I woke to rays of sunshine streaming in through the partially open window. My wife was still sleeping and I looked over at her face, the only part of her that was visible above the duvet. It was still an attractive face, although the 45 years of our marriage had created quite a few more wrinkles. The marks on her nose from where her glasses had perched since she was 12 years old had become permanent years ago and I doubted that they would ever disappear even if she no longer wore them. I looked over at the bedside table where she always laid her glasses and saw that there were two pairs of glasses sitting with her tablet. My wife is so very nearsighted that after she turned 50 and had to get progressive lenses she has always had a second pair of glasses with a weaker prescription that were just single vision that she used for reading in bed so I knew she had again been awake during the night. This is now a pretty common occurrence as she has very seldom slept through the night over the past few years. My mind drifted back to that day 46 years ago that I met her. I was 24 years old and was selling cars at a dealership in the city that was about 15 miles away from the town that I was raised in. It had been a slow, rainy day, and I decided that even though I didn’t like eating by myself I would take time off and grab a bite at a nearby restaurant. When I walked into the restaurant there was a bit of a lineup, but I knew that it would only be a minute or so until I was seated because there were lots of empty tables and the hostess was seating people as fast as the girls could clean a table. There were two girls in front of me and one turned around to look my way. “Hey Mike, I haven’t seen you for ages. How, and what are you doing?” Sally asked. “Really good Sal. I am working up the street selling cars at Jack’s. What are you up to these days?” I asked. I just graduated from university and I will be out looking for a job shortly. Mike, I’d like you to meet my cousin Marjorie. Marj, this is an old friend from high school – Mike Nesbitt.” Sally said. Her cousin Marjorie turned around to face me and my heart began to thump. On her very attractive face was a pair of glasses. These glasses were fairly strong because as she turned around I could see that the edge of her lenses stuck quite a way back from the frame. The lens thickness was likely somewhere around a half inch or so right where the temples were hinged to the face of the frame. I was having a hard time coming up with something to say because I was pretty much tongue tied but I did manage to say hi and pleased to meet you. Girls who wore glasses, especially strong ones were extremely attractive to me. Sal and I had dated a couple of times back in high school and we had ended up more like friends than as boyfriend and girlfriend. I had never been able to enter into a close relationship with a girl who didn’t wear glasses and Sal had never shown the least little need for any vision correction. I was very pleased when Sal invited me to join them for lunch and I was even happier when she made it quite plain that she was not expecting me to pay for their lunch. Sales had been more than a bit slow so far this month and I was seriously contemplating a change in employment. Our lunch was a very pleasant experience. I did spend a lot of time looking at Marjorie but I don’t think either of them really noticed. Marjorie was reasonably tall with a very shapely body and extremely nice legs. Her hair was a reddish blonde and while it might not have been the color that would have attracted me if she had not worn glasses it was not what you would call carrot topped and it didn’t turn me off. We finished lunch and dawdled a little over a coffee, but finally it was time to go. Marj had to go to the washroom, but Sally had gone before we left the table so Sally and I ended up at the cash register to pay our tab. “I noticed that you were quite interested in Marj Mike. She is staying at my place for a couple more days, so if you want to call her there I am sure she would like that.” Sally said. “She seems very nice Sally. I might just give her a call tonight.” I replied. “I better warn you Mike that she is pretty shy and introverted. She hasn’t had much dating experience and I think it is mostly because she is very self-conscious about her thick glasses.” Sal told me. “Her glasses don’t bother me. I think I will call her Sal.” I replied. I did call Marjorie that evening after I got off work and got back to the house. I had not been able to find a job that used the skills I had learned in University yet and I was, at age 24, still living at home with my parents. Fortunately my younger brother and sister were both off at school so at least I had a room to myself now, but at my age it was definitely an embarrassment to be still living at home. I talked with Marjorie on the phone for a short time before I asked her if she wanted to go out to grab an ice cream cone. She accepted my invitation and I went over to Sal’s to pick her up. The only perk to working as a car salesman was that every once in a while I was able to get a really hot car to drive for a day or two, and before I left work I had asked my boss if I could take a red and grey 62 Corvette that he had picked up fairly cheaply at an auction a few days ago. My boss was a pretty decent guy and was one of the few car dealers that sold his used cars with more than a 30 day or 30 feet warranty so he let me