I had gone through Ashley’s cash line at my local grocery store a number of times. Ashely was slim, reasonably tall and had a nice rear end. She was lacking a little in the breast department, but she was still an attractive enough young lady that I was thinking of asking her out on a date. She was only on cash on Saturdays and Sunday’s so I figured she was likely in her last year of high school and was about 17 or maybe 18. I had recently celebrated my 20th birthday, so there probably wasn’t too much of an age difference. I was always quite pleasant towards her, and I would like to think from the way her eyes lit up when she saw me approach her register that she might not be too hard to convince to date me. I popped into the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon to pick up a few items for my supper. After I left school and apprenticed to a brick and block layer so I could learn a trade I had moved into a small apartment and for the most part I did my own cooking. As I came towards the cash registers I scanned the cash registers to see which one Ashley was working at. I spotted her blond hair hunched over an item that she seemed to be price checking, and when she raised her head I was surprised. Ashley was wearing glasses. I had never seen her wearing glasses before and that was the nail in her coffin as far as I was concerned. I love girls who wear glasses, and I think the main reason I had not asked her out yet was because she didn’t wear glasses. As the line brought me closer I could tell that these flat fronted, rather large eye sized black Ray Ban frames held lenses that were no beginner’s lenses. There was quite a bit of lens thickness sticking out behind the frame and I guessed that Ashley had a prescription close to, or slightly above -10D. There are so many different lens options these days that it is really hard to tell a prescription from just looking at it. As I paid for my order I casually mentioned that I liked her glasses, and she gave me a strange look and just said thanks. The following weekend I did my grocery shopping early. The store was not busy and it was easy to get in the line for the register that she was working. Today she had on a different pair of glasses. These glasses had a slightly smaller eye size so the lenses would be thinner anyway, but these lenses were thin enough that they barely stuck out behind the frame. The power of these lenses looked to be a little stronger, because when the lenses were viewed from a side on frontal angle the power rings on the hinge side of the frame went on and on. I paid for my order, and since she didn’t have a bagger working she bagged my groceries. “New glasses?” I asked. “I just got used to seeing you wearing your other pair.” “Yes, I just got them yesterday. Do you like them?” Ashley asked. “I do. They look very nice on you. You made a good choice.” I answered. “Thank you for saying that. I am not used to wearing them, but I was having problems with my contacts and I have to wear glasses for a while.” Ashley replied. “If you are not otherwise occupied would you like to go to the movies with me tonight?” I asked. “I am sorry but I can’t tonight. If I give you my phone number you can call me and maybe we can set something up for next weekend.” Ashley responded. I called her early in the following week. We chatted for a while, and I invited her out to dinner on the following Saturday with a movie to follow. She accepted and our first date went extremely well. Without seeming to be too interested I got her to tell me that she had gotten her first glasses when she was 8 years old, and her eyesight had deteriorated every year to the point that at age 17 her newest prescription was -12.50D. Her old Ray Bans had been -11.00D, but she couldn’t see well enough wearing them to avoid having to get a new pair with her current prescription. Now that her dad had spent a lot of money on her new glasses to get the thinner lenses she likely wasn’t going to be able to get new contacts until the next time her eyes got worse. “You look really attractive wearing those glasses.” I said. “Other people have told me that. But I don’t feel cute or attractive wearing glasses. I wish I had my contacts back.” Ashley replied. Ashley and I dated for 4 years. She graduated from high school, went on to three years of university and then a year of teachers college. When she graduated we got married and moved into the house I had rented. Ashley had required a couple of small prescription increases during the 4 years we dated, and every time she had her eyes examined she would ask me if I would prefer to have her wear contacts. I always replied that I liked her appearance wearing glasses, but she should do what she wanted to do and she always ended up with new glasses, however she did want to wear contacts for our wedding. Ashely liked her teaching job, and while we both wanted children we chose to wait another 4 years before Ashley was pregnant. Our first child was a girl and a little less than 2 years after Rachel was born Curtis came along. That was going to be the end of our offspring, but 4 years after Curtis, Jamie was born. That was definitely a big enough family so we did what we should have done sooner to prevent this happening again. When Rachel was 8 I noticed her squinting at things and I suggested to Ashley that we should have Rachel’s eyes examined. Ashley was also due for a checkup, and she called and made appointments for both of them. When I came home from work that night I had 2 of the 3 females in the household wearing glasses. Rachel had rather a strong prescription for a first time glasses wearer and she really liked her new corrected eyesight when wearing her -2D glasses. Of course Ashley’s prescription was so strong that she couldn’t get her glasses in under a week. At age 33, after having some increases with the birth of three children, Ashely now required glasses with a prescription of -18D. Even with the thinner lenses her lenses stuck out behind the frame of her new glasses almost as much as her old -11D Ray