The young assistant district attorney approached the jury. She leaned against the rail and scanned the jury box. Alexandra Cabot appeared to be in her mid-30s, and in most of the previous episodes of Law and Order: SVU that I had watched, she wore glasses. But now, before she spoke to the jury about the rapist and murderer she had put on trial, she removed those glasses.
My prescription is woefully out of date, so much so that the eyecare company that prescribed the glasses has given up on sending me reminders to update my eyeware. As I type this, I am wearing those inadequate lenses; they suffice for most of the tasks I engage in (including shooting pool.) I have “no-line” bifocals, so I adjust my head and eyes to read or watch from the section of the lenses more suitable for the task. When I attended a reading of banned books at Dear.Mom in December 2023, (“Reading The Banned,” Weekly View, December 7, 2023) I read passages from Jesse Andrews’ book, “Me And Earl And The Dying Girl.” I stood in the center of the room, glanced down at the page, and began to read; I did not remove my glasses. These days, though neither section of my bifocals works fully well, they are not so poor that I must routinely perform the “glasses on, glasses off” maneuver.
Someone I know will beat herself about the head and neck while looking for one of her twelve thousand pairs of reading glasses. The TV show In The Heat Of The Night, has Carroll O’Connor, (in the role performed by Rod Steiger in the film version) putting his glasses on and taking them off, often. When reading at his desk, he has them on; when approached for conversation by one of his deputies, he takes them off. He puts them on to drive, takes them off to shout, placing them carefully in the breast pocket of his shirt. But the glasses never stay in one place.
In the days of yore, people wore (poet, much?) their “readers” on a thin chain around their necks. When close work was required, they lifted their “eyes” to their other eyes. With reading done, they dropped the readers; the chain kept them off the floor, the chair and from between the seats of the car. The eyeglass chains that I see these days are attached to the sunglasses of joggers and birders; the “chains” are usually thin strips of parachute or bungee cord, and not metal links. And those strips are used to keep the glasses on. In one of the children’s books that I was reading with my youngest granddaughter, the mother was looking for something. Myah, who will soon be six years old, immediately determined where the missing item was. The woman was looking for her glasses, and Myah pointed out, “They’re on top of her head!” The top of the head is the new “chain dangle” for reading glasses. When finished reading, the person will rotate the glasses upward away from the eyes, and onto the brain. (No chain? Onto the brain.) But for sunglasses, the new eyeglass-chainless society will place them at the back of the neck.
In the 1984 film The Karate Kid a man teaches a Karate student muscle memory by having him repeat “wax on, wax off” as he completed a task. When I see people going through a routine with their glasses, in person and on some television show, in the place of Mr. Miyagi’s mantra, I will chuckle to myself, “glasses on, glasses off.”
cjon3acd@att.net