I was a pretty good student in both junior and senior high, and when I graduated, I went on to university to take a 4-year biology and science course. When I left university, I had no idea what I wanted to do, nor was I able to find a job in my field. I had student loans that needed to be paid, and I managed to get into a one-year teachers college course that would allow me to be a high school teacher. Since I was still attending school, this put my student loan repayments on hold until after I graduated from teacher’s college and while I wasn’t that excited about becoming a schoolteacher, I really had to figure out something to do that would either put my loan repayments on hold again or I could borrow a little more money and continue my education. I did well in my courses and when we were sent out to do practice teaching, I ended up at Lincoln High for a 2-week stint in the classroom of the Biology and Chemistry teacher. The first day I stood in front of a classroom of grade 10 students found me feeling very nervous, but I must have done fairly well at bluffing my way through the day because after the last class the teacher in charge congratulated me on doing such a good job on my first day. The second day was a little easier for me to handle. As with the first day I had 3 grade 10 classes, and a single grade 12 class, which gave me 8 periods to teach, 4 of Chemistry and 4 of Biology. The first day I had noticed a young lady that was probably around 15, maybe even 16 in one of the grade 10 classes who attracted my attention. She was one of the half dozen girls in the class that wore glasses, but her glasses were no ordinary run of the mill glasses. This was back in the early 80’s, and the style of the late 70’s had been fairly large plastic drop temple frames, which were the style she wore. Because of my school background in science, I knew that the appearance of her lenses indicated that they were bi concave and that these lenses were used for the correction of myopia. And from the thickness of her glasses, it appeared that this young lady had a pretty significant amount of myopia that needed correcting. I knew nothing about people that wore glasses. My grandparents wore reading glasses, but my parents were just reaching the point where their arms were getting too short to read sometimes. My 2 brothers and my sisters and I all had good eyesight without needing correction. A couple of girls in my class at school had worn glasses, but I had not developed any interest in them – or their glasses. Now I was finding that I tended to watch this young lady with the thick looking glasses whenever I could without making it terribly obvious. I checked the class list, and I found her name was Jamie Procter. She was already 16 in grade 10, so I suspected that since most 10th grade students that had their birthday around the same time were age 15 Jamie might have failed a grade, or else might have been out of school for a year for some reason. She seemed to be interested in the work I was teaching, although I did notice that even though her desk was fairly close to the front of the room, she managed to make a bit of a production out of the fact that she needed to get up from her desk and walk closer to the board to see things that I had written on it. And if she didn’t leave her seat, she would scrunch up her eyes behind the thick lenses and squint to see the board. When she was writing things down in her notebook, she would also draw her face quite close to the notebook. It seemed fairly obvious to me that she needed stronger glasses, and after a few days of watching her, I was going to say something, but I mentioned this to her regular teacher one day and he just told me that Jamie’s eyesight was rather poor and she had just recently gotten new lenses in her glasses so there was no need to say anything that might draw the attention of the other students to her, At the end of my 2 weeks of practice teaching the teacher I had been teaching under must have spoken to the principal because on my last day there he asked me if I would like to put in a job application. I had liked living in the town for the two weeks I had been there, and the school was just as good as any other one would have been, so I did fill out the application. I went back to finish my classes and just before graduation I found a letter from Lincoln High telling me I had a job teaching there as long as I graduated. That was not going to be a problem, and after graduation I sent a copy of my new teaching certificate to the principal. I went home to stay with my family for a month, and then I headed off to see if I could find a place to rent for a year. My dad had advanced me some money to use to tide me through to my first paycheck and that really helped a lot as I was able to find a one bedroom apartment to rent and I bought some used furniture as well as some groceries. When the owner of the small apartment building found out I was a new teacher he even waved the payment of the last month’s rent and only required a small security deposit. When I went to the school to set up my classroom, I got my class lists. I had only remembered one name, and I was pleased that Jamie Procter was in both my grade 11 Chemistry and Biology classes. When school went back in September, I had no problem picking Jamie out. It appeared that she had gotten new glasses as her frames looked different. They were no longer drop temple, but were just normal plastic, again with a bit larger eye size than her prescription should have had to reduce the thickness of her lenses. And her lenses in her new frame looked to be even thicker than I remembered. I had changed the seating slightly and I made sure Jamie was in the