In spite of my rule, I was intrigued (a synonym for bullied) so I agreed to be fitted for contact lenses. 

After an exam which includes expanding your pupil to dimensions large enough to allow people to put their hands inside your head, I was taken to a special room for instruction on the installation of my contact lenses. 

Except you can’t tell someone else how to put them in.  It’s like teaching someone how to tie their shoes or parallel park.  It cannot be instructed, it must be experienced through painful, humiliating, trial and error. 

By the time I got the first lens in I was sweating everywhere including my ear canal and my eyes were watering so much that I was getting light headed from dehydration. 

The optician was very supportive.  She said: “You did fine, really.  It usually takes a little longer with people your age.”  Only the second time I’ve heard that sentence since my honeymoon.

The second lens proved more challenging.  My optical assistant was rolling her eyes so hard that her own contact lenses popped out.  Finally she said: “Alright, I’ll show you, just let me do it for you.”

At this point I shared another of the other hard and fast rules I have: Never Let Anyone Else Touch Your Eyes.  There’s nothing we can do; it’s a Rule.  Evidently optical assistants have rules too, some of which allow them to use a TASER.

Eventually I was able to get both lenses on my eyes and then learned how to get them off, which would have been easier and less painful if I could have just pulled my eyes from their sockets and rinsed them in boiling water to remove the lenses.  That is not a medically approved method, by the way.

Since the initial consultation I have improved marginally in my lens technique. 

I prepare my little contact lens altar with the holy water and the blessed containers, regally labeled R and L.  (Still not sure what those mean.)  Then bending over the altar at just the right angle to aggravate my sciatica, peering directly into my eye, I slowly direct my finger toward my eye, hoping the lens hasn’t somehow fallen off into the toothpaste, and….

Blink.  My body says: Don’t forget the hard and fast rule!

Contacts would be convenient, other than the gymnastic eyelid stretching required to get them in.  I’m afraid that pulling my eyelids will stretch them out of shape and I’ll end up with giant floppy fleshy flaps of skin, like big elephant ears hanging over my eyes.  If God had wanted man to have plastic discs floating on his eyes he wouldn’t have invented those little nose pads for our glasses.

I’ll keep trying.  The eyes are the windows of the soul, and contact lenses are the plastic sheets we tape up to keep the draft out of the soul area.  Not that poetic, I know.  But at least I won’t look old.  Or smart.

Hope this finds you seeing clearly,        

David

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