Several months ago I started wearing eyeglasses to help me see things in the distance. I’m nearsighted. I’m myopic. My vision had been devolving for the past couple of years, but in the last few months before I visited the optometrist, the situation was getting out of hand. On the golf course I lost sight of my ball soon after it left the tee. “See where that one went?” Driving was worse, especially for passengers; “What’s that sign say?”, “Turn here, or up ahead?” Driving alone to someplace I’d never been before usually required at least one U-Turn and one trip around the block. I couldn’t read the street signs until the car had entered the intersection, too late to turn. “Oh. Here it is.”
During this period I managed to renew my driver’s license, eyetest and all.
With my glasses I can follow a tee shot deep into the weeds under a stand of pine trees, and I can read road signs from two-and-a-half blocks away.
But my glasses aren’t perfect. Anything within their frames comes to me sharp and clear, but stuff on the edges fades and gets lost. It might be the frames themselves in the corner of my eye, blocking the way, or it might be that beyond the edge of the rims where my vision is unenhanced, the world remains distant and cloudy — and unworthy of note. Wearing the glasses was difficult at first. I perceived both the clear picture directly ahead and the dim picture to the left and the right. I could see the world bending into focus as I turned my attention, and my entire head, to look. Occasionally it made me feel sick to my stomach. But after a week or so I adjusted, and unless I focus my attention there, I don’t notice the dimness on the margins. I don’t notice the world bending to my gaze anymore, even if I try.
In elementary school we watched a film about vision and the brain. The narrator was fitted with a pair of goggles that used prisms to invert everything in his field of view. He stumbled around the upside down world, stepping up to duck under a low hanging lamp, reaching left for the toothbrush on the right. After a few days the clownishness was over. The world turned itself right side up, and he perceived just as he had before. The man, also a pilot, took control of a small plane and demonstrated how well he could tell up from down. As he flew, he explained that since our eyes already invert everything we see (our lenses focus upside-down images onto our retinas), it’s the job of our brains to turn everything right side up. The brain understands that the world should be right side up and makes the correction for us. For the goggle-wearing pilot, it was a small trick for his brain to perform the typical inversion once more. He went through another couple of days of re-acquaintance with top and bottom when he removed the goggles after the experiment was over.
My brain has adapted to the new world presented by my eyeglasses. Weaker peripheral vision outside the frames caused distraction and nausea, so my brain began filtering out the distraction. To keep me safe. Unfortunately, we need to know what’s happening on the edges.
Yesterday I was stopped at an intersection. I waited while a pedestrian crossed and the sedan on the left took the opportunity to go. I watched the ped as he crossed; he was thin, dirty, too tan, shorter than me, thinner than me, his face was all angles, his brows blonde and thick, he was probably homeless, he might have been a coal miner or a mechanic in different circumstances, how much bad luck and how many poor decisions in row would I have to make to be just like him? Once he made it to the curb I glanced ahead just to make sure the right of way was still mine, and I eased the truck into gear and then the intersection. Halfway through I looked left and spotted a black Volkswagen Jetta that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t see the car approach the intersection. I didn’t see it stop. I didn’t see the left turn signal flashing. I had no idea it was there.
Nothing happened. The driver had sense enough to know that I didn’t know he was there, and he waited while I exercised my right of way.
I’ve waited at intersections a thousand times and had my attention pulled left or right by something I’ve noticed on the fringes — an approaching car, a ped stepping off the sidewalk. Certainly I should have made an effort to look left, but in the days before I wore glasses I could count on my peripheral vision to help me to remember to look. Not anymore.
Chastened, I glanced left and right and checked the mirrors after I was through the intersection. The black Jetta had made its left turn and was now following me. A thin-legged lady walked a golden retriever on the left sidewalk. She leaned as she walked to avoid some azalea branches overhanging their planter. A block and a half ahead on the right, a man in a baseball cap was climbing into a blue Jeep. The black Jetta was still behind me. It’s left turn signal flashed again and the car slowed. The driver had shaggy black hair, intentionally disheveled, and sideburns. In the mirror the skinny-legged lady stood while the golden retriever sniffed at the base of a tree. The man in the baseball cap looked at me from behind the wheel of the blue Jeep as I drove by. His left turn signal flashed. The Jetta made its left turn. A young woman cyclist wearing shorts and a belly shirt waited near the sidewalk at the intersection ahead. She had to lean to reach the curb with her foot. She looked back over her right shoulder and laughed. As I passed, another young woman, also in shorts and a belly shirt, wobbled up to the cyclist on roller-blades, laughing and reaching out for balance. In the mirror the Jeep had entered traffic. The young women were cute, but if I had to choose, I’d choose the cyclist. She had the more interesting face. The thin-legged lady and the retriever were underway again. Apparently the base of the tree was not interesting enough. That Jetta had turned left to follow me, then turned left on the next block; he was going around the block. Was he lost? Had he made a wrong turn?
Then it occurred to me that I faced another deficiency of brain and perception. I was tracking the positions of cars and cyclists and dogs even when they weren’t in view. When they again fell into view, they lived up to expectations — the Jetta would be slowing to make its left turn, the Blue Jeep would be turning onto the road, the pleasant looking young ladies would remain at the intersection until I was passed them. I was remembering what I had seen and making predictions about what was to come, and I was doing both unconsciously. What if I had actually turned my head to see the black Jetta when I was waiting for the homeless man to cross. Maybe I had seen it and registered it. Maybe the driver and I had actually made eye contact and had come to agreement that I had the right of way. Maybe I had forgotten. The part of my brain that remembers and keeps track of the state of the world dropped the black Jetta, let it slip, filtered it away because something more important, something clearer ahead needed keeping.
I hope it’s the former. I can train myself to look both ways and double check what’s on the periphery. I can’t train my brain to better remember where the cars and the pedestrians are.
Meanwhile, I left my cellphone in the truck, which LMA drives to work every day and where the truck is at this moment. It’s the second time in less than a week that I’ve forgotten it there. And on Saturday morning I walked out of the house into the morning fog wearing my eyeglasses. I forgot to bring along the detachable sunglass lenses and later that afternoon I squinted through the glare all the way home.