You Know You're Getting Old When . . .

. . . it's heaven having reading glasses scattered in all rooms of the house.

Like the Cyclops sharing their single eye, Shari and I share reading glasses. I had two and she had a couple. We often forget our age and have to share a pair in order to read restaurant menus. It's less obvious than one of us reading the menu out loud.  ("Huh? Can you repeat that again, louder?")

Any more, I need glasses to peel hard boiled eggs and to play solitaire on my mini-tablet. It has become safer for me to wear glasses wielding a French knife doing food prep. I can't tell a phillips from a straight slot screw, so I need glasses for most fix-it jobs. And I can't search for songs on my ittie-bittie MP3 music device without glasses.

Fortunately, I can still bathe, brush my teeth, and drive motor cars (but not read maps) without wearing glasses.

The worst part is reading tiny 10 or even 8 point fonts in legal documents. That's when I pull the document to my sunny office window and use my trusty Oxford Dictionary magnifying glass to distinguish a 6 from an 8.

Heck. I can't even read my own tiny handwriting from years ago.

For a while I was thinking of croakies -- the elasticky thingie that clasps onto eyeglasses so you can wear them around your neck -- like jewelry or a spinster librarian. But that didn't work out.

I like to wear T-Shirts with a pocket. Some people use the pocket to store a pack of cigarettes (instead of rolling the pack in the shirt sleeve). If you are in India, that shirt pocket is used for an assortment of pens, scraps of paper, notebooks, and money. Like high school geeks, engineers and pocket-protectors, prestige is measured by the number of items bulging from the pocket. I like the pocket for my reading glasses.

Admittedly, they fall out when leaning over, and I've had to fish my glasses from the bottom of the swimming pool, but it's better than shoving glasses in a back pocket and having that sickening, crunch feeling and noise when you sit on them.

What did work out was Shari buying some reading glasses in bulk. We just leave them strategically scattered about the house in places where we might need them.

So heaven is being able to flop down in an armchair, or pick up a kitchen knife, or reach for the iSong iPlayer knowing that reading glasses are somewhere nearby.