very front row so that she would not have to walk up closer to the board and I wondered why her previous teacher had not done that the previous year. After class that first day Jamie came up to me and asked me if I could move her back a row or two. Apparently, she felt centered out for her poor eyesight if she sat in the front row, and even though I mentioned that it looked to me that she would be centered out more when she needed to get up and walk closer to the board to read what I wrote she still wanted to sit back a row or two. That answered my question as to why her previous teacher had not placed her in the front row. I sort of wondered if she just didn’t want to be under my close scrutiny, but actually it made me look at her more often. Other than the thick glasses she wore Jamie Procter was pretty cute. She had a really decent slim and trim figure and her breasts had developed very nicely. I saw her with her glasses off a few times when she needed to clean the thick lenses and her face was very attractive. The thickness of her glasses did detract from her looks though and I wondered why she didn’t avail herself of some of the tricks to thin out the thickness of the lenses. I had one teacher in high school that likely had a similar prescription to Jamie, and her glasses were made with little circles in the center of the lenses. They looked a little funny the first few times you looked at her glasses, but soon you forgot about them. But it wasn’t my place to say anything to Jamie. The first parent teacher night went fairly well. I met Jamie Proctors parents and they seemed like really nice people. I did comment on how it was too bad that Jamie’s eyesight was so poor and that she had to wear such thick glasses and they told me that Jamie had ordered all her glasses with safety lenses. She did have a little more myopia than other people, but her prescription was only around -10D. But she insisted on lenses that were bigger than she should have as well as having lenses with a center thickness of 3mm instead of the normal 2mm. From my knowledge through my studies, this would indeed make glasses appear a lot thicker than they needed to be. With what I had learned from her parents I began to watch Jamie a little closer. One of the ladies I taught with wore glasses that looked to be reasonably strong, but they were crafted in such a way that the thickness was well hidden. I asked her one day if she minded telling me her approximate prescription and she said it was around -11D. I mentioned that I had a student with much thicker lenses in her glasses and she knew immediately that I was talking about Jamie Proctor. “I think Jamie’s glasses are a little weaker than mine, but honestly, I feel there is something wrong with that girl. She has always played the “poor me my eyes are so bad” card ever since she got to high school. I had her last year for mathematics, and one day at the end of the class she wanted to try my glasses on. We switched glasses, and although I was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to see through her thick lenses I found that they were weaker than mine. She told me that my glasses helped her a lot more than her own. I suspect that she has a thing for thick glasses because she seems to be doing everything she can do to get stronger glasses.” My associate said. I had noticed what she meant. Jamie spent most of her time looking at things that were very close to her and in reading she drew her face right up to everything and she never seemed to look up to give her eyes a break. She had also gotten an exemption from track and field due to her poor eyesight so during the time when the other classmates were outside, she was in the library reading. I don’t know what was drawing me to Jamie Proctor. She was, as I had mentioned, one of the oldest girls in the class. At 17 she was only 5 years younger than my 22. I started having fantasies at night of having Jamie Proctor in my bed, gently removing her glasses, and making love to her. This was crazy. An affair with a student would end up very badly for me. I could lose my job and could end up being blacklisted as a teacher. And Jamie was not helping me at all. Some days, at the end of our class, she would come up to me and ask me a question about the lesson I had just taught. The questions were pertinent, and I did my best to give her a decent answer, but I was beginning to think that she knew I was having fantasies about her. I suppose that was just my guilty conscience coming out, but instead of being able to put them out of my mind they intensified. And the day she brushed her breasts against my arm as she turned to walk away made me realize she was definitely doing this on purpose. I managed to get through the school year without following through with any of my secret desires. The region we were located in was in an area frequented by tourists in the summer and a few of the other teachers had gotten summer jobs at some of the resorts. I found myself applying at the local building supply outlet as I had driven a delivery truck to help put myself through university. I ended up getting the job and to my surprise John Proctor, Jamie’s dad, was the owner. Unfortunately, this put me in even closer proximity to Jamie as she was working there as a cashier that summer. This was not a good situation to be in, and I likely should have quit and tried to find another job. But I didn’t and I was right. Now Jamie was openly hitting on me every chance she got, and I really didn’t know what to do. I thought it best if I talked with her father about the situation, but he didn’t help much. He told me if I wanted to date his daughter it was fine with him. Jamie and I had fun together that