I got my first pair of glasses when I was particularly tiny. My right eye has been legally blind since birth. I don’t remember who, but an adult in the family always said about me that I was blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other.

     The thing I do remember is that those glasses were a battle from day one. They didn’t bother me so much, but boy did they bother the adults in my life. I was neither clean nor graceful as a child. I was a tomboy who climbed stuff and played in the dirt. I have picked on my own children about how they “grow goo” out of their fingers. I am certain I did the same thing in those days. My glasses were eternally crooked and covered in filth, and I didn’t care for one second. I looked over the top of them most of the time anyway.

     My Mother and I had an unspoken dance we did over and over and over again on a daily basis when I was little. She would either steal the glasses right off my face or, on occasion, ask for them. She would wash them and reinstall them on my face. She dared not hand them to me because of the aforementioned “goo”. When I was older she constantly harped at me:  “Wash your glasses, you can’t possibly see anything out of them”, “Your glasses are filthy!”, “Don’t you wish you could see out of your glasses?”, on and on and on. In high school I switched to contacts, and solved the problem.

     My vision leveled out for many years where I didn’t need glasses or contacts because blindness can’t be corrected and my other eye had strengthened enough to hold it’s own without help.  Now that I am older, I am back to wearing readers. My good eye is waving it’s white flag of surrender and has asked for reinforcements. So, I have a zillion pairs of readers stuffed all over the house, in my purse, and at work. Guess what? Filth on them drives me nuts!

     I have noticed something. I don’t notice the accumulation of filth until it has reached critical mass. I put them on and after a period of time it seems like all of the sudden they are cloudy and blotched with fingerprints, dust, etc. I remember when I was younger and would finally, to make the nagging stop, take the glasses off my face and look at them. I was regularly appalled and wondered why in the world all of that filth didn’t cue me to go wash them without being told. I guess I had just grown accustomed to looking through it, around it, or over it.

     As is common for me, I was considering life this morning. I was thinking about how easy it is to spot obstacles to clear vision in someone else’s life. We just don’t notice what has accumulated in our lives until it reaches critical mass and we are in crisis. We have all just grown accustomed to looking through, around, and over our circumstances. Sometimes we need someone to remind us to wash our glasses.