February 17, 2025
The route I have taken at 5:00 AM most weekday mornings for two years is six miles of blackness: no street lights, mainly woods and pastures that show up in high beams. At the third mile the rural road through the ink-black darkness turns into another, past a sheetrock factory. White smoke pours from smokestacks and curls into the night sky.
In recent days headlights of approaching vehicles exploded in blinding glare.
The road descends through the hamlet of Taylors for two miles to a city highway, where the gas station and fast-food lights show the way. Traffic signals blurred in double images until I pulled into the parking lot. Daylight had broken when I left the exercise class an hour later.
More and more, I had been increasing the font size on the laptop in order to use it. Reading a book or magazine meant pressing my nose into the pages.
On a sunny morning I drove at a snail’s pace to an optometrist’s office and picked up a six-month-old prescription for eyeglasses. The next appointment was scheduled for June. Instead we headed to Stanton Optical. The woman at the desk read the prescription. “This is probably out of date. You need a new eye exam,” she said.
The doc ordered me into his tiny chamber to sit facing a row of eye-test devices. He gave me eyedrops to dilate my pupils. “Set your chin here, your forehead here,” he ordered. He pushed a button and sets of four block letters flashed on a white screen, F-R-Z-Q, A-Z-K-R, T-H-A-K, and on and on. He increased and lowered the font size. I squinted and guessed through eye-test boot camp. Cataract surgery is the ticket, he said.
Following the exam we made a weak attempt at fun by picking out frames. The Stanton shop offers hundreds of frame styles displayed on three walls. They stock the senior-citizen Ben Franklin type, the tiny squares of glass that convey world-weary wisdom, and the Clark Kent-style thick black frames.
You can choose the giant aviator type Peter Fonda wore in Easy Rider. The saleslady showed off her horn-rimmed frames streaked with tiger-like stripes. We have a woman friend whose thin dark frames add style and glamor.
The Stanton staff person said the drugstore “readers” scattered around the house may do more harm than good because of the imbalance of strength in one eye or the other. We ordered two pair, one for distance the other for reading.
I pulled from the Stanton parking lot into the afternoon traffic. Vehicles ahead were blurry, indistinct. Signs were unreadable, except for the giant L-O-W-E’S that’s half the height of the hardware store building. Luckily, we were early for rush hour. Muscle memory and knowing the road got us home.
Hours later the dilated pupils returned to normal, the blurriness receded a bit. But the cataract alters, clouds, distorts. I resumed enlarging the laptop font size in the same way I turn the TV volume up so I can hear it.
In high school I spent a week in the hospital after a friend stuck his finger in my eye playing basketball. Both eyes were bandaged, the doctor explained, to avoid stressing the uninjured eye. I lay in darkness, a Candystriper volunteer about my age spoon-fed me meals. I never actually saw her. I got her name but not her phone number.
Before discharging me an optometrist checked my vision using his 1960s technology and pronounced me just below eagle-eye sharpness, better than 20:20, then the going standard for human eyesight. As the decades flew by, friends and family members surrendered to declining vision and acquired glasses and contacts. I marched forward, clear-eyed.
Eventually, a career of staring at desktop screens did its damage. For years the eight-dollar off-the-rack readers were good enough. Two weeks ago I sat opposite two people across the living room. I saw only hazy silhouettes in the lamplight.
The branches of the six-foot-tall avocado tree in the corner of the room spread gracefully from the woody stem, giving the tree the appearance of a giant bird. From my chair it was a fuzzy shape in disorienting duplicate, the dark outline of a tree, twice. I could make out neither detail nor the rich texture of the foot-long leaves. The trunks and limbs of the trees through the windows behind it were faint and ghostly.
The other sideshow, the one in the midsection, continued with small victories. Two consecutive CT scans showed stability in my liver and pleura. The oncologist ordered a more precise PET (positron emission tomography) scan, which confirmed progress. “The drug clearly is working,” he said. “Stop taking it for a while, let’s focus on quality of life. Get the cataracts done.”
Over days without the chemo, the eye redness and irritation faded. I quit the twice-daily eyedrops and hunted for an ophthalmology practice. “They’re very good at it these days,” a friend with experience said.
It doesn’t need to be mentioned: ophthalmology and optometry are facts of modern life. Nearly everyone in the family wears glasses. Our daughter Marie wore corrective glasses with Coke-bottle-thick lenses when she was five or six; eventually she grew out of them.
We make allowances for handicaps that become the nuts and bolts of our lives. Eyeglass wearers acquire several pair as insurance against losing them. People with contact lenses deal with cleaning, inserting, and removing them. We wait on hold to make appointments with specialists, on slick highways we allow greater distance between our vehicle and others.
The eyes make allowance for the cataract. I still drive the dark road, slowly. We navigate through the health-care wilderness, trying for wisdom or at least humor, sometimes dazed, bewildered. The caveat: being able to see, move, function. Confronting the handicap is survival, but also joy. The bold colors of spring are weeks away. The ophthalmologist is downtown, waiting.
On the Road 