The invitation came as an attachment to an e mail. My class of ‘78 was having their 40th reunion in June of 2018 and I was asked to RSVP as to whether I would be coming or not. I had opened the attachment and was looking at the 4 pictures that were rather poorly reproduced on the invitation. There was one of Rod Johnson’s 73 Mustang with a couple of guys leaning against it. Then there was a picture of 3 guys and a girl. I was pretty sure that the girl was Kathy Mallory, and one of the guys was Gary Burns, but the other 2 guys were just not recognizable to me. One picture was of the football team playing a game and if I hadn’t known that Sam Longmore was number 27, I wouldn’t have known anyone. The 4th picture was of 2 girls with long blond hair, white t shirts and blue jeans and as my eyes focused for a closer look, I was almost positive the one of the girls in the picture was wearing a pair of what, back in 1977 or 78, would have been considered major coke bottle glasses. You might ask how I could spot a pair of potentially strong minus glasses in a rather poorly reproduced photo. I would then have to tell you that from the time I had left that one horse town that I grew up in I had spent my time searching for ladies that needed and wore strong glasses. I probably have one of the largest private collections of pictures of girls who wear glasses, and while I have no idea of how many actual pictures I have I do know that I have over 300 individual named girls consisting of between 4 and 100 pictures of each girl as well as almost 400 individual single girls in the myodiscs and over -20 diopter category. I also have 225 individual girls of the same 4 to 100 pictures range of girls whose prescriptions range from -15D up to -20D along with another 350 single pictures of these ladies. I also have a large number of ladies pictures with prescriptions that range from -10D to -15D along with about 500 single pictures of these ladies. So, can I spot a girl wearing glasses with a strong prescription? I would like to think I am pretty much an expert. The use of a fairly powerful magnifying glass didn’t help a lot. The picture was, as I mentioned, not the best quality. I did manage to identify the girl who was not wearing glasses and I suspected that I would be able to find out who the other girl was from Cindy Marshall – or whatever her married name was now. One of the people on the call to RVSP list was a Cindy Short and I wondered if that might actually be Cindy Marshall. Just for the heck of it I called her number. “Hi Cindy. This is Pete Evans from the class of 78. I received the invitation and am just calling to tell you I will be coming. Were you Cindy Marshall by the way?” I asked. Cindy replied that she was married to Gord Short and that her maiden name had indeed been Marshall. “I thought I recognized you on one of the pictures on the invite, but after trying as hard as I could I didn’t recognize the girl with the glasses that you were standing beside.” I said. “Oh, that was Lisa Marley. The picture was likely from before she got contacts.” Cindy replied. “Lisa Marley? That was Lisa? I remember Lisa, but I certainly don’t remember her ever wearing glasses.” I responded. I hung up and started to think. I attended Riverside Senior High in grade 10, 11 and 12. I seemed to remember a Lisa Marley in some of my classes, but she certainly hadn’t worn glasses at any time I could remember. Too bad, because if I had found a reasonably good looking girl that wore strong glasses, I might have stuck around that one horse town. Actually, it was a fairly large town, with a population of around 25,000 people when I lived there with my parents, but there was no future there for me. Nor were there any girls that wore glasses strong enough to suit me so as soon as I graduated, I headed for the big smoke to go to college. I studied to be a medical technician, and when I had my degree, I was fortunate enough to be hired by the fire department. I received my training as a firefighter as well and that led to over 35 years of earning a very good wage. I was able to marry and raise 2 daughters. I had purchased a house soon after I started working. Then I bought a bit larger new house and kept the first house as a rental. By moving into a new house and finishing the house off myself I managed to move my family into a new home every 5 years. After 30 years of doing this, I had 5 rental income houses and the one we lived in, so my portfolio was in quite good shape as the first 2 homes I had bought were now paid off and I had 5 rental houses with payments on only 4 so I was paying down the remaining mortgages quickly. Everything should have been perfect except for the fact that I had lost my wife 2 years earlier from cancer. Here I was a widower at the age of 58. I had met Marcy while I was doing my medical training and we had married once I was hired by the fire department. I knew that Marcy was the girl for me, as she was quite pretty and wore glasses with a