summer, but I did not fulfil my fantasy, as that would have created a really difficult situation if Jamie had ended up pregnant. Also, in mid-August prior to school going back I went to my principal and told him that, with her father’s permission and because of Jamie’s wishes, we had dated over the summer. He already had prior knowledge of this, and he told me that he had arranged the class lists so that Jamie was not in any of my classes so there could be no accusations of favoritism. I was fine with this, but Jamie was a little upset. She wanted to quit school and get married, but her parents and I convinced her that she needed to get her grade 12 graduation diploma and then we could decide if we wanted to marry. Finally, she settled down and agreed that this was the best course of action. While we were dating, I had mentioned to Jamie that I knew that her glasses were not as strong as they looked. I also told her that I had figured out that she wanted to wear much thicker glasses and that she was doing everything she possibly could to make herself need stronger lenses. She was a little surprised that I had figured her out, but she didn’t get upset and simply asked me if I had a problem with her doing that. I might have at one time, but by now I rather liked the looks of her thick glasses, so I told her I would go along with whatever she wished to do. And she also advised me that her present glasses were not the -10D her parents had suggested they were but were actually a little stronger than -11.50D Jamie had, since she originally started wearing glasses, gone for an eye exam right at the beginning of August so that her new glasses could be ready for her to wear when she returned to school. This year I convinced her that she should wait until the end of September or the middle of October and then go for her eye exam after a full day in school. If she was not seeing well now in August and couldn’t wait until mid-October, then she should at least try to wait until around the middle of September. I told her that after a day of reading in school her eyesight would be a little worse than it would be at the beginning of the day. She had read something about this as well, so she agreed with me. And when she did have her eye exam, her prescription had increased to -12.50D. She did not order glasses from her usual optician, but instead wanted me to photocopy her prescription slip, use white out on it to make it blank and then photocopy the blank. White out didn’t work as it gave a little grey streak where the white out was used. We then put white out tape over the gray streak and after photocopying it again finally we had a nice clean prescription slip. By using a pen with black ink, I wrote her a nice new prescription showing her prescription as being -15D for both eyes along with the mild astigmatism she had in her right eye. Then we went off to a different optical store in another town not too far away. The optician didn’t question a thing. We chose a new plastic frame that was a little bit rectangular in shape and a little smaller than Jamie wanted. We had talked about the safety glasses lenses, but I convinced Jamie to just go for the regular lenses as they would still look thicker than her old glasses. When her new glasses came in and we picked them up Jamie was a little disappointed. It turned out that because of the thinner center thickness and the smaller frame the edge thickness of the -15D lenses was about the same as her old glasses had been. I liked the appearance of them a lot better because they just plain looked nicer on her face. And the cut in was more than it had been in her old glasses. Jamie had to struggle a little at first to make her eyes focus through the new lenses that were -2.50D stronger than she was prescribed but it didn’t take long before she loved wearing them. She really liked the fact that she could feel the over correction. She could no longer bring her reading material as close to her face as she had been doing but after about a month, she found that she barely even noticed the extra power. She then wanted me to help her get even stronger glasses. We went to an optician in yet another town, picked a similar frame and ordered her new glasses as being -16.50D with her same astigmatism correction for her right eye. When we compared the new glasses with her old glasses the difference in the thickness of the lenses was noticeable but without the old glasses to compare to, I felt that no one would be able to tell. To prevent any comparison, we had new lenses ordered for her old glasses and we got them tinted for sunglasses. By now Jamie was almost finished with grade 12 and she was going to graduate with a degree. I wanted to get married very soon after school was dismissed, and Jamie was all in favor of that. Her mom wanted a church wedding though and it took a little string pulling on her part to make this happen. But happen it did and on the 20th of August that year I became Jamie Proctor’s husband. We had already moved my stuff into a 2-bedroom apartment in the same building I had been living in since I came to town, and Jamie was fairly happy to be living there with me. I say fairly because there is always a bit of a power struggle between every newly married couple, and it took a little bit of time to sort this out so that we could both accept our positions. Jamie was working at the lumber yard for her father full time now. It made it less of a problem for me at school these days because I was no longer “the teacher that was dating a student”. But Jamie had a little bit of a problem in that she was no longer the girl with the thickest glasses at the high school. She had liked that her glasses defined her, and we had