Over The Hill

Printed on: Thu, Oct 18, 2007

A dim view of the future

By Kelvin Wade

I'm old. I'm not Jurassic and not quite as old as dirt but I've been around. This week I turned 41. The thing that rubbed my nose in the fact that I'm no spring chicken has been my failing vision.

I needed to renew my driver's license and since I'd done it twice by mail, I had to go into the DMV and take an eye exam. I'd been dreading it. The photo on my driver's license is so dated, I might as well be sporting a dashiki and big ol' Angela Davis afro in it. Plus, I don't even think the weight was accurate at the time I first put that lowball number on there.

My vision had gone south since my last renewal and I had doubts about passing the eye exam. But like Seinfeld's George Costanza, I believed I could squint down to at least 20/30 vision.

Like it or not, I decided to first visit an optometrist for glasses before the DMV eye chart showdown.

I knew I was in trouble when the assistant at the optometrist's office casually asked me to start reading the lines on the eye chart across the room and see how low I could go down the chart. I looked at the top line. How did they expect me to read Russian?

The optometrist led me into her office and had me sit down in a contraption that looked like something we're using on al-Qaida operatives in Guantanamo. I didn't know whether I was about to be waterboarded or subjected to the Ludovico Method ala A Clockwork Orange.

She turned off the light and I screamed. OK, I didn't scream but I wanted to. She had me look through a strange optical device and asked me again and again if I could see various numbers and letters clearly as she switched lenses. She shone a light in my eyes and looked at my eyeballs so closely I thought she was about to give me butterfly kisses.

"Ahhhh just what I thought. Your vision sucks."

I'm sure she said something more professional than that, but it meant the same thing. So, I got glasses in anticipation of the DMV eye chart test.

Now, I hadn't been to the DMV in years. Not much had changed. Every so often I expected a coworker to hold a mirror under the nose of the drone working the window to make sure they were still alive. I could've sworn this was the same line I was in years earlier. Same people, just older.

Once at the window, I asked the fellow if I could try the vision exam without my glasses first and he said that would be no problem. Then he walked across the building, opened a door on the far wall and pointed to a sign hanging on an apartment door in the distance.

"Can you read that top line?"

OK, maybe it wasn't that far away but that's what it seemed like when he asked me to read the letters on the sign before me.

WWGCD (What Would George Costanza Do?) went through my mind. I can do this. The letters shimmied and danced in the distance as I squinted and started to name them off. I felt like a drunk trying to say the alphabet backwards.

The DMV drone slowly shook his head.

I slid my glasses out of their case, put them on and passed the test. Now my license says "Corrective Lenses" on it. It might as well say, "Over the hill."

What happened to yesterday? Peace.

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NOTES: It's strange being middle aged. And in my family, calling 41 middle aged is being generous. But when my parents were my age, they used to complain about aches and pains they had. My dad would want me to hold his feet while he did sit ups. Or he'd be out on the basketball court trying to act as though he hadn't lost a step.

Nowadays, everyone I know is on some kind of prescription medication. Twenty years ago, it was all about going out partying on the weekend and getting home just before sunrise. You'd fall into bed and sleep for three hours and then get up and go to work. You could do those kinds of things when you're young.

Now? Staying up after midnight seems pointless. When the alarm goes off in the morning, I can't believe the time is accurate. I stumble into the kitchen to start the miracle black elixir (coffee) that will officially wake me up, along with the morning popping of the pills. Heck, even my dogs are on medication.

As my parents grew older, my brothers and I marveled that their main topic of conversation was who had died. When an uncle or aunt was in town, they'd sit around and compare notes.

"You heard about Bobby Ray, right?"

"No."

"He dead."

"Nooo! He dead?"

"Yep."

On and on it would go. A list of names and the various descriptions of their demises. It seems morbid and in poo taste but my brothers and I would laugh about this. You kinda had to be there to hear them do it. Now I wonder how long it's going to be before we start playing the 'He daed' game.

I can just imagine the older folks reading my column who probably want to smack me upside the head. They're probably screaming at their newspaper or computer screen saying that 41 isn't old. "Forty is the new twenty!" some are yelling. Really? Well, I've been twenty and this certainly isn't the new twenty.

So it's all relative. Perhaps I'm not that old.

But my vision still sucks.