prescription of -23.00D. She wanted to get contact lenses and while I always told her she could do what she wanted to do, I managed to keep her wearing glasses until the day she died. Even when both of our daughters got contact lenses, I managed to talk Marcy out of getting them, and to this day I don’t quite know how I managed that. Marcy wore her myodiscs until she died, and I have them, along with all of her old glasses, stored away in a safe place where sunlight and high heat will not cause the plastic frames to deteriorate. I have quite a collection of glasses from my daughter’s as well. Both Vivian and Beverly inherited their mother’s myopic gene, and both needed glasses by the time they were a year old. I had thought it might be the case, but I wasn’t really thrilled to see both my babies being highly myopic almost from the time they were born. Possibly because Marcy wore strong glasses the girls didn’t seem to have any problems and understood that their glasses were a necessity. Both girls have similar prescriptions now that they are in their early 30’s, and so far, they have avoided the retinal problems that many high myopes have with strong prescriptions. I think Viv has a prescription that is slightly over -25D, and Bev is just under 25D. Unfortunately, my granddaughter Stacey appears to be following in her mother Bev’s and her grandmother’s footsteps as she is quite nearsighted and is now also wearing very strong glasses. Viv and her husband don’t have any children yet, but if they ever have a girl, I suspect that the myopia gene will be passed on once again. Shortly after I moved to the city one of my colleagues that I was taking the medic’s training with invited me to a Saturday gathering at his church. I wasn’t sure if he was actually Ukrainian or not, but the church gathering was at a Ukrainian church hall. It was a fun afternoon, and everyone was having a really good time – even me. One of the dancers in the performance was a really attractive dark haired girl with a great body and glasses that captivated my attention. As she flew across the floor in perfect time with the other dancers, I could see the light flashing off the front of what appeared to be biconcave lenses in her glasses. I wanted to meet her and after the dancers were finished, I managed to work my way over to where she was standing, and I told her that she was an excellent dancer. Fortunately, that lead to us spending the rest of the afternoon together, and I ended up taking her home.to where she lived with her parents. She had come to this country at the age of 3 with her parents from Bucharest, Romania, and while I was to find out later that her parents still spoke with an accent Marcy spoke perfect unaccented English. It didn’t take me long after our first date before I hated to be apart from her. I knew she needed stronger glasses, but like most myopes she had devised ways to push her glasses up tight to the bridge of her nose with the knuckles of her hand so that she didn’t smear the lenses. At the movies we sat where Marcy wanted to sit, even though it was slightly closer to the screen than I would have picked. She squinted a lot, and once in a while she would tilt her glasses slightly. I knew what she was doing, but every time I suggested that maybe we should go see an eye doctor to get her new glasses she would always brush me off by telling me that her glasses would do for a little longer, After about 6 months of rather intense dating, I asked Marcy to marry me, and she accepted. I think her parents might have been a little relieved because while contact lenses had started to reduce the numbers of highly myopic young ladies a fellow could meet, there didn’t seem to be a lot of eligible young men hanging around their door looking to date Marcy. And if a guy had looked past the thick biconcave glasses that Marcy needed to see anything she was actually a very attractive girl with an extremely nice figure. I felt I was very fortunate to find such a lovely nearsighted young lady. And once Marcy accepted my marriage proposal, she also agreed that she would let me take her to see her eye doctor and would get new glasses. Even though the squinting and her pushing up her glasses made Marcy extremely desirable to me I knew that she needed a stronger prescription, and while the squinting might disappear for a few months it would likely come back. We saw her eye doctor and we bought Marcy quite an attractive pair of glasses. Nothing could be done to make the lenses look any better though and Marcy’s new -20D lenses had a deeper front base than her old lenses had. The thickest part of her lenses, at the very outside of the temple had to be about 2cm thick – really close to an inch. Knowing that the lenses would be thick we had chosen one of the few frames available that had the hinge for the temples set well back, and even so they had to bring the lens forward in the frame so the temples would close. Marcy was happy with her vision, and I was happy with how