A mindset you employ as a kid but learn, through trial and error, to completely dispense with in your adult years is knowing there is absolutely no chance of something working out favorably, but crouching in a silent paralysis as events unfold exactly as you knew they would. At some point during your adult years, I think you mostly learn to just speak up and not waste your or anyone else’s time.
Of course, as an adult, you don’t really have the wrath of your parents to fear. Which I certainly do today, a weekday afternoon in the middle of spring break, one where Dad K. is determined that I am to obtain my learner’s permit, today, and begin driving pronto. I just turned sixteen a month ago, and he’s so serious about me getting a license and a job, immediately, that he refused to let me even sign up for the school baseball team this spring. So it’s not as though this looming license exam is assaulting me out of nowhere.
Problem is, I have horrible eyesight and know that without my glasses, I will flunk the visual portion of the test… the same pair of glasses I lost some months ago, and told no one about. Partly because I knew he would fly through the roof, and partly because I always hated wearing them, in fact have refused to, at least at school, since about the fifth grade.
It was in the fifth grade that I bombed out on the school eye exam badly enough that they forced me to get some specs. Up until that moment, I honestly never realized that I even bad eyesight to begin with, just assumed the struggle to see well at a distance was typical. And though going through an ultra short period where I was so stoked about wearing these shiny gold framed metal jobs, jazzed at my perceived image overhaul, that didn’t last very long. It only took maybe a couple months and one school photo, tops, to sink in that, nope, you are still a tremendous dork. Even dorkier than before, in fact. A huge chunk of this was probably because, as “luck” would have it, my memory is that the first classmate to see me in these things was also widely perceived as the most beautiful girl in our grade, Andra Cole. If memory serves, I don’t think I had enough nerve to wear them onto the bus that morning. I believe I must have waited until arriving at school, whereby I then dipped into the restroom, before classes began, to slap them on my head, inspect myself in the mirror, and only then summon the courage to face the world. Because this memory persists, running a bit late for some reason, rounding the corner into a mostly deserted fifth grade hall, and almost crashing into Andra. Who will forever have the dubious distinction of being the first victim of my latest dweeby look.
“Jason!” she exclaimed, drawing up short, recoiling in a slightly breathless manner with a hand to her chest. Grinning slightly, as she then recovers and goes around me.
As for me, in the moment, I am positively beaming, because I interpret her reaction as a positive one. Continuing onward to Mrs. Duffy’s class, my homeroom, fully emboldened by that encounter. Andra freaking Cole of all people, taken aback, offering me a friendly and dare I say impressed, breathless grin! Unreal! Only later will I have occasion to first reconsider, and then highly doubt this assessment. It eventually sinks in that I’m still the same social pariah as before, these glasses weren’t doing a thing for me, appearance wise, and on top of that I hated wearing them anyway. She was almost assuredly grinning at how I looked even more moronic than before.
So I’m already feeling this way, and then there’s this day where my cousin Amanda sees my school picture and is positively howling with laughter, asking me why in the world I would wear these things, because I look like the biggest dork on the planet. Yeah, that pretty much ended the glasses experiment. It didn’t matter that I could not see the blackboard much beyond the first row. Coupled with a tendency, like any self-respecting antisocial type, to sit as far away from the teacher as possible, if given free reign in the matter.
A couple disparate thoughts on this eyeglasses phenomenon would only occur to me much later, in much more recent years as I write this. One is that, considering I never wore those glasses again, there were numerous friends acquired beyond that point who probably had no clue about my horrific eyesight. Especially because in my early 20s, I finally acquired and began using contact lenses instead. Also that I think not wearing those glasses may have, however accidentally and improbably, somewhat helped me in life.
They say that those who lose one sense develop some or all of the others to a greater extent, by way of compensation. And now that I look back on my willful self-sabotaging of the eyesight situation, I can see where this almost certainly must be true. Because it’s no exaggeration to state that I could not see the blackboard for crap, yet refused to wear the glasses. Coupled with this fondness for the back row, further enhanced as the years progressed by becoming chummier with the hoodlum types than I would the teacher’s pets. And as a result, I believe I must have developed into a really good listener, because this was the only way to b.s. my way through these classes.
Of course, there are pluses and minuses to this approach. Though I had been a straight A student at one point and maintained the reputation for such, in reality I became more of a solid easy B as the years progressed. In part due to pure laziness, because I was never the type to spend a week getting an A if I could pull off a B in five minutes. Some of it was not laziness, however, merely the limitations of some exceptionally poor eyesight. Becoming a great listener, however, is not without its merits, and I feel as though this has served me well in life.
Well, fast forward five years, from the fifth grade, to this glorious spring day of our current Easter break, 1991. One thing I’m acutely aware of even then, is that my own parents have forgotten that I am supposed to be wearing glasses. Yes. Absolutely. As my brother and are I fond of saying, we did not have bad childhoods by any stretch of the imagination; however, we positively had the most BIZARRE childhoods of anyone we know. Among the more curious and somewhat related factoids for example are that they never ask to see our report cards, which is part of why I’m still able to coast on the fumes of my distant straight A reputation. They seem to just assume that because we are smart, we must be doing great.
And so yes, my stepdad has totally forgotten that I’m ridiculously nearsighted, as we climb into the car for this farce. As we do so, I am just sort of issuing silent prayers to myself, that I can bluff my way through this somehow the same way I do every day at school. I don’t recall where Mom is on this fine weekday afternoon, because she is not among our intrepid foursome, making their way into Mansfield proper to the BMV testing facility, whatever it was known as back then: me, of course, and my brother, and Dad K., but also this amusing goofball who is “downline” from him in his Amway organization, Mike Mills.
Mike Mills is driving us across town to this cabin, literally, in the Madison section of Mansfield where they administer these exams. He’s often around for basically no reason at all — having gone Direct, he holds no job, and these days he’s even driving a car with an actual roof. There’s a classic rock mix tape in the cassette player and Mike, as always, is in a jovial mood, he never stops talking. At a time when the band R.E.M. is taking off bigtime, many have noted that he reminds them of the lead singer, in looks and mannerisms both, back in that distant era where Michael Stipe still had hair; however, he actually has the same name as their bass player. Therefore it’s as though we have half the band right here in the car with us.
