It has been a long time since a column of mine got as much reaction as last week’s. The subject was ordinary enough: My getting older as evidenced by my missing the last step on a stepladder on the Sunday a week before Thanksgiving.
My inexperience with reading glasses seemed to me the proximate cause. I had left a pair on, climbing down from the chicken coop roof, and misjudged where I was in relation to the ground. Gravity did the rest.
On Monday, talking with a joint specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, I decided I was an example of a kind of ’tween. That is, not children between 11 and 13, who are neither kids nor teenagers, but those between physically resilient middle age and the time when things begin to fall apart. (Hello, Dr. Mambrino, D.D.S., how’re the boat payments going?)
Oddly, this is all contemporaneous with my 9-year-old’s beginning to dismiss just about everything I have to say with a crisp, “Okay, boomer.” Punk kid.
Reading glasses ought to come with a manual (large print?) outlining a few facts. One, they are for reading, not walking and definitely not messing around on ladders. Two, you will lose them. A lot. Until you come to your senses and buy a lanyard or strap.
Sure to form, I lost my only decent pair of glasses the evening before my run into Manhattan. I had a backup, of course, an older pair held together at the left temple with black duct tape, and these I mislaid for a while on the Jitney somewhere between Manorville and Queens.
After fretting in my seat at the front of the bus and enlisting my patient seatmate in the search, I found them back near the lavatory near a woman’s very pointy high heels. It would have served my right had she harpooned them the way Ahab darted the white whale. It’s time to get serious about holding onto my specs, it seems.
Chris, an actor friend, drove the message home when we met for lunch on the Upper East Side after my appointment. He had been cast somewhat recently as a film character who wore reading glasses. Not sure how to deal with them, he asked wardrobe if he could have “one of those dangly things” to hang them around his neck. Wardrobe said okay.
The role? “An editor,” Chris said.
I made a rude gesture with both hands.
He laughed. I put on my duct-taped glasses, wrote the tip, and signed the credit card slip. Then I hobbled a block to Duane Reade to buy another pair.