Sep 15, 2023 4 min read

On my kitchen counter next to the coffee maker is a bowl filled with reader glasses. This morning, I did an accounting.

Twelve. A dozen pair of readers entangled in the bowl, their ear stems so entwined that when I reach for one pair, two more hang on like moneys from a barrel. There are red round glasses and blue square frames and wire-rimmed ones; tortoise shell pairs and the big, round black pair that make me look like Simon the Chipmunk when I wear them.

They ended up in the bowl after I went around the house to gather them. It was like an Easter egg hunt as I lifted pillows and blankets and scratched around beneath stacks of papers. It reminds me of those days when my children were little; I would end each evening on a scavenger hunt, collecting little cars and blocks from all the nooks and crannies where they played to return them to the toy basket to be pulled out again the next morning.

I don’t stow my glasses around the house on purpose for convenience – the glasses just end up scattered. Some days I get a thousand or so of my goal of 10,000 steps just retracing my path to where I was last. That I can reliably find a pair in the kitchen suggests I’m taking way too many trips to the fridge. It also tells me that the donning and removal of reader glasses tends to get into the muscle memory.

Fifty-five years I went without needing glasses, and then, almost overnight, came the need to get further away from the book or the computer screen. Failing the ability to grow my arms longer, I started collecting glasses, and in the past few years, I’ve moved up in strength a bit. Most are inexpensive and come from those rotating racks at the drugstore. The first times I shopped, I’d try them on and check out my reflection in that little mirror, but what’s the point now?

There’s a common absurdity about people my age wandering around looking for glasses, and the whole time they’re right there atop the head. I once scrambled around and then touched my face, and there they were. An option would be a chain to hang the classes on my chest, but how often would I be chasing around for my chain?

A co-worker visits that rotating drugstore rack often. Sometimes when he’s at the gym, he gets onto the treadmill with his book and then realizes he’s forgotten his readers. Off he goes across the street to buy another cheap pair. I’d say, stow a few pairs in the gym bag.

I try to keep a pair of readers in my purse, for shopping trips. More than once, I’ve toughed it out at the supermarket without the glasses, and came home to find (while wearing readers) that I’d mistakenly bought the canned tomatoes with the basil. Or bought the wrong milk.

This would not be a problem if I’d been wearing prescription glasses all along. When grade-school classmates started showing up with glasses, I envied them. Those specs make them stand out in the crowd and in the class photos, too. Later, as we became teenagers, I was always impressed that they managed to use contact lenses with such ease. My own son and daughter learned how to use their contact lenses before they learned to use their smartphones.

A friend had cataract surgery this summer. He said it’s been a strange adjustment not having glasses on his face all his waking hours. He still needs to use readers, though.

Come on over and see my collection, I told him, because I have more than I need. You might look good in the blue ones, or maybe the wire frames. And you are welcome to take the big round ones – if you don’t mind looking like Simon the Chipmunk.