take the Vette to make sure that there was nothing wrong with it. In the 15 miles between the dealership and home the high performance 327 in it had gone through almost a quart of oil and there was a faint blue haze that followed me so I knew that my boss was going to have to spring for a rebuilt engine that he likely hadn’t counted on. Marjorie was suitably impressed with the Corvette, and the car didn’t blow a gasket or throw a rod or anything. We had our ice cream and rather than take a chance on going for a drive I took her for a walk through the park. Marjorie lived in another small town of similar size that was about a 30 minute drive east of the city, and the town that Sal and I lived in was, as I had mentioned, about a 15 minute drive to the west of the city. In order for me to date Marjorie if I continued living at home I would be driving for about an hour and a half round trip for each date. But as we continued our walk around the park I was feeling more and more like Marjorie might just be the right girl for me. When I took Marj back to Sal’s parents’ house I had gotten her phone number at her own parent’s home. I had made no promises, but I did make it fairly clear that I liked her. I think she was a little pleased at that, and maybe a bit surprised that the silver colored oval wire rimmed glasses with the thick lenses that she needed to see anything more than a few inches in front of her face didn’t make me shy away from her. I had noticed the reticence that Sal had mentioned to me during our conversation and I had also felt that she would be receptive to going out with me if I asked her to. The following morning I told my boss that the Corvette had an oil consumption problem along with a pretty serious whine in 3rd gear. I am fairly sure that with that information he was planning to send it back to another auction to let some other used car dealer look after the problem, but for the time being the Corvette was sitting at the back of the lot with a hold sign in the window. I had not had any sales for a few days and my paycheck was not going to be very impressive. Jack was very fair with his commissions, but if I didn’t sell anything more than the $500.00 beater I had sold I could barely pay for the gas to come into work. Fortunately that day a gentleman came in and made a decent offer on a Cadillac that was only a couple of years old so all of a sudden my commission for the week had jumped to $400.00. The sale of the Caddy was only the tip of the iceberg though because I sold another car that day and three more the next day. All of a sudden my check for that week was going to be close to $1,400.00. I did some thinking. My cousin Reg was a pretty good mechanic and he was going through an apprenticeship program to get his license. In the evenings he often worked on cars for his friends and relatives. It would be a simple job for him to do a ring and valve job on the 327 in the Corvette. And, while I suspected that the previous owner might have done a bit of drag racing with it, other than the third gear whine in the transmission I hadn’t found anything else wrong with the car. Jack would never sell the car to a customer, but if he was willing to sell it to me I might be able to turn a nice profit. I spoke to Jack and he not only was willing to have me take the car off his hands for exactly what he paid for it, he also told me he would finance me if I paid him a grand down. Now my paycheck was going to be a lot smaller, but in the long run I stood to make a bit of money. And if what I was thinking about Marjorie came to pass I was going to need all the money I could get. I spent a few nights helping Reg pull the engine and transmission out of the Corvette. There was a bad bearing in the transmission so that was a pretty inexpensive fix. Reg suggested that I should have the engine block bored out and I should install oversized pistons along with the proper rings if I wanted a job that would last, but I decided that I would rather try to just hone the cylinders and put new rings on the pistons. We did that and when we started the Corvette the blue smoke was gone. I now had a good looking Corvette that was in very saleable condition. I had it advertised and while it was in the paper I also drove it back and forth to work. Naturally, instead of the newspaper ad that I had paid for to bring me a customer, a guy who came by the lot saw it there and wanted to buy it, but I had to tell him that I could not sell my own car from the car lot. He did buy it from me that night after work though. After paying off my loan from Jack and paying Reg for his work I made a $2,000.00 profit on my venture. Now I was in a much better position to look for a job as a Geologist so that I could use my degree. I had been trapped in what seemed to be a never ending cycle of not having enough money to take time off from work to look for work. I had not been seeing much of Marjorie while I was working on the Corvette but I had been calling her every night and talking to her for quite a while on the telephone. Mentally I was falling in love with her. Marjorie had not gone to university like Sally and I had and had been working in a clothing store since she graduated from high school. I had discussed my thoughts of getting a job as a geologist with Marjorie and I asked her if she would marry me and move away from home if I found a job that required me to relocate. “Isn’t this a little too soon to be talking about marriage Mike?” Marjorie asked me. “I don’t think so. I spent a lot of money to get an education. Right now there is no work around here for me in my field. I could move out west, where there is work, but I didn’t have enough money to do that until I was able to make some good money by selling that Corvette. And now that I have the money I find I don’t want to go because I am falling in love with you.” I replied. ‘How can you say that? We have barely even dated.” Marjorie said. