Shortly after my wife and I moved to a different area of the country than we had spent most of our married life in I heard from an old friend that a girl who had been in my class throughout grade school and high school was living in a town about a 4 hour drive away from the town I now lived in. He gave me her phone number, and I added her to my contacts list with the full intention of calling her as soon as I could arrange to take a trip to where she now lived. Before I could do that though my wife fell ill, and although she would never recover, at least after a year of being almost incapacitated she had reached a point where I could leave her alone for the day once in a while.
I had told my wife that Patsy Warner now lived in the area and that someday I would like to visit her, but that was not met with a resounding cheer from her. Although my wife had gone to a different school she had known Patsy through a mutual friend and as a young lady Patsy had been one of the prettier girls in school. I could understand why my desire to visit Patsy was meeting with a bit of resistance from her, but there was no way I could tell her that there was no intention of me replacing her with Patsy after the illness she was struggling to beat had taken her away. Patsy was about the same age as I am, and there had been absolutely no interest on either side when we were in school. We had been friendly, yes, and we had been in the drama club and the glee club together. We spoke in the hall, and when we met on the street, but Patsy was always going with one of the older guys. Anyway, the biggest obstacle for me was that Patsy was not one of the girls who wore glasses, and I had absolutely no interest in going after a girl who did not wear glasses with a nice minus prescription.
So far a year and a half had gone by. I had tried a couple of times to call Patsy, but she had not answered her phone and I had not waited to see if her answering machine would take a message. We were now into late fall and it was no longer possible for me to take a trip to visit her, as winter in the mountains where she lived could get pretty unpredictable and I still needed to be home every night. As winter passed into spring and the snow began to melt I began to think more and more about a quick visit to see Patsy. I called her again, and this time she answered. I explained my situation with my wife to her, and that somedays she had good days, but other days were bad days. Patsy understood that as she had been a nurse, and her own husband had died from a similar disease about 20 years earlier. This made it easier to set up a tentative meeting as Patsy would understand if I called that day to cancel.
But I didn’t have to cancel and after a 4 hour trip through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery I had ever seen I arrived at the restaurant where Patsy and I were supposed to meet. I was about 15 minutes early and I needed a coffee to warm me up so I went in and was seated. The heat and the hot coffee did the trick, and I started warming up nicely. I had positioned myself to watch the door and every time an unaccompanied older lady entered I would scrutinize them to see if I could recognize their features. I had given my name to the hostess, and had told her I was meeting Patsy, who the hostess knew, and she corrected me in telling me that Patsy was never called that and was only known as Pat. I told her that old habits ran deep, but I would do my very best to try to call her Pat.
Right around the time scheduled for our meeting the door opened and a lady walked in and looked around the restaurant. She was about the right size for Pat, but this lady wore glasses. Her hair was cut short, and the lenses of the glasses showed light down each outer side of the lenses so I knew that these glasses held a reasonably strong minus prescription. They can make the lenses very thin these days, but there is no way that they can reduce the cut in because cut in is due to the optical properties of the lenses. I doubted that this lady was Pat, because when we graduated high school at the age of 17 Pat had not worn glasses and contact lenses had not really been an option yet unless your family was quite wealthy. The prescription that was in the glasses that this lady wore indicated to me that she had been a glasses wearer from an early age.
As the hostess led this lady to my table I quickly surmised that I had been wrong in my thinking. Obviously this was Pat, and her glasses were quite strong for someone who had become nearsighted later in life. She was still quite attractive for someone in her early 70’s and she obviously took good care of herself as she was still as slim and trim as she had been as a young girl.
I was very interested in asking her about her glasses and her eyesight but I knew better than to bring the subject up first. As we ate we discussed the village where we both grew up and talked about some of the people we had each kept in contact with. Then the discussion rolled around to family and grandkids. We talked about her losing her husband over 20 years earlier and we talked about my wife’s illness and the eventual probable outcome. I only had a 2 hour window before I had to leave and it was rapidly closing without saying a word about her glasses or her eyesight.
