wearing glasses all the time AND having the option to have cool sunglasses. And that did for it. I went a decade without a new pair of glasses, because my insurance was used every time on replenishing the disposable contacts. By 2001, the prescription was so far out of whack that I needed something for those days when I just couldn’t blink the crud out of the contacts one more time.

Honestly, the main reason I went looking again was because of my new girlfriend, who wore glasses sometimes and had these amazing magnetic clip-on shades that went over them. Brilliantly simple, made you wonder why nobody had thought of that before, and I wound up buying a similar pair in 2002. Tiny things, and once again, the last glasses I would buy for a decade (although six years in, I did have the lenses updated with the kind that get darker in UV exposure). The contacts were still primary, but I at least had some alternative.

Six years ago, I replaced them with a frankly too-expensive pair of frames that were doing their best to be stylish. Self-darkening, too, which I soon realized was less than optimal when driving. Within a year I was mostly off transit, and on days I took the car, I found myself squinting just a bit too much to be comfortable. But then, they weren’t really meant for everyday wear.

Which leads us to now. I spent my entire VSP benefit and some flex-spending aside on two pair of Warby Parker glasses, one sunglasses and one regular, in a neo-retro style that frankly suggests nothing so much as “short-sleeve dress shirt, skinny tie, and you’re launching a Gemini mission at six but serving a warrant on some Mississippi Klansmen at nine.” Which I only undertook because my cousin does all right switching between two pair of glasses and I can always leave the polarized prescription shades in the car for just such instances.

I’ve come full circle, to be honest. I don’t want the hassle and inconvenience of carrying extra contacts and replacing them every week or two. It’s the same line of thinking that has me on a regular rotation of footwear that doesn’t need to be laced up (or, in the summer, require socks). To wake up and put on a pair of glasses is a lot lighter lift than to wake up, take out the contacts case, rinse off each lens, blink it into the eye, and then remember to take them out at night so you don’t sleep in them and make things worse in the morning. And much easier to deal with for camping. Even if you’re just driving up to a cabin with running water and electricity.

I guess it’s possible that I’ve just aged into wanting simplicity without artifice. The glasses aren’t exactly hipster – they might read that way on a millennial, but on someone in their mid-40s it just reads as…I’m not sure what. Hopefully something like that infamous afternoon when I was told that I looked like I didn’t have to prove anything.

I was wearing my glasses that day.

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