Running Free

Running Free

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Blind, Batty and...




I wish I were a bat. Or at least had the ability to see with my ears as a bat does. It would have been very handy the other evening driving home from an Easter celebration with friends. The friends live about an hour away. But for some reason, this particular Sunday night meant that 80 miles away was a two and a half hour road trip.

I was the designated driver. I had bought my driving glasses. Without them, I am close to blind. But my glasses make the world clear and sparkly new again. Except, something was wrong with these particular glasses- they seemed to be rather, well, frosted, I don’t really know how to describe it other than to say that I couldn’t see anything other than fuzzy shapes and blurry cars.

I did not have any alcohol in my system – I had stuck to water- and one Buck’s Fizz – more than seven hours earlier. So I knew it couldn’t have anything to do with spirits of the liquid variety. I was perplexed and more than a bit baffled.

My DS had quietly decided to take a respite and was blissfully sleeping in the passenger’s seat and DS was right behind him- figuratively and literally. My driving partners would be of no use to me on this night I could tell.

If I were a bat for example, while my eyes would be small and poorly developed, with visual acuity, I would be able to use my vision as an aid in navigation especially at long distances, beyond the range of echolocation. And goodness knows echolocation would have been most mightily appreciated on what promised to be a long sojourn home.

I felt like Edith Wharton’s character Ethan Frome stuck in a heavy New England snow storm, unable to see more than a few inches in front of him. Luckily, my life has no parallels to his and I was in a car and not a horse drawn wagon.

However, the wagon might have moved more than the fifteen miles an hour I moved for close to thirty miles of the drive home. I guess that in hindsight (no pun intended) it was a good thing given that I lacked vision, night goggles that worked and echolocation.

Well, we made it home in one piece and none the worse for wear.

The next morning I trotted down to the optometrist where I had just purchased this pair of glasses a mere two weeks earlier. The optician was perplexed. Imagine what I was.

I had after all, purchased three pairs of glasses – two of which were for distance- one being a pair of sunglasses, the other a pair for night time driving. The third pair was, I must admit –a pair of – gulp- reading glasses.

Now given that these three pairs of glasses had cost more than a few pennies, I was less than satisfied with the state of affairs. Especially when the call came in a day later telling me that the so-called pair of distance glasses actually contained my reading glass prescription.

“Imagine that,” I said to the optician. “Lucky for me traffic was moving at a snail’s pace for much of the drive home.”

Of course billows of apologies were proffered across the telephone line. I hope that when they come back to me the glasses are the way they are supposed to be.

Bats have it pretty good in my opinion.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.


Ann

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camerone said...

Thank you so much! Feel free to spread the word- it is a bloig designed to be a picker upper at the end of a long day and help us look at the positive- well mostly!

carpe diem Ann