After too many years of squinting and watery eyes, particularly when reading at night or looking at highway signs, I can see again. It turns out that not only had the vision in my left eye declined substantially (from a -6.5 to a -7.75, according to my contacts prescription), but my astigmatism is finally bad enough to merit correcting.
And man, these new astigmatism-correcting contacts rock. I can see my laptop screen clearly from a distance of two feet. I can read small print without squinting to keep the letters from swimming and jittering. I can see street signs before I’m right up on them. (All of which should start to sound alarming to people who have ridden in a car with me recently. I certainly am a little alarmed to realize how bad it had gotten.)
It’s a bit like the first time I got glasses. I went to an optometrist in Hampton when I was a kid, off Mercury Blvd. in a “high-rise” office (read: more than three stories). When I got that first pair of glasses on and looked out the window, I was thrilled that I could see the outlines of leaves where the trees met the sky. It had always been a fuzzy blur before.
(This, of course, is probably funny to my more conservative readers who may be itchy to make jokes about short-sighted liberalism. Let it pass, kids.)