to have some long talks about what she wanted to do with her eyesight in the future. She claimed to have no regrets that she was extremely nearsighted and was dependent on wearing the thick glasses she claimed she had to use to even walk from one room in the apartment to another. She really couldn’t even read the pages in a book without her glasses on because now when she took her glasses off, she had to bring the book so close to the end of her nose that the only way she could focus on a word was to close one eye. When we made love now, she wanted to always leave her glasses on. I didn’t mind that because I knew she felt very vulnerable without them, and I didn’t want her to feel that she no longer had any control over the situation. Finally, Jamie seemed to decide that she wanted to make herself even more nearsighted. I had done some reading about myopia, and I had discovered that quite often nearsighted ladies developed even more myopia when they got pregnant so I warned her that it was possible that if we got her stronger glasses now, she might have some further deterioration when we decided to have our children. She told me that she didn’t care. For some strange reason she now wanted to be known as that lady with the thickest glasses in town, but she didn’t like it when I told her that she already had that title. A couple of days after that she started asking me when she could get me to write her out a stronger prescription, but I told her that I didn’t want to write her out a prescription for stronger glasses unless she had another eye exam first. Fortunately, the eye doctor she had always used had sold his practice to a young lady that had just graduated and had finished her training with him. While he had stayed on for a little while to help her out, he had finally gone off on a cruise with his wife. I thought that Jamie likely had not reached the full -16.50D prescription of the lenses that were in her present glasses, and since the last pair of glasses she had been prescribed by the doctor were the -12.50D ones we had never purchased I was a little worried what the new eye doctor would say. We decided we would tell her that Jamie had gone for an eye exam in the city and had been prescribed stronger glasses then. I felt the best course of action would be to take her sunglasses, remove the lenses and replace them with the -15D lenses that had come with them. I managed to get the -16.50D sunglass lenses out without a problem, but when I tried to put the old -15D lenses back in the frame the left lens went in with no problem, but the right lens was giving me trouble. I likely could have heated up the frame in a cup of hot water, but I decided I would go into the optician’s, and I would tell them that my wife was wearing her glasses while she was reading in bed and when she fell asleep with her glasses on, she rolled over on them, and the lens popped out. While I was in the optical store, I would also make an eye appointment for Jamie. This plan worked well. They heated the frame and popped the right lens back in and then the girl who made the appointment suggested that, in order to save Jamie some time, she could check the prescription in her glasses right then. I could have told her what the prescription was as I had written it, but I thought I should keep that to myself. After I took the old glasses back and had Jamie put them on, I regretted what I had done. Jamie could not see very well through the -15D lenses so we knew that her eyesight was much closer to the -16.50D that she had in her newer glasses. It really didn’t matter as Jamie was going to be wearing the -16.50D glasses right up to when we pulled into the eye doctor’s parking lot, and when the new eye doctor tested her eyes, she was going to find out that Jamie definitely needed stronger lenses than were in the -15D glasses she was wearing. I don’t know how she managed to pull it off, but when Jamie came out of the examination room, she showed me her prescription slip. It read -17.50D for both eyes, with her usual -0.75 x 90 for her astigmatism in her right eye. We had discussed ordering her new glasses, and I had told her that this time we needed to order them from the local optician. Jamie was adamant that she did not want the newest high index plastic for her new lenses. She still would have rather had regular old CR39 plastic, but the optician advised her that it was no longer available in a prescription as strong as hers. Reluctantly she settled on the 1.67 index plastic, but she chose a frame that, while rather trendy, was a little bigger than the optician wanted her to use. And when the suggestion was made that she could have some of her prescription placed in the front of the lens to reduce the thickness, Jamie, as I had expected, refused to even consider this suggestion. When her new glasses came in Jamie was fairly satisfied with the way they looked. I thought they looked fantastic on her. The lenses actually seemed to be very thick, and they stuck out more than I thought they would at the back of the frame. I had never seen hi-index lenses that were much over a half inch thick, but these were at least another eight of an inch or more thicker. And the outer edges of the lenses were not shaved off, so the prescription came right to the sides of the frame. This would likely be the last time Jamie could have this happen, because with strong minus prescriptions the diameter of the lens circle becomes smaller and smaller so with her next increase, she would probably have to end up with a myodisc appearance in her lenses. I knew that Jamie’s mother Gillian was nearsighted, but I had not ever seen her wearing her glasses. Soon after Jamie got her latest glasses, we went to