Four Eyes

1979

I was a generally well behaved 7th grade kid which resulted in me being assigned a seat at the rear of the class. Trouble was, my eyeballs couldn’t see the chalkboard. I wasn’t aware of my vision deficiency, I just assumed the other kids in the back row couldn’t see either, so I squinted and never thought to complain. The annual school eye exam was the revelation. It was under these conditions that Dr. Dressler, now retired, fixed me up with my first set of glasses. The chalkboard was restored to my visual realm.


February 2012

Both Klem kids have been issued glasses. The boy, 5th grade, needs spectacles for seeing distance while my daughter, 2nd grade, needs them for reading. Each, curiously, has a properly functioning eyeball countered by a crummy one.

“How do you feel about getting glasses,” I asked the boy after the eye exam with the optometrist.

“I’m OK getting glasses. Anything that will help me do better,” came his mature response.

“Did you know you needed glasses,” was my follow up question.

“Yes, because we had a test at school and it said I needed glasses,” he replied. Before the school test, though, he said he thought he could see just fine.


He and Wife Klem joked that it’d be cool to get a monocle for his one problematic eyeball. Luckily the monocle option was no pushed forward.

“I can read the titles of the books on the fireplace,” he said of the Harry Potter series on the mantle from 20 feet away while sitting at the kitchen table wearing his new glasses and a smile. His formerly blurry world had regained some range.


And so it starts, another generation of four eyes. Cute looking four-eyed animals, though, these ones.
-klem