A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

I have absolutely awful eyesight, as in I can’t see the big E. At all. I see a fuzzy blank wall.

Since I was 20-ish, I have needed bifocals. I resisted taking the dual-peeper plunge because I have an extremely odd, expensive prescription and can buy 3 pairs of glasses for the price of one pair of these fancy bifocals. Prescription sunglasses are handy, so I’d spend the extra moolah on those.

In the past I kept an old pair of glasses on hand for reading, and used the updated glasses for everything else. As my eyes deteriorate, the old glasses become reading glasses, and the new glasses become everything else glasses.

Recently, the bifocals have become an imperative. My new eye doctor spent a ridiculous amount of time dancing around the issue of what he perceived to be female vanity, fearing that the pronouncement of my bifocal necessity would send me into a swoon. Apparently, ladies get in a tizzy when they don’t have perfect eyesight.

I could not parse the conversation at first. When I finally translated the mansplaining, I exclaimed, “For God’s sake, what the hell do I care about bifocals! It beats being blind!”

I proceeded to mock the dude to his employees for the rest of the visit.

Warned that bifocals would take “some getting used to,” they took no getting used to at all, except when I sat down to use the computer. My 21 inch screen and monster Cintiq sit too high. I have to lean back so far to see the screen, it is impossible to do work on the thing. The Cintiq can be laid flat, so it’s not as big a problem, but it looks like I will be using my old glasses as computer reading glasses after all. I don’t seem to have any trouble drawing with the new bifocals.

My new doctor is the best in this area of the state, and all the best people go to him. I know this because every celebrity with a country mansion on this side of the mountains got name dropped by staff, and I never knew that particular Charlie’s Angel lived out here. I am not immune to a taste for harmless celebrity gossip, and had a good ol’ time tittering with employees.

I wish somebody would titter the mansplaining eye doctor into the 21st century.