Losing It
By Gene Aronowitz
One day, in early March 2024, I couldn't find my glasses.
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 couldn't find them.
Linda and I had 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 them fogging up. I checked the car, but they were not in there.
Linda and I checked every room in our house. We checked the bedroom, even under the bed, thinking I had put my glasses on the bedside cabinet the previous night, only to find they had fallen off. We checked the bathroom because I take my glasses off while grooming. 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 thought I might have taken my glasses off to prevent them from falling.
I was upset because our insurance only pays for new glasses every two years. My prescriptive, progressive, and transitional glasses, which I bought about a month earlier, were costly, and it seemed I would have to buy a new pair. I gave up the search, worried that I had not only lost that essential assistive device but was also somehow losing my mind.
The next morning, I heard Linda shout, "Gene. Get in here." Oh shit,” I thought. “What did I do now?” When I arrived at her office, she pointed at the Venetian blinds. 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.
Hindsight is 20-20, and in my mind, here is what I think must have happened. When I finished meditating in Linda's office that morning, I must have looked out the window because there were more than a hundred grackles or other blackbirds milling around. I wanted to take a picture of that assemblage. I probably pulled up the Venetian blind by pulling down the cord, and as I did so, the cord must have somehow become attached to my glasses, which 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 the glasses up with it.
Finding those classes was certainly uplifting.
A version of this memoir is included in the book 23 More Memoirs.