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” I asked. “No, not really. There is an obvious attraction when you first meet someone, but it takes time to get to love them and we have not had enough time.” Marjorie replied. “Then I suppose what I feel for you is just a very strong attraction then. I can understand and accept that, and I am willing to take some time for us to get to know each other better. But I am not about to leave here for a job before I find out if you are the right girl for me. And I know that your parents – and mine – would be very upset if we went out west without getting married.” I replied. “I will make a deal with you. I like you a lot Mike, and I also think we could have something together. If you get a job that requires you to move I will come with you. But we will not marry, nor will we live together until we are married.” Marjorie told me. With that I went ahead with a number of job interviews. The head offices of many of the gold and silver as well as oil exploration companies were located in a nearby city. It took a few weeks after I had sent off my resume to a number of companies before I received a call to schedule my first interview. Unfortunately, the job I was offered was not suitable. I hoped that there would be other offers because I was getting quite anxious to put my plans for a future life with Marjorie in action. I did spend quite a few nights and weekends with Marjorie while I was waiting to hear from any of the other companies I had applied to. I had done my best to avoid any discussion about her eyesight and her glasses but she surprised me when she brought the subject up herself. Marjorie had gotten her first glasses just before she turned 13. She told me that she knew that she needed glasses for most of the year before she got them, and her first prescription was considered fairly strong at the time with her glasses being -2.50D for both eyes. She immediately started to wear them all the time. Now, 9 years later her prescription had climbed to -12.50 and she thought she likely required another slight increase. “Have you thought about trying contact lenses?” I asked. “I thought you liked me in glasses?” Marjorie asked. “I love your appearance wearing glasses. I just was wondering if you ever planned to try contact lenses.” I replied. “I won’t say never to the idea of wearing contacts but I have to tell you that I liked wearing glasses from the first time I put them on my face. My eyes feel safe from harm behind the lenses. The only thing I didn’t like was when people made nasty comments about the thickness of my lenses back when my eyes were getting worse and worse in high school.” Marjorie said. “Don’t ever think you need to try contacts because of me. I am quite fond of you with your glasses.” I answered. Because of the money I had earned from the sale of the Corvette I was prepared to wait a while until the right job came along. The waiting was almost intolerable, but fortunately I was able to spend a lot of my time with Marjorie and that made it a lot easier to take. As our relationship became more intense I began to get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much longer before Marjorie would be willing to marry me and I was certainly willing to invest whatever time was required. Selling used cars was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but in the meantime my commissions were more than paying the bills. I had now worked for Jack for over 2 years and had become accustomed to the sporadic, although financially remunerative income. It was hard for me to tell Jack that I would be moving on, but finally a job offer came in that I felt would be very suitable for both Marjorie and myself. I was going to have 30 days to relocate myself to an area about 1,000 miles away. My work would be covering a lot of ground but at least I would be based out of a small city of around 30,000 people, where I would be living. Marjorie and I discussed this, and she agreed to move there as she had promised. “You know, if you would marry me now, we could get an apartment together. It would save quite a bit of money. And I am pretty sure you will agree to marry me eventually.” I said. “That isn’t a very romantic way for a guy to ask his girl to marry him.” Marjorie said. I reached into my pocket for the ring box I was carrying and I got down on my knees as I opened it. “Marjorie Duncan will you marry me and become my wife?” I asked. “Yes Michael Nesbitt I will marry you.” Marjorie replied with tears in her eyes. I wanted to have a simple wedding and was willing to go before a Justice of the Peace. But this was not to be. Before I knew it Marjorie and her mom had a wedding all planned. While they could arrange the wedding immediately, the logistics of everything meant that the earliest we could be married was going to be in 4 months. This meant that not only would I have to start my new job; I would have to rent an apartment and set up housekeeping on my