Bans lenses had. By now she had worn glasses for over 15 years, and since I had never expressed any desire for her to get contacts, and because I had never done anything but compliment her while wearing glasses she never even mentioned that she would like to wear contacts again. By the time Rachel was 12 her newest glasses had a prescription of -6D and she seemed to be pretty helpless without her glasses. She wore her glasses from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, and only ever removed them to clean the lenses. Curtis had his first eye exam when he was 8, and he had 20/20 vision, so Ashley hoped he would escape her myopia curse. Jamie was the one who worried me a little. She seemed to be fascinated by her mother and her sister’s glasses, and even though she was only 6 I had caught her a couple of times wearing Rachel’s old glasses around the house. I knew if I had caught her twice there were likely many more times she had done this and hadn’t been caught. But what really worried me was the day I caught her wearing her mother’s old -11D Ray Ban’s. I asked her what she could see with her mom’s old glasses on and she proceeded to show me that she could see everything I pointed out to her. That created a real dilemma for me. It would not have bothered me one little bit to have my youngest daughter wearing a strong prescription. But could I, in all conscience, get my daughter a pair of glasses with a -11D prescription to wear? I thought about this for a couple of weeks or more and one day I came home to find Jamie wearing her mom’s old -12.50D glasses. I did the same thing. I checked out how well she could see things. She had learned all her numbers, and we had a calendar set up so that Rachel and Ashley could check to see if their eyesight had gotten any worse since their last eye exam. I checked her with the calendar, and she could read the dates I pointed out as well as if these glasses had been prescribed for her. I asked Jamie if she wanted to wear glasses even though I knew full well what her answer would be. When she answered yes, I asked her if she wanted to wear glasses with the same prescription that was in the glasses she had on right now. When the answer to that was yes, I knew what I had to do. Ashley’s old glasses were 15 years old, but the style was one that had been around for years so they didn’t look that much out of place on Jamie’s nose. They seemed to be just a little wide for Jamie’s face, but again they were not anything that someone would look at and say that they didn’t look like they belonged on Jamie. I got Jamie to put on a coat, and I drove her to an optical store that advertised that they specialized in very high prescriptions. The girl we dealt with looked at Jamie, wearing Ashley’s old glasses, and asked what she could do to help us. I told her that Jamie was so very nearsighted that she really should have a second pair of glasses, and she agreed. She wanted me to produce a prescription, but I asked her if they could make the second pair exactly the same as the pair Jamie was wearing and she finally agreed. She read off the prescription from her machine, and then she measured Jamie’s pupillary distance with another machine. Since the prescription was -12.50D for both eyes with no astigmatic correction she told us she could have the new glasses ready in about an hour. I paid for them, and Jamie and I waited for her new glasses. They took just a little less than an hour and when the same girl called us up to have the new glasses fitted I went to the fitting table with Jamie and the optician had her take her mom’s old glasses off. Then she heated the earpieces of the new glasses to fit around the back of Jamie’s ears until Jamie told her that they now felt perfect on her face. When Jamie and I got back to the house both Rachel and Ashley were home. I had left a note for Ashley saying that I had taken Jamie to have an eye exam, so when Jamie came in wearing her new glasses it was almost expected that she would be wearing them. Of course a -12.50D prescription does look fairly strong, and while Rachel didn’t seem to notice Ashley sure did. She made quite a fuss over the fact that Jamie’s eyes were so much worse than hers had been at the age of 6, but she eventually settled down. Rachel wanted to try on Jamie’s new glasses, and she was surprised at how much stronger they were than hers were. Ashley tried them on as well, but of course they were too weak for her. By the following day it was as if Jamie had worn glasses for years. Like Rachel, from that day on I never saw Jamie without her glasses on unless she was cleaning the lenses. There was very little difference between Rachel, and Jamie. They both brought their reading material much closer to the tip of their nose that I thought they should. Jamie seemed to bring her books closer to read than Rachel did, and they both read a lot. It didn’t surprise me when sometime around a year after she had gotten her glasses Jamie started complaining that she couldn’t see very well. I checked her vision using the calendar trick and she couldn’t even read the numbers until she was about half way from the point we used as a reference. She really needed stronger glasses quite badly. Rachel also had trouble reading the numbers from the reference point and she obviously needed a bit of a tweak in her prescription as well. I worried a little that Ashley and Rachel’s long time eye doctor would be suspicious about the fact that Jamie had not gotten her glasses from him, but nothing was said so I casually mentioned to the receptionist that we had, on our doctor’s recommendation, taken Jamie to see a specialist in high myopia. Her eyes were healthy, but just very myopic and we could just use our normal eye doctor in the future so this was her first visit to our normal family eye doctor. Nothing more was said, and I suppose it was less suspicious when Jamie’s new exam showed that her eyes now needed a prescription of -15D. Rachel required an increase as well, and her prescription had to be -7.50D. I didn’t think