After reading the wonderful glasses stories posted here, I have a few of my own which I am tempted to tell, so here goes. All of them are true, and all of them are “glasses moments”, which never leave you.
I have always had a strong feeling about glasses and anything connected with eyesight, and I could never explain it. Finding sites like this has helped me a lot in that respect. I think it probably all stems from early childhood as my parents wore glasses. My father had extreme astigmatism and my mother was hyperopic all of her life. In later life, she couldn’t even get glasses she could read with, and along with her glasses she used a strong magnifier which she always carried around her neck on a cord. My father kept a spare pair of glasses in his bedroom drawer, and my mother had several old pairs of hers around the house.
When I was about 12, I would be left in the house on my own every Saturday as they both ran a business and Saturday was their busiest day. Normally I would just amuse myself with games, or go out bike runs in fine weather. One wet Saturday, I was bored, and I started to rake through drawers which felt a little naughty! Even naughtier, I found my dad’s spare glasses and took them out of their case. I held them, unfolded and folded the legs, held them up to the window and marvelled at the total distortion they made of the world outside. I already knew this as sometimes when I was close to him, I would look through his lenses and was amazed at how they would even turn things upside down! If a car was travelling from left to right, seen through his glasses the car would be travelling from right to left and….. it would be upside down! That Saturday, the devil in me said “Go on - put them on,” so I did. My heart immediately started pounding with excitement, and as I looked around the room, I felt like I was high on something and didn’t want to come down. I walked around the house, and it was like being in a crazy hall of mirrors at a funfair! Exhilarating, exciting, totally magical! Things were a bit blurred, but the most magical bit was that everything was distorted and mis-shapen to the point of surrealism. I loved the feeling. Of course, I was too young and naive to realise that I was being sexually awakened. After half an hour, I put them away, and scolded myself for being bad. I vowed not to do it again.
On the next Saturday, I just had to - I was hooked! I got his spare glasses from the drawer again, and put them on. The magical feeling returned. This time, I wore the glasses for the whole day, and what a thrilling day it was. By the afternoon, I was beginning to get used to them, and my brain was probably compensating for the totally wrong correction. At one point I took them off, and wow! When I looked up, everything was wrong. Everything was sloping, circles were oval, and worst of all, I was seeing double and couldn’t converge properly. I quickly put the glasses back on and things were much better.
On the third Saturday, I decided to go outside with them on, and that was a revelation. The world had changed! I didn’t want the neighbours to see me, so I got on my bike and found I could ride it with the glasses on. I went to a shopping area away from my home and sat in a busy park, and walked about in the crowds, getting the most amazing thrill from being in public with these very strong glasses on. I couldn’t wait for the next weekend to come around. On Saturday nights when my parents were home, I acted totally innocently and made sure the glasses were back in the drawer where they were kept. But by then I knew I had done something to my eyes because I couldn’t see the TV screen properly on Saturday nights. It was distorted, and double, with one image above and slightly to the side of the other. By Sunday I still felt a bit odd, but by Monday, things had more or less returned to normal, which wasn’t really “normal” for me, as I always had trouble seeing the blackboard and reading and doing close work from as early as I can remember. This takes me round to my experimentation with my mother’s hyperopic glasses, which is a story for another day.
In hindsight, I know I was stupid, and I probably did cause irrepairable damage to my eyes, but weighing that up against the absolute sheer pleasure and massive buzz it gave me, I don’t regret it. Am I making any sense?
https://vision-and-spex.com/glasses-moments-1-exploring-the-glasses-world-t539.html