Abracadabra! and they're gone

I hate, hate, hate wearing glasses. Never mind that the 20/15 (or is it the other way around?) vision of my youth had one physician ask if I swooped down on mice in the field. Never mind that I didn't have to wear reading glasses until I was in my forties. Never mind that I didn't wear glasses all the time until I was well into my fifties. I hate wearing glasses. All that excellent vision did was spoil me for when I had to start wearing the wretched things.

I didn't like the idea of contacts, and that's a good thing because it turned out, when I did decide to give contacts a try, I found out I am not allowed to wear them. Turns out I have a little problem called Fuchs syndrome, wherein my eyes retain too much water and the corneas swell. Yes, dearies, my eyes are all Fuched up. Can't wear contacts, can't have laser surgery, have to look forward to cornea transplants and that gives me the heebie-jeebies, considering my eternal history of inexplicable, undiagnosable reactions to any medical procedures and/or medications.

The glasses I have been wearing the last three years (below) are the first pair of trifocals I've had. I adapted to them easily because I'd been wearing bifocals for some years. Funny thing about bi- and tri- focals is that I can't read with them for any extended period of time. I have to have separate reading glasses.




With the mid-distance focal length in trifocals, I can actually read the labels in grocery stores. I couldn't with bifocals, and the distance I stand from shelves is too short for the rest of the length, so the tri-focal part made shopping less of an onerous chore.

Soon after I got the pair above, with a hint of lavender-bronze in the earpieces, that shape went out of fashion immediately, not that one needs fashionable glasses for picking up litter and chain sawing firewood. One needs glasses that don't slide down one's nose, a particular failing of those glasses pictured above. A screw that held on the left earpiece kept coming loose, and I had to travel with a mini screwdriver.

So when time came that my glasses were so scratched that I felt I was looking at the world through gauze, I decided to put an end to the little rectangular eyeglass fashion by ordering a pair. I looked through dozens and dozens of frames at the optometrist's. I wanted rectangular with a small lense, but big enough to support trifocals. And, I wanted rimless, for some reason I haven't figured out yet.

I think it has something to do with my theory that people don't look at your eyes if you're wearing glasses. Their vision stops at your glasses. How did I come up with such a bizarre theory? When we were building our new house, I ordered windows with internal white mullions. After they were installed I realized that my vision stopped at the mullions, and it took a long time before I started looking through the window. Having arrived at such a neat theory all by myself, I applied it to glasses also.

So, I wanted my new glasses to be as invisible as possible. When I turned my back on the reasonably-priced frames to the Silhouette frames whose prices stop your blood en route to your brain, I spotted the ones I wanted.

They were perfect: rimless, no screws attaching the earpieces, rectangular, fashionable:

Ah, I was ecstatic. I looked in the mirror and saw my eyes. These glasses have changed the way I look at and see myself. Washed out. But that's a makeup problem, as in I don't wear any. My bad, not the glasses's fault.

They are all but invisible when I am wearing them. There's a funny little muted silver crossbar that holds the two lenses together, and nose pieces that I am trying to get used to, but other than that, they are perfect. I like the fact that the rimless style makes them invisible. In fact, they are so invisible that I now have another problem--I can't find them when I set them down: