I was a little kid during the sixties, a time when there was a lot of excitement in the air about new “techniques” for everything from learning to medicine. I was often a guinea pig for pilot programs in the primary grades. Now, I’ve always been an imaginative person open to new possibilities, but I regarded some of the stuff they asked me to do with more than a dollop of scepticism.
Phonics. They sure as heck didn’t “werk” for me. As a natural born speller from birth, I rebelled indignantly against them. I guess it works for kids who have trouble spelling; my attitude was along the lines of, “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.” I also remember my frazzled teacher tryin to persuade us to use coloured wooden rods of various lengths, to do arithmetic. Why not just use the numbers, I grumped sensibly.
When I was about nine, I was introduced to the latest in the field of ophthamology when the school nurse informed my parents that I was far-sighted and needed eyeglasses. The stuff my eye doctor put me through bordered on quackery. His theory was that I had a “lazy eye,” which was a source of shame for me, as no one had ever before accused any part of my anatomy of being lazy. His theory was that, if I exercised the slothful muscles in my eye, it would smarten up and get with the program, and I would no longer require corrective lenses. Many times my mom took me to the tall clinic building in downtown Winnipeg, where I was subjected to all sorts of ridiculous hocus-pocus involving peering through machines at insultingly juvenile pictures from which things would periodically disappear. I’d have to watch and report what item had vanished from the illustration. Seemed more like a game than science to me, but what did I know? I was just a kid. I tried my hardest, staring earnestly at flashing lights, and following pencils and beams of light to the far reaches of my peripheral vision, which left me with whanging headaches on the bus ride home. Often, I had to wear a patch over my more industrious eye, ostensibly so that my weaker eye would find some ambition.
Resistant to this cutting edge science, my indolent eye continued to grow weaker, at a rather alarming pace. I had frequent eye examinations, and my lenses got thicker and thicker. If this continued, I’d need a guide dog by junior high.
I hated the examinations. To dilate and paralyse my pupil, the doctor used eye drops that stung fiercely. I always cried, which would wash the drops back out, and meant Mom and I would have to wait through the examinations of numerous other patients in order to repeat the process. Eye appointments meant discomfort, scolding, and acute embarrassment on my part for disappointing everyone with my lack of improvement. I learned to cheat by memorizing the eye chart, not understanding that an inadequate prescription lens would only mean more eyestrain and inability to decipher signs on buses, lessons on the blackboard, text on television screens, and the like.
On top of everything else, eyeglasses were not the cool fashion statement that they are today. Even though I wore my glasses only in class and not at play, I was ridiculed by some of the mean kids on the playground. They chanted “four eyes” and said that with my white blonde hair and spectacles, I looked like a “granny.” It’s probably more than a little Freudian that I frequently lost my glasses, which would get me into real hot water with my frugal parents.
At the age of sixteen, I asked my eye doctor if he thought I should start wearing my glasses all the time. His startled response was, “You mean you aren’t already? How do you keep from walkin into telephone poles?” I took that as a yes, and I wasn’t happy about it: Everyone knew that “boys don’t make passes at girls with glasses.” My parents wondered why I would so often bend and break the arms of my glasses; they couldn’t know it was because every time a cute guy walked into the room, I’d whip them off hurriedly and hide them under my desk.
Fortunately, the rapid deterioration of my eyesight slowed to a creep and then a virtual standstill when I became a young adult. I found I would replace my glasses only because the lenses were so scratched as to be difficult to see through; in later years (when I was paying for my own eyeglasses), it would be to get more fashionable frames.
A few years ago, I began to have serious difficulty seeing things up close, and learned that now my vision was changing due to age. Now I wear bifocals (the kind in which you can’t see the lines) – you can tell when I’m at a computer because I hold my chin upwards rather aristocratically in order to read the monitor through the bottom of my lenses.
As for that lazy eye thing, that’s all straightened out now: the rest of me has slowed down to match.
