Historical September 1989 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Father Time and I arm-wrestled last week, and Father won.
It wasn’t even a close match. Like the rest of you, I’m sure, I try to avoid focusing on those things which tell me—shout at me these days—that I’m growing older. Sometimes, though, the inevitable effects of the aging process grab me by the throat and yell at me through a bullhorn so that I can’t ignore them. That happened recently. Last fall I began calling the Post-Dispatch to complain about the quality of their print.
The size of the individual letters and characters was getting smaller and I was forced, oddly enough, to hold the paper farther away to read the words.
Each of the six or seven times that I called, the Readers’ Advocate would begin to explain about the kind of ink they were using and how, yes, she was sorry that it did rub off on people’s fingers.
Each time I’d interrupt and note that I wasn’t calling about the quality of the ink, but the size of the print.
The letters, I knew, were getting smaller. “You can’t fool me:’ I said, “this is being done to get more words on each page so that you can save money!” She denied it vigorously.
It wasn’t just the Post, either. I also called the editors of The Atlantic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and The National Enquirer, all of my favorite publications.
In every case they denied making their print any smaller or harder to read.
I was convinced that I had uncovered some communist or suburban plot until I complained to Sue Rothschild, the editor of our award-winning Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere. Sue painstakingly showed me the layout sheets from 1987 and 1989. Indeed, there was no question.
The size of the print was the same.
I was faced with the inevitable. Somehow my arms were shrinking and getting shorter. “How could this be?” I wondered. I knew that there are all kinds of strange diseases going around these days. Then I remembered that my first wife and I had visited central Europe not long after the Chernobyl disaster and had eaten some leafy salads. Plus, there was a week this summer when I went on a binge and ate White Castles for three days in a row.
I wasn’t sure what exactly had happened or how it had taken place, but clearly something had affected the length of my arms. I came home and checked my longsleeved shirts, but, much to my surprise, they all still fit!
My arms were the same size.
Now I was perplexed.
The size and clarity of the print had stayed the same, my arms were no shorter, yet I was having trouble reading. I increased the wattage in all of the light bulbs in the house, but there was no improvement. I couldn’t imagine what the problem might be. Several months later I was at a party discussing my problem with a friend and she asked me if I’d had my eyes checked. “Now that would look silly:’ I responded, “I don’t know anyone with checked eyes. Blue or green sure, or even hazel, but checked eyes?” There was a long pause and my friend emptied her glass with a big gulp. “No, you idiot’: she quietly whispered, “I mean have you had your eyes examined by a doctor?” Then the truth hit me like the shock of pain that runs up my leg each morning when I first get out of bed: I may be having vision difficulties due to semi-quasimiddle age! Last week I went to Dr. Bob, an old friend who’s an ophthalmologist.
He asked me to begin reading from the eye chart. “Which chart?” I asked. “The one on the wall:’ he replied. “Is there a closer one I can read from?” I asked. “You’ve come to the right place:’ he said dryly.
A week has passed since my eye exam.
Since then I’ve been to three retail eyeglass stores and have talked to an optometrist, two opticians, three optimists, and waved at an opossum.
One place that the first wife and I visited had this huge room with a see-through wall so that we could actually see the lenses being ground and the eyeglasses assembled. (I couldn’t help but think of the tale about the man who was visiting an eyeglass factory and fell into the lens-grinding machine. Yep, he made a spectacle of himself.) The end of the story is that I’m now sitting here wearing these funny kind of halfglasses. I’m not ready for the bifocal step yet; the half-glasses are a compromise between necessity (being able to read) and vanity (not walking into doors). It’s absolutely amazing how helpful the glasses are.
The difference between peering over and looking through the lenses is embarrassing!
I have a slight headache now because I’m not used to not squinting when I read, but I suspect I’ll get used to seeing things normally.
Now that I can see and can see what I couldn’t see, I can see why I couldn’t see. See?
Some people who don’t know me well were concerned that the glasses would bother me; they feared that it’d be difficult for me to admit that I’m aging. Ha! Little do they know. I just pretend that they’re sunglasses with clear lenses. I’ve rationalized that the glasses give me a rather erudite, sophisticated look.
When I wear them, I think I resemble a cross between Ben Franklin and Sam, the bartender from “Cheers!’ Come to think of it, my hairline is more like Ben’s. Actually, the best thing about the glasses is now that I can see again, I’ll be able to rely more on the written word. That’s good because lately it’s been harder for me to make out what people are saying.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September 1989.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1989_09.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
