Reading Glasses

    As I age, my eyesight has deteriorated.  I still have excellent far away vision, but everything within an arms length distance has gotten blurry.  My optometrist says I don’t need prescription glasses, “reading glasses will do fine”.   So over the last 10 years I have been buying reading glasses with a passion.

    I read once that during World War II that Coca Cola, with the help of the US government, set the goal that a bottle of Coke should be “within the arm’s reach of any G.I. anywhere in the world.”  I took a similar strategy with reading glasses.   Since I was always needing them, and could never find them, I decided I that I would buy enough of them and spread them throughout the house so that I would always be within an arm’s reach of a pair.

    I now have them available in most of the rooms of our house, and a pair in all of my coats and jackets.

    One of my projects this spring was to make some more vent windows for my greenhouse, because my old ones have rotten away.  I had finished the frames and needed to paint them before I proceeded.  With that in mind, yesterday I drove into McBride to buy some exterior white paint.  

    When I got inside the hardware store, I reached for my reading glasses, but discovered that my spring denim jacket that I had just retrieved from storage, didn’t have any glasses in the pocket.  I found my way to the paint section and strained my eyes over all the cans on the shelf.  I bought the paint and drove home.

    In the afternoon I was tired from our walk around the trail, but I was determined to get my window frames painted.  I went out to the shop, cleared a space on my work bench, laid out the first frame, and got a screw driver to open the can of paint.  When I got it open I was dismayed to discover that instead of the white paint that I thought I bought, I had mistakenly purchased a can of black paint.  

    Today, I will make another trip to town to return the black paint and get some white.  This time I will make sure I have some reading glasses with me.

Take a look at my paintings (done with the use of glasses):  www.davidmarchant.ca