own. “I need to have my eyes checked before the wedding Mike.” Marj told me. “Well, let’s get an appointment for you and have it done before I leave. I would like to help you pick your new frames.” I replied. Her eye doctor was able to fit her in the following week for an exam. I had given Jack my notice and I was training another salesman as my replacement so it was a simple matter to meet Marj at her work and take her to see the eye doctor. She had been complaining that things were not really clear in the distance for a couple of months now and I was hoping that she would require a decent increase. I was almost disappointed when I found out that her prescription had only climbed by -0.75D to -13.25D. There were a lot of frames to choose from but with such a strong prescription the optician was quick to veto a large number of them. Since Marj had gotten her silver wire frames styles had really changed and now the new frames were rather excessively large in my opinion. Even choosing the smallest frame we could find would make her new lenses quite a bit thicker. And, because of the thickness of her lenses the lens would make the frame sit even further away from the bridge of her nose, so the optician had to use formulae to calculate how much stronger Marj’s lenses would have to be. Finally the new frames and lenses were ordered with a -14D prescription. The additional -0.75D was supposed to make up the difference in the additional vertex distance she needed. I was fortunate in that the new glasses arrived the week before I was leaving to drive west. I took Marjorie to the optician and was with her when the lady took her new glasses out of the case and slipped them onto her nose. I loved the thickness. It was just what I wanted, but Marjorie was not thrilled with them at all. The plastic frame was done in an almost clear but slightly pink tinted plastic, and the lenses had to be close to ¾” thick at the outer edge. She really was upset when she looked at herself in the mirror, and no amount of my telling her she looked good was able to settle her down. Finally she realized that she had no choice if she wanted to be able to see clearly. And she did want to see clearly. The last few months of being less than perfectly corrected made her realize that she really needed the new prescription and she finally settled down. I was able to find a 2 bedroom apartment in a very nice area that was reasonably priced. I signed a 1 year lease and started to buy some furniture. The only thing I bought new was our queen sized bed and pretty much everything else was bought at garage sales. I left a lot of things that we would need in order for Marjorie to buy things that she wanted. The remaining 3 months passed fairly quickly. I had made arrangements when I was hired to be able to take about 10 days off, and I drove back for the wedding. Marjorie had chosen Sally to be her maid of honor, along with a couple of her high school friends to be bridesmaids. I had my old boss Jack as my best man, and I called on my brother and my cousin Reg to be ushers. The wedding was a lot of fun and it was great to be finally married to Marjorie. The only thing that threw a damper on things for me was that Marjorie had gotten herself contact lenses to wear for the wedding, and I had a bad feeling that she would be inclined to wear them a lot more of the time once she was used to them. Fortunately after we got back to the apartment that was going to be our home for the next few years Marjorie confessed to me that the contact lenses were not very comfortable for her to wear for much over 6 hours. And 6 hours wasn’t quite good enough. It didn’t cover the whole 10 hours of traveling and lunch breaks that she needed for her to be able to put in an 8 hour work day. As well, if we went out on a Friday or Saturday night, we pretty well had to be home by no later than 2 in the morning. It didn’t take much time before those expensive hard contacts were relegated to collecting dust in a dresser drawer. I could understand why Marj wanted to wear contact lenses for the wedding. The glasses she had gotten before the wedding looked very thick. She had chosen a plastic frame that was very much in style in the early 70’s. The frame was a pale pink color that faded to clear around the bottom of the lenses, and the temples were what is called a drop temple style. We had chosen a generic make rather that going for the pricier frames, and had been fortunate enough to find a frame that was quite small, but still had long enough temples that they fit her. Most of the frames that were this size were designed for children. Her new lenses were so thick that the temples would not close. This was fine as long as Marjorie had them on her face but had made it rather difficult for those times when she wanted to wear contact lenses and still have her glasses along in case her contacts bothered her. I laughed internally, because I thought it funny that a person with bad eyes that wanted to wear contacts could not get a pair of glasses that would fold into a case to be carried with them. And it was also very humorous to me that the new large frame sizes made the lenses of the glasses of anyone who needed a strong prescription so extremely thick that they wanted to wear contact lenses. It almost seemed as if the frame manufacturers were driving everyone to getting contact lenses with these big frames. With her contact lenses safe in a drawer and her glasses, thick