Wearing glasses - essay

When I was in the fourth grade it was discovered, more or less accidentally, that I was nearsighted. VERY. In fact, I was legally blind without glasses. Why no one had figured this out previously I really don't know. I hadn't figured it out. I had no other experience of seeing. I guess I thought everyone experienced the world as a great blurry mass of confusion. My teachers in the first three grades should certainly have been aware of it. But if they were they apparently didn't care. They preferred, I suppose, to just think I was stupid. I was stupid. How could one not be stupid if they can't read the blackboard or the flash cards from which they are supposed to be learning the multiplication tables or how to read and pronounce and so forth? So I was given glasses. Thick ones.
Interestingly, people do not seem to perceive being extremely myopic as a handicap. Where they might sympathize with someone who is totally blind they don't sympathize with someone who is really blind but wears glasses. My school chums, otherwise reasonably friendly and understanding, immediately labeled me "four eyes." They didn't think it was mean, I guess, it was just that wearing glasses was not what they did. And although it was occasionally used as an insult, it did not seem to cost me any friends. I was still accepted, still part of the "gang."
But later I learned that wearing thick glasses did not help in growing up. If I tried any form of sports with the glasses on I inevitably broke them invoking my father's ire (and his ire was considerable when it came to paying for new glasses). If I played without my glasses...well, I just couldn't. But even so I don't think anyone ever thought of me as being handicapped, or as even personally sensitive about my affliction. Many people, including some I know to have been unusually sensitive when it came to other things, thought nothing whatsoever about commenting, "they're just like coke bottles," after trying on my glasses. Or they would feign dizziness and stagger around remarking, "how can you see ANYTHING out of these," or, "My god, they're so thick," and etc. From my point of view this was insensitivity with a vengeance. From their point of view it was apparently just conversation.
I've never seen anyone approach a one legged person with, "that's a really interesting stump you've got there, mind if I try on your artificial leg?" I've never seen anyone tell someone in a wheelchair, "what's the matter, can't you walk," or observing to someone with cerebral palsy that, "that's a mighty funny twitch," or some such thing. But charity doesn't extend to the myopic. Granted its funny to see someone without their glasses addressing the store manikin instead of the salesperson. And the "Nearsighted Mr. Magoo" is not without humor. Sort of like a slapstick comedy about the mentally retarded (another group, by the way, that doesn't get much sympathy). I notice, however, that they don't make cartoons about the "Legless Mr. McGimpy," or "Palsy Walsy Palsy," or whatever.
If you really need glasses badly and don't happen to have them you can't drive, can't watch television, can't recognize your friends unless they come right up to you, and can't even read unless you hold the book a couple of inches from your nose, which is most embarrassing. Its not much fun going to parties and having everyone insist on trying on your glasses and then carrying on about how blind you must be without even a trace of delicacy. They don't go around asking people to let them try on their hearing aid, or play with their wheelchair, or wear their catheter, or their artificial arm. Nor do you ever see in a movie the hero having to remove his glasses before kissing the fair young maiden. The cowboy riding through the snow doesn't stop every few minutes to wipe off his glasses. Cowboys and detectives and heroes of all kinds just don't wear glasses. Only milquetoasts, sissies, and the boy next door. You know, the scrawny one who talks in the squeaky voice and always loses the girl to Mr. Noglasses Macho. Thank heaven for contact lenses. Nobody asks to try them on.