Just got my eyes dilated for the whole elderly-lady eye exam:
Why does it seem like the only people I envision wearing these dark films over their eyes are old women doddering out of vision clinics? I do not think of the old men or the young people wearing them.
I feel sick and handicapped. I didn’t wait to drive home (in my even more actually for real sick mother’s car) and now have a piercing headache from the painfully-bright sunlight, even though it is blessedly overcast today in the hottest month of summer.
I am like a sick pink gin blossom. I ordered new rose-colored glasses, and like a typical old lady, I declined to pay the extra fifty dollars to get progressive lenses for my light-sensitive blue migraineur’s eyes. Plus I wasn’t sure I could handle those three-to-four minutes of adjustment time waiting for my glasses to untint themselves every time I come inside or step into a patch of shade. But maybe that is what I really need: a shield of shadow over my eyes to protect me from seeing and being seen when I walk into the refrigerated grocery store to escape the blistering blue skied brightness of climate change in the Puget Sound region.
There are two ways to be an elderly invalid: rich, or poor. My pocketbook (that’s what old ladies carry their coupons and medicine and hearing aids and flimsy thin bills and “business cards” that are just jotted down numbers handed to them by young grifters who say they can stop in any time to do “odd jobs” in) is even more sickly than I am, so I can’t afford all of the helpful bells and whistles for my new spectacles.
I drove home like a menace with my eyes closed part of the time. My hand up not to hold a phone to my ear, but to maintain the invalid’s permanent-salute creating a canopy jutted from the brow to protect the eyes.
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