as they were, perched on her nose, Marjorie found a job in a clothing store. This kept her busy enough that she didn’t mind me being away the occasional night on my exploration trips. I had told the company that I didn’t want to travel a lot, but there were times when I just couldn’t finish my work in the area in a day and make it home at a reasonable time. It was only nine months after our wedding when we found out that Marjorie was now 3 months pregnant. We were quite happy about this as we had discussed having kids before we married and we both wanted children. I was now earning quite a decent salary, and the money Marjorie had been earning had almost paid for our apartment and a lot of our bills. Now we had some money in the bank. We decided that we would stay in the 2 bedroom apartment for at least another year and would turn the spare bedroom into a nursery. When Rebecca was born Marjorie had decided to breast feed her. A couple of months after this Marjorie started to notice that her vision with her glasses wasn’t quite as good as it had been before she gave birth. It took her another month before she decided that she would tell me this and when I questioned her how long this had been going on I realized that she hadn’t said anything because she didn’t want to get thicker glasses. It turned out that her prescription increase was again only -0.75D, but this still made her lenses a bit thicker, and this time, to get her temples to close, they had to shave off the back of the lens. This gave her new glasses a bit of a myodisc appearance, but I liked this look a lot. When Rebecca was almost a year old Marjorie was pregnant again. And, once again, after our son Jack was born, Marjorie needed new glasses. This time her prescription increased by -1.25D and her new glasses were going to be -16.00D. The optician gave her a choice between a lens that was dished in on both the front and the rear, or a lens that was flat on the front but was what I considered a real myodisc. Instead of having just the outer edge shaved off so the temples would close, the true myodisc lens was going to have a complete circle inside the frame. Marjorie didn’t know which one to choose. She didn’t like the idea of the myodisc, but she realized that the biconcave lenses would be fairly thick. I suggested that with her strong prescription she should buy 2 pairs of glasses so that she had a backup pair and she agreed and we bought one pair of each. Marjorie took one look at the biconcave -16D glasses and immediately decided that she was not going to ever wear them. I couldn’t blame her. The front appeared to be quite dished in, but I suppose it only had about -4D in the front curve. The back curve was pretty steep as well, and the edge thickness looked to have used every bit of the ¾” lens blank. The myodiscs were definitely the nicest looking pair and I soon became accustomed to her wearing them all the time. But I did convince Marjorie to put the biconcave lensed glasses on every once in a while when we made love. I used the excuse that she would probably like to wear her glasses, but it would be a shame if we accidentally broke her good ones and she fell for this. She also wore the biconcave glasses when she was in the shower, and she had a strap that held them to her face when she was in our pool. I did get to see her wearing them enough that I found that she turned me on whenever she had them on. Since we had decided that 2 children were going to be enough of a financial burden for us to raise and educate we took steps to avoid another pregnancy. Once the pregnancies ended, there were no more huge jumps in Marjorie’s myopic prescription, although in the last 38 years her prescription had climbed to a little over -20D before it had started to drop back down, leaving her present glasses around -19D with a +2.50D add. It was fortunate that her prescription had lessened right around the time she needed bifocals, because progressives were not easily available if the person’s prescription was over -20D. And the new thinner lenses really made quite a difference in the lens thickness of higher prescriptions. Both of our children had gone on to graduate from university and had gotten married. Rebecca had ended up with a -9D prescription but had hated her glasses and at the first available opportunity had gone for that laser surgery. It seemed to work for her, although there had been a lot of horror stories about surgeries that had gone badly. Jack was mildly myopic, but didn’t wear glasses except for driving at night. And so far none of our grandchildren had shown any indication that they would need glasses. I had been worried that since Rebecca had such a good outcome from her surgery that Marjorie would want to have her eyes operated on, but after a consultation with the surgeon, who told her she was not a candidate for the laser surgery but she could have lens implant surgery she decided that the risk was just too great. She was looking forward to developing cataracts so she could have cataract surgery, which would pretty much eliminate her myopia, but so far her cataracts were not hindering her vision and her doctor had advised her to wait a while longer. As I look back and reflect on my life over the years, I thank my friend Sally for introducing me to her cousin Marjorie. I could not imagine having had anyone else as my wife. Specs4ever Sept 2016
https://vision-and-spex.com/reflections-over-the-years-t971.html