she looked. Our next step was getting married and then we had 36 really wonderful years. After our marriage Marcy didn’t have a lot more myopic progression, and by the time she passed away her prescription as I previously mentioned had settled right around -23.00D. It was hard driving back to my reunion. I was looking forward to seeing my mom and my old classmates again, but hopefully the best part would be seeing Lisa Marley again and trying to find out if she still wore contact lenses, or had she gone back to glasses. Actually, the worst case scenario would have been if she had gone for that implantable contact lens surgery, because she was a little young for cataracts, but I still hoped she wore contact lenses. And the best case scenario would be that she was either not married, or she was divorced, and she now wore her glasses all the time. While I have often called the town that I grew up in a one horse town, or sometimes a Podunk backwoods village, my memories of growing up were very pleasant. I had played baseball, hockey and football, and while I was not a memorable player, I was certainly not the last one picked for a team. My sister Connie had never moved from there, my mom was still alive and living in the house we had grown up in and at times I regretted raising my 2 daughters in a big city. My girls had come out for a month during every summer to spend time with their Gran, and they had gotten to know Connie and Joe’s 2 boys and a girl quite well. Viv and Bev were quite close to Katie, Eric and Bruce and I know they still came here for visits. I think Stacey, my granddaughter knew her second cousin Natalie quite well as they were the same age and Bev and her husband came here at least once a month to visit Eric and Carlie along with Katie and Bruce’s families. I had been the odd one out, because I very seldom came back to town, but even Marcy had brought the girls to visit many times without me due to the excellent bus service. Mom was so happy to see me that I felt really guilty about not taking more time to visit while my dad was alive. She might have been 83 years old, but she was still sharp as could be and very mobile. We talked well into the evening about how much she had liked Marcy, and about how wonderful her granddaughters and their husbands were and how her great granddaughter was such a delightful child. I felt bad when we talked about my dad. His death had hit me hard, and I wished I had taken more of an effort to come and visit. But mom didn’t seem to blame me, and she knew that I had been fighting Marcy’s battle with her. She had really liked Marcy and while she had been rather against my marriage at first because of Marcy’s poor eyesight once we were married mom and Marcy became very close. Mom had been correct in her thoughts that if I married a girl with such poor eyesight any children we had would likely also have poor eyesight. She was correct, but I couldn’t tell her back then that this really didn’t matter to me. The next morning, I headed over to the high school as the sign in period was from 10 to 11. I arrived at 10:30, and the place was fairly full already, so I figured this event was going to be very well attended. There were 4 ladies registering attendees and I recognized 3 of them right away. I headed for Cindy Short who was wearing a name tag that read Cindy Marshall Short. I didn’t even have to tell her my name before she dug into a folder and brought out my form and my nametag. I paid my money, put my nametag on my shirt and started wandering around. There were quite a few people I recognized, and we spent a bit of time reminiscing. As I walked to the refreshment table a lady bumped into me and said “Pete Evans. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that you liked ladies that wore glasses?” I looked at her as she walked on by. I had not recognized her, but I certainly looked at her as she walked away. She was a little heavier appearing than Marcy had been, but Marcy had spent a lot of time retaining her figure. But this lady still looked pretty good from behind. I had a pretty good idea who this might be. If Cindy and Lisa were still good friends, it was very likely that Cindy had mentioned to Lisa that I had inquired as to who the girl with glasses was in the picture on the invitation. I kept an eye on the lady I thought might be Lisa and when she left the group of people she had been with and started walking away I walked over to her and said, “Why didn’t you ever let me know you wore glasses?” By this time, I had read her name tag and it simply said Lisa Marley. Lisa and I chatted for quite a while. She told me that she had gotten her contacts when she graduated from Junior high, and she desperately wanted everyone to forget the girl with the thick glasses. She wore contact lenses exclusively for the rest of her high school years and when she graduated, she went on to become an optician. She had returned to our hometown and had eventually married Joe Wicker. They had 2 