Finally I had to say something and I merely said that I didn’t remember her as wearing glasses back in high school. That must have been the right thing to say, because then I got pretty much the whole story, albeit a condensed version. Pat had noticed during her last year in high school that her distance vision was just not right. By Christmas time she had to ask the teachers to move her up to the front of the class so she could see their writing on the board. But she had been deathly afraid of getting glasses, and she struggled to see well enough to graduate from our grade 12 year. She had been accepted into a nursing program at a hospital in the city as soon as she graduated, but she knew she needed glasses badly so just before school ended she had her eyes tested. She told me that at the time her optometrist told her that she had likely strained her eyes by not getting glasses when she first discovered she needed them and that her first prescription was likely a lot stronger than she would have needed it to be if she had gotten her eyes checked and had started wearing glasses a lot sooner. I wisely did not ask Pat what her first, or any subsequent prescriptions were and she went on to tell me that while she was in training to become an RN she had needed to have her eyes tested every year because they had gotten worse and worse and she needed stronger lenses.
After Pat had graduated and was an actual nurse she had met, and soon married her husband. She had continued working as a nurse until she was pregnant with their first child, her first of two daughters. Pat told me she was wearing contact lenses by the time her daughter was born and I suspected that they were the original hard plastic lenses, which she confirmed. After the birth of her daughter Pat had her eyes checked and her eye doctor discovered that her eyes had gotten much worse during the pregnancy. Once she returned to work she was able to get the new soft plastic contacts that had just come on the market and she wore them all the time until she was pregnant with her second daughter. After the birth of their second daughter Pat again experienced a sizeable jump in her prescription. She then stayed at home with both girls until they were in school full time.
Once her daughters were both in school Pat went back to nursing, and she did that until her husband was diagnosed with a life threatening illness. Fortunately he worked for a large company that had good health insurance, so it was not as much of a financial burden on the family as it could have been. Pat took a leave of absence from nursing so she could be home to look after her husband. By this time their oldest daughter had graduated from university and the younger girl was in her last year when their father passed away. Pat ended up going back to work at the hospital but when she went for her annual eye exam she needed an increase in her prescription again.
Pat’s story sounded very familiar to me. Often when a young person struggles to see without the glasses that they so badly need they will make their eyes worse by doing this. Then when they do get glasses and their eyes are able to relax, quite often they need an increase in their prescription. As well, increases of as much as -2D when a nearsighted lady is pregnant are not unrealistic. And then, with her husband’s illness and eventual death I could see the stress increasing her myopia. I was almost afraid to ask Pat what her prescription was now, but just for the heck of it I added it up in my mind. Say she started with as much as -3.50D. Then add on -4.00D for the increases during her pregnancies, which would give her about -7D. If her husband’s death gave her another -2D she would be at somewhere around -9D. Her glasses looked stronger than that to me and I suspected somewhere around -13D or -14D, which would have allowed for the few increases she had told me about before she got married as well as some other ones over the years. The time was really drawing close for me to take my departure and I decided I would venture a rough guess at her prescription. I told her I suspected that her glasses were somewhere around -13D. She seemed surprised that I had gotten so close and she told me that they actually were -13.50D along with some other numbers that she couldn’t remember.
I really did have to go. I told Pat it had been a wonderful get together, and that we would have to do it again if we could find a mutual time and date. She agreed that she would like to see me again, and I picked up the tab for the lunch. I hugged Pat goodbye and we went outside. As she got into her car and drove off I thought about the future. She was a widow and soon I was likely going to be a widower, but as far as I was concerned there could be no future together. You see, she had just told me that she was scheduled to have her cataracts removed within the next couple of months. And without those gorgeous -13.50D glasses there was just no real attraction. I had lost my chance with her once in high school, and now I had lost it again. She was twice gone to me.
Specs4ever October 2016.