that Rachel would need that big an increase because she had not had to move that much closer to the calendar to read the numbers, but I wasn’t going to argue with the eye doctor. Since Rachel’s prescription was now a little higher than our eye doctor’s in house optical department could make in a hurry I decided I would take the girls to the other optical store where Jamie and I had gotten her glasses. I wasn’t sure they could do Jamie’s new prescription as quickly as they had made her old glasses, but it was worth a try. Fortunately they were not very busy, and the technician who did the lens grinding said he could do both girls glasses that day. Then we had to decide what the best option was to use for the lens material. I told him to go ahead with using regular plastic for Rachel’s glasses and he got the machine going on those lenses. Then he came back to show us a couple of lenses for Jamie. One lens had a curve on both sides. He said it was called a full field lens and this design was often used for the higher prescriptions. The other lens he showed us was the same type of lens that Ashley had in her glasses and the front of this lens was flat, but the circle on the back of the lens didn’t reach the edges. He called this a lenticular lens, but added that it was more often called a myodisc lens. I knew from what Ashley had told me that she did not like the distorted vision from lenses that curved in on both sides, so I suggested to Jamie that if she was anything like her mom she would like the flat fronted lens the best. The lens technician said that this was a good choice and it was possible the circle might not show very much as with the smaller eye size lens openings in the frame that Jamie liked the best the outer edges might very well disappear in the shaping of the lenses. Of course Rachel’s new glasses were ready first. The new glasses did look a bit thicker than her old -6D lenses had looked in her other glasses, but she looked very pretty wearing her new ones. When Jamie’s new glasses were ready I could tell that the lens technician had done a very good job. There was just a tiny ring at the edge of the temple sides of Jamie’s new lenses. You could tell that these lenses were very strong, because the cut in really shrunk the sides of her face in, but the frame was a nice choice because the new glasses looked like jewelry on Jamie’s face. Did I perhaps mention earlier in this story that I was fascinated by people who wear strong glasses? If not you have likely figured that out by now. Jamie and I had saved her secret. Or should I say that by having such a large increase in only a year Jamie had saved her secret from coming out all by herself. I knew she would never tell her mom what I had helped her do. But I still wondered how she had managed to force her eyes to see through glasses that were made to correct -12.50D of myopia. Was she already fairly nearsighted? Had she been trying different pairs of her sister and her mother’s glasses to see if any of them helped her? What I should have done would have been to take her to the eye doctor and have her eyes tested properly. But I didn’t do that and now I would never know the truth. I suppose though that it didn’t really matter now. Jamie was a very nearsighted child and it was very likely that her myopia would gradually get worse and worse. I did make a concentrated effort to get both my girls to move what they were reading away from the tips of their noses. It seemed that my chiding was in vain, because neither of them changed their habit of reading from such a short vantage point. I was a little more worried about Jamie, because she was 6 years younger than Rachel and her prescription was exactly double Rachel’s. There was no doubt in my mind that Jamie could end up with an extremely strong prescription. Strong, to the point where she might even have problems enough to be considered visually impaired. And I didn’t want that so I spent a bit of time discussing myopia with Jamie and I explained how it was possible that reading too close could cause her myopia to get worse and she might eventually reach a point where no matter how strong they made her glasses she would not be able to see properly. I would like to think that my little discussion helped, but in actual fact Jamie still kept bringing her reading material right up to within about 6” from the tip of her nose. When I would mention this to her she would just say: “But Dad, I can’t see properly from much further away.” I knew that for me to say anything more it would be a waste of time, so I stopped mentioning it. By the time Jamie turned 8 I knew she needed a stronger prescription. While she didn’t have to get quite as close to the calendar as she had to the year before she still couldn’t see much until she moved up a bit. Rachel seemed to be able to see quite well, so it fell on me to take Jamie in for another eye exam. As expected her prescription need to be increased, and now she was going to be looking through -16.50D lenses. Jamie wanted a slightly larger frame and I let her get it. Her lenses were going to have to be myodiscs again as I wasn’t prepared to spend the extra money over the cost of the 1.67 index plastic lenses. We had gone back to the same optical store, and I couldn’t believe it when they told us they were able to do Jamie’s new glasses that same day. The new glasses had more of a myodisc look, as the myodisc circle was visible almost all of the way around. There was just a little area by the nosepiece where the circle of the myodisc disappeared. Jamie’s prescription was still a little weaker than Ashley’s was and I had the feeling that by the time Jamie had her next birthday she would have caught up to her mother. I still had a bit of a guilty feeling about the fact that I had helped Jamie start off with such a strong prescription, but she seemed to love wearing glasses. Here I had 2 lovely, but myopic daughters, and Jamie really loved her very high prescription while Rachel was quite satisfied with her lower prescription. Specs4ever July 2018