I’ve been in reading glasses for about four years now, since Halloween week of 2006. Sally, then 28 months old, accompanied me to the optometrist. I didn’t know about the eyedrops which blind you for an hour. I had promised Sally I’d bring her to the annual Halloween parade, beginning just minutes after my eye appointment. I remember inching along Chapel Street six blocks to the Green, the glare so, well, glaring that I had to ask passers-by what color the street lights were. The first person I ran into that I knew, I grabbed the sunglasses off their face and borrowed  them for the rest of the morning.

Getting reading glasses was sobering enough. I’d had amazing vision for my entire life. I could read signs atop far-away mountains, or paperback books under the bedsheets without a flashlight. Overnight, I was overcome by haze. I stopped being able to read in dim light. And not reading in dim light meant I couldn’t read theater programs while at the theater. Something had to be done.

Bittersweet, it felt. I’d always wanted to wear glasses. My parents and my older sister all wore glasses. I’d stopped smoking, and liked the idea of another prop to point with. But I knew that vision-wise, my clearest days were behind me.

For a few months, I really got into the aesthetics of reading glasses. I bought them anywhere I saw them—Barnes & Noble, the supermarket, the dollar store, boutiques, antique stores. I got little magnifying lenses shaped like credit cards as back-ups in my wallet for when I forgot my glasses. But I never have forgotten my glasses. The only time was a few weeks ago when I changed a jacket before rushing off to church. At the pew, a hymn impending, I confidently reached into my shoulder bag for a glasses case I’ve carried there for years for just such an emergency. Instead of reading glasses, it contained a toy pair of glasses with little foam monkeys on the frames. I still don’t know how they got there.

I have reading glasses planted in every room of the house: round frames at the computer desk, weird wiry ones in the bathroom, flimsy doomed ones in the basement, several pairs in the bedroom and living room.

I’ve had more amusing accidents with them than I can count. Twirling them at editorial meetings until they flew into pieces. Having a lens pop off right in my face. Two pairs, which I got very cheap at a Rite Aid going-out-of-business sale, were purported to be extra-tough, for sports use, and were branded with the ESPN logo. Both pairs snapped in two within days of use.

Now I’m facing a new problem. I have something like 10 pairs of reading glasses, (and lots of reading to do, for that matter). But every pair but two are missing one or both of the little nose-rests in the middle. With heavier pairs, this is a noticeable problem—a pinchy jab I can feel, and a pokey blemish people looking at me can see when I take the glasses off. It began almost as a curse. I got a dollar-store pair and didn’t notice a nose-rest was missing. Then, one by one, all these other pairs started losing nose-rests. It’s the worst horror-story scenario ever concocted, but it’s happening to me.

The Man Who Jabbed Himself in the Face. In far-sighted 3D. You’ll never want to take a book to bed again!