Blind Speculation

I'm looking forward to reading glasses. I figure that way, I'd look less interruptable. Someone would burst into the room, gabbling away. I'd wait a second or two, and they'd pause. I'd slowly raise my eyes and peer myopically at them through the glass. If they kept talking, I'd tilt my head, slip my specs down my nose, and glare over the top. If they still didn't let up, and it was serious enough that I had to attend, then I'd take off my glasses with a martyred sigh, fold them carefully and put them away. And we'd all know that reading time had come to an end.

Those of us without glasses get so little ceremony. We don't get to pat our lapels or walk round the house looking for them. We don't get to find them with a sigh, and open the cute little box, nor unfold the arms and slide them on. There is no flag that we have now transitioned into Reading Time, apart from the book in our hands, and somehow it doesn't communicate enough. When we are interrupted, we get no time as we turn our attention to the immediate problem. We're expected to change our focus immediately, as if it instantly moving out of a book was possible. Glasses would give us a pause, a moment's grace, to return to the here and now.

Sadly, too, those of us without glasses never look as intellectual. Someone reading with a pair of specs on appears to be deconstructing a text. We look like we've flopped down with a novel.

But I figure most of us get to wear glasses as we age. I just have to wait my turn, and then I, too, can add a little transition ceremony and a mildly intellectual air to my reading. By then, however, the kids will have grown up. I'll be trying to find my glasses to read medicine labels, and cursing the day I wrote this post.