THERE’S a great poem by Ogden Nash that I used to find oh-so-terribly amusing, until just recently I suddenly realied that it was all about me. It begins with nice Mr Nash rhyming about how middle-aged life is merry and he loves to lead it…. “But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it.”
Well, its official. I am declaring today to be that day for me. Because I definitely can’t read the telephone book, nor can I read the music on the music stand, the Cyprus Mail is just a blur, and, as for the Langenscheidt pocket Turkish-English dictionary that I keep in my bag, it is not only because I am just not clever enough to learn Turkish that it might as well go in the bin… what am I to do?
According to his witty ditty, what Nash did was to get two pairs of specs:
“one for reading Earl Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Keat’s Endymion with..
…and the other for walking around without saying hello to strange wymion with”
Well that’s no good for me. For a start I am in denial – as everybody is at first, so I just squint and hold the page ever further away. Moreover I don’t only suffer from this middle-aged presbyopia (apologies to the under forties if I am being too technical) but I also have very slight myopia and wear those marvelous daily contact lenses that you throw away every night (unless you have gone to bed too drunk to remember). So if I want to admire the contours of Pendadaktilos or make out the leaves on the trees or read a car number plate at 25 meters I have to keep the lenses in. If I remove them, sure, I can read anything. But wearing them causes acute shortening of the arms. So it would seem that what I need is lenses with reading glasses on top when required – what’s the problem?
The problem, let us admit it, is vanity. Women can tend to look rather uncool in reading glasses. Chaps are different. I know a man my own age who only has to put on his reading glasses to be suddenly transformed into a distinguished professor-type and despite it aging him about 10 years he still manages to look almost sexy in them. It is not fair. Why does everything about aging seem to work out to men’s advantage? We girls can work miracles with our hairdresser, our personal fitness trainer, and God knows how many Faustian pacts with the devil of make-up and wardrobe, but putting on those reading glasses is as good as having your date of birth branded on your forehead.
Well, approximately … my husband is several years older than me and he claims he doesn’t need reading glasses yet, although mysteriously he is the owner of quite a substantial collection; at least one pair in every room, and others in the car for reading maps. Could we be looking at another case of denial here? And yet he is a man, so why is he postponing the opportunity to look sexy and professorial? Grrr… who’d be a woman!
Peekabo, I Almost See You
Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm
isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,
And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said
Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression
that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and
you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one
set of glasses won’t do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Keats’s
“Endymion” with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange
wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on
your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading
glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without
them on you can’t see where they are.
Enough of such misshaps, they would try the patience of an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining
years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.