her parent’s place for Sunday dinner and for the first time I saw her mom wearing glasses. Her prescription was strong enough that her lenses had a bit of thickness to them, but I estimated that she had a prescription somewhere around -7D or maybe a little higher. This did not explain why Jamie liked thick glasses so much. Her brother Ed and his wife Molly were there as well, and neither of them wore glasses. I checked as carefully as I could but could not see any signs of contact lenses in either of their eyes. The discussion over dinner was a little bit of a surprise to me though. John wanted to retire, and he wanted Jamie and Ed to take over the business. The terms he set were fair, and although no decisions were made that evening Jamie and Ed were going to have to make their decision before John sold out to someone else. Jamie and I also had a lot of talking to do. Jamie really wanted to get pregnant and start our family and of course buying half of her father’s business would put a crimp in her plans. Jamie really got along well with her brother and sister-in-law, and I found Ed to be a great guy. We had a lot of discussions about what we should do, and finally I proposed that if Jamie and Ed wanted to buy their father’s business, if Jamie got pregnant and could not work in the business I would either quit teaching and come to work in Jamie’s place, or I would just take some time off teaching until Jamie was ready to come back to work. This seemed to satisfy everyone, and the plans to take over the lumber yard materialized – right around the same time as Jamie discovered she was pregnant. Jamie managed to work into her 8th month of pregnancy. I suggested to Ed that I could give my notice to the school board for the end of June that year, but he told me that I should keep teaching until we saw how much becoming a mother would affect Jamie’s ability to work at the lumber yard. Jamie’s involvement was mostly doing the office paperwork and the bookkeeping end of the business so a lot of her work could easily be done from home. I had also familiarized myself with the work Jamie was doing and I felt that I would be able to help Ed out any time he needed me. Jamie was actually becoming a bit of a pain in the butt, as she was now constantly complaining about how bad her eyesight was during her pregnancy and I think that the reason for her complaining was that I had told her that she needed to wait for a few months after giving birth before she had her eyes examined again. I didn’t know what was pushing her to want stronger and stronger glasses, but she still looked forward to getting stronger lenses. I tried to explain to Jamie that her glasses were as thick as they possibly could be, but she did not understand what I was trying to tell her. I then drew a 2” (5.08mm) circle on a piece of paper and I explained to her that this was the inner curvature of a -20D lens done in regular CR 39 plastic. I drew a straight line 2.2mm in front of the circle, and from a point on the line at the center of the circle I marked the center point. Then I took the 32mm from the center point and showed her where the center of her nose would be. A 50/18 frame means that the lens width is 50mm, and the bridge is 18mm wide. By marking off 9 mm and allowing another 2 mm for the frame I showed her where the inside edge of her lens would be. But then when I measured the outside edge of the lens the thickness remaining was only 13mm. Finally, after seeing what I had put on paper Jamie realized that her glasses would only be about 12 or 13mm thick at the outer edge no matter how strong her prescription was. And I also explained that a 1.74 hi index lens would be even thinner because it is about a 30% reduction in thickness so she could go as high as about a -25D prescription before she would have lenses that were the same thickness. I think all my explanations were a waste of my time though, because after Lisa was born Jamie still wanted to have her eyes examined immediately and to get stronger glasses. Finally, when Lisa was about 6 months old, I gave in, and Jamie had her eyes examined again. I was a little embarrassed with the results. Jamie had been going around under corrected by -2.50D and she ended up with a new prescription for OD - 20.75D and OS - 20.50D. And when her new glasses arrived the optical lab had put about -3D of her prescription in the front of the lenses, so her new glasses now had biconcave lenses. Jamie didn’t like the biconcave part very much, but since the new glasses gave her so much better vision, she didn’t want to send them back to have the lenses replaced with ones that had plano fronts because she couldn’t go without them. Even though Jamie didn’t care for the new glasses at first, I liked them a lot. Jamie had chosen a Ray Ban style frame that was a dark brown in color, and it went well with her honey blond hair. I liked the fact that when I looked at her glasses on her face from a slightly angled viewpoint that the indentation of the front of the lenses was very visible. And even though the lenses had some of the prescription in the front there was almost an obvious circle visible in the back of the lenses. After wearing them for a couple of months Jamie eventually got used to the way the lenses looked, and since her vision was quite good when she was wearing them, she began to like them a lot. I knew that Jamie had now added about -10D to the prescription she had when I first had her as a pupil the year I did my practice teaching. I still couldn’t understand her obsession for thick glasses, but I loved her appearance wearing them, and I would be satisfied for the rest of my life if Jamie never needed any further increases. Specs4ever May 2020