children, a boy and a girl. Both of her children had inherited her myopia, although her son had a much lower prescription than she or her daughter had. She told me her son’s prescription was right around -10D, but she wouldn’t say anything about her daughter or her prescriptions. Lisa offered her condolences on the death of my wife, as apparently, she had known Marcy and both my daughters. One time while visiting mom Marcy had broken her glasses and Lisa had helped find a frame that her lenses fit perfectly. Vivian and Beverly had both been struggling to see one August and Marcy had liked Lisa enough that she had the doctor that Lisa worked for do our daughter’s eye exams and sell us their new glasses. It was sort of coming back to me and I remembered that was the summer Viv turned 16. Joe and Lisa had divorced 3 years earlier. Lisa mentioned that she really wasn’t looking for another relationship, but I wondered if that was really true. I told her that it was too soon for me to even think about a relationship as Marcy had only been gone for 6 months and I just wasn’t ready. But I would be more than willing to take her to the reunion dance that evening if she was free. I wouldn’t say that she jumped at the invitation, because I had included in my invitation the words, “If you would be willing to wear your glasses for me.” She thought about it for a few minutes before she said she would, but I knew she was reluctant to do so and I told her to forget my request, she could wear her contacts if she wanted to. “No, I can’t. Everybody in town knows me wearing glasses by now. I can only wear contacts for around 10 hours these days before they start to bother me. I usually wear my contacts all day for work, and then I switch to my glasses. My eyesight is not nearly as good wearing my glasses, but it is good enough for doing my housework and preparing meals. I sit a little closer to the television than I would like to, and when I am on the computer, I have to make the font bigger, or bring my face really close. By this evening I will need to switch to my glasses anyway. I wasn’t planning to go to the dance, or I would have worn my glasses here this morning so you would have seen me wearing glasses anyway.” Lisa said reluctantly. I picked Lisa up at 8, and I brought her a dozen roses. I wanted to ask her how strong her glasses were, but I didn’t say a word. They were definitely stronger than the ones Marcy wore. I suspected that they were 1.9 hi index glass and there was a small area at the outer edges that didn’t have any prescription in it. They might not have been -30D, but they were stronger than my daughter Vivian’s -25D glasses. Marcy and both my daughters had worn the 1.9 hi index glass lenses in their going out in public glasses for a few years now. I rather liked the 1.74 index plastic lenses because Marcy could do her glasses in a full field flat fronted lens, but both Viv and Bev had to have the outer edges where the prescription ended flattened off and I loved the thickness sticking out behind the frames. Also, the glasses with the hi index glass lenses put some really deep marks on their noses. My dancing left something to be desired, but at least I managed not to step on Lisa’s feet, and we had a pretty good time. A number of Lisa’s friends stopped by our table to say hi, and we were sitting with Gord and Cindy, so the conversation during the bands breaks was good. Cindy and Lisa had been friends forever, and while Gord and Joe had gotten along, I had the feeling that Gord was just as happy that Lisa wasn’t with Joe anymore. I drove Lisa home around midnight. When she was buckled in, she took off her glasses and told me that those darned things are heavy. I could see the deep indents on her nose when I looked at her even in the dark, but I didn’t say anything. I invited her to have brunch with me the next day and she surprised me by inviting me over and she would cook for me. When I got there, I expected Lisa to be wearing her contact lenses, but she surprised me. She was wearing a pair of biconcave myodiscs that had to be a lot lighter on her nose than the glasses she had worn the previous evening. I told her that those glasses looked nice on her and added that they had to be a lot lighter than the glasses she had worn the previous evening. She confirmed my statement and we sat and talked for a while after brunch. I asked her if she would like to go to a movie with me the next Saturday and she accepted the invitation. As I got into my car to drive home my last look at her was one that I would treasure for the rest of the week. Her body that was slightly matronly but still shapely and her pretty face wearing those strong biconcave myodiscs was burned into my brain. I had a feeling that my mom was going to see a lot more of me over the next little while, and if it wasn’t for my girls and my granddaughter living in the city my class reunion might very well have brought me back to live in my Podunk little hometown. Specs4ever July 2021