Imperfections

 

You Are Not Perfect

 

As a child I always looked at any sign of being different as being bad, I really just wanted to stay in the background.  Until I was seven, the plan had gone off without a hitch.  Mrs. Joyce would soon be the hitch in my seamless program, after class one day she pulled me aside to ask if I had any trouble reading the board.  I hesitated for two reasons; one, I didn’t know if there was a right or wrong way to read a board.  Secondly, I was afraid that telling my teacher that sometimes the words she wrote were too hard to read would lead to more questioning, which up until this point in my life was completely against my principles.  Either way, I responded honestly and told Mrs. Joyce that I had to squint to make out the tiny words she wrote on the board.  I think she sensed my fear because she calmly explained that I might need glasses.

“Glasses, what a horrible disaster,” I thought to myself.  I would be the first one in my class to have glasses.  The idea alone seemed to scream harassment.  A couple days later all the kids lined up in the gym for the annual hearing and sight test.  As I was waiting in line, I realized that most of the kids took their test and were moved to one side of the gym.  However a small fraction of the kids took their test, were given a piece of paper, and then wandered over to another side of the gym at the discretion of the proctor of the vision test.  After doing my absolute best to identify the letter E in various positions from about ten feet away I was handed a piece of paper and told to give said piece of paper to my mom when I got home from school.

My second verdict on the opinion of needing glasses came from my first visit to the eye doctor’s office.  To my recollection the first time I ever stepped foot into a doctor’s office was at that very instant, with the optometrist.  Four fully grown men had to hold me down just to get the dilation drops into my eyes, then came the bombardment of tests.  The first test seemed pretty innocent; all I was told to do was stare at a red dot and then BAM! A puff of air hit my eyes and I recoiled in the same manner as a deer hearing a gunshot.  Immediately following my recovery from the shock I was informed that they would now have to perform the same test on my left eye.  After that small destruction of my ever decaying innocence I sat through an hour of the doctor flipping through lenses and being asked which was better 1, or 2.  After muttering what seemed like the four hundredth 2, I was permitted to walk through the frames while the doctor discussed my ocular health with my mom.  I was not fortunate enough to just be near sighted or far sighted, I had astigmatism, meaning my eyes were a little more oval than they should have been.  That was the day I learned I’d be living with glasses for the rest of my life.  I was crushed, I had been in denial throughout the horrible process, thinking it had just been some kind of mistake on someone’s part, I was wrong.  To add insult to injury, my mom managed to find the closest working replica of Beaver Cleaver’s frames.  As we patiently waited for Dr. Gold to finish putting my new lenses into the frames I stared at the glass coke bottles sitting on the tip of my mother’s nose.  I was going to soon be joining her club.  Sure, it had a large membership full of happy and successful people, but the glasses wearing nation was not a nation I cared to be part of.  The few minutes following the doctor calling my name and doing the final fitting of the frames to my face are a haze to me.  I think it had to do with the gamut of emotions I was going through, like a crash course in the 5 stages of guilt.  Finally, as I pulled the glasses onto my face and they snuggly grabbed onto my nose I became completely aware.  For the first time in my life I could see.  I could make out the patterns in the carpet; I remember seeing leaves on a tree for the first time and realizing that everything in life was not simply a blotch of color bleeding into another blotch of color.  For months I allowed my eyes to feast on all the visual desserts the world had to offer. 

            I did end up being the first kid in my class to have glasses, however I also would like to think I was the first kid to realize one of the hardest lessons of life, we are not perfect.  As I’ve grown up I’ve had a lot of different pairs of glasses, in sixth grade I tried contacts, but it just didn’t feel right.  When I wake up each morning and slide the all too familiar frame across my nose and tuck the supportive scaffolding behind my ears I’m quietly reminded, “You are not perfect,” but I reassure myself in knowing that at least now, I can see that for myself.