Losing It
By Gene Aronowitz
One day, in early March 2024, I couldn't find a pair of glasses I bought recently. I tried to figure out what might have happened to them.
The day before, I had an appointment with a retina specialist to have my eye injected with a substance that would slow the development of macular degeneration. The medical assistant had placed my glasses at the other end of the room, and I thought I might have left them there. I called their office, but the person I spoke to was not able to find them.
Linda and I stopped at a Chinese restaurant after my appointment to have some soup in our car. Since the soup was hot, I wondered if I might have taken off my glasses to avoid having them fog up. I checked the car, but they were not in there.
A little later, Linda and I did a more thorough search of the car and then checked every room in our house. We checked the bedroom and even under the bed, thinking I had put my glasses on the bedside cabinet the previous night, only to have them fall off. We checked the bathroom because I take my glasses off when I groom. We checked the laundry room in the basement because, earlier that morning, I had loaded the washing machine, and since I had to bend down, I might have possibly taken my glasses off to prevent them from falling. We checked her office, where I meditate every morning because I always place them on the table next to the window while I meditate.
I was upset because our insurance only pays for new glasses every two years. My prescriptive, progressive, and transitional glasses are very expensive, and getting a new pair seemed inevitable. I gave up the search, worried that I had not only lost that essential assistive device but was also somehow losing it myself.
The next morning, I was in my office, and Linda was in hers. I heard her shout, "Gene. get in here." Oh shit,I thought. What did I do now? When I got to her office, she pointed at the venetian blind. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but as I got closer, I saw my glasses hanging from the cord you pull down to raise the blind.
Here is what must have happened the day before. When I finished meditating in Linda's office, I looked out the window and saw more than a hundred grackles or other blackbirds milling around and wanted to take a picture of that assemblage. I pulled up the venetian blind, and as I did so, the cord must have somehow attached itself to my glasses that were sitting on the table. But the birds flew away, reacting to the noise of the ascending blind. Disappointed, I released the cord, which, when it rose, apparently pulled my glasses up with it.
Finding those classes was certainly uplifting.
