This morning I had something in my eye. An eyelash perhaps, a spec of dust… a tree limb. But the real difficulty began when I tried to see what was in my eye.
Being in my mid 40’s seeing something close-up is …well, impossible. It happens to everyone…yes…everyone, and if it hasn’t happened yet to you – it will. Go ahead look it up, its called Presbyopia. Anyway… being a new Presbyopian, I am still adjusting to my limitations.

Not considering my recent age related handicap, I saunter over to the bathroom mirror pulling down my lower lid thinking I would just look in there and see what was causing the irritation, and pull it out. Immediately, and somewhat unconsciously, I did the ‘pull-back’. You know the ‘pull-back’. We all laugh about the ‘pull-back’. The ‘pull-back’ is not simply an action to put more space in between you and an object …there is an art to it. Your arms elongate and your head moves back away from your chest, drawing your chin in tight and cocking your head slightly to one side and back at the same time while using your arms to raise the object up and away from you so that you are almost looking down at this object which is actually at eye level. Sometimes there is an adjustment to the ‘pull-back’ where you pull and push the item back and forth testing out different focal distances…. Somewhat like adjusting a camera lens.

Everyone does this pretty much the same way. I don’t know why. I bet cavemen did the same thing while using animal blood to draw buffalo pictures on the walls of their cave homes… if only they had those little drugstore half glasses… they may not be extinct.

Back in the day…folks my age would try to cover up the inevitable challenge of seeing close-up. Since aging was to be avoided as long as possible, the longer you could keep this little secret in the closet the better.
We baby boomers don’t seem to care much. Perhaps it’s our sheer numbers that gives us such abandon… we laugh it off. So whenever we see someone else doing the ‘pull-back’ we laugh heartily with them, in a gesture of camaraderie.

Somehow it’s funny to be losing your keen eyesight to old age ….well --until you have something in your eye.

Back to the problem at hand…
Once I ‘pulled-back’ far enough for my head to be in focus in the mirror, I was waaay to far away to see if there was anything in my eye. So now I started to hunt around for one of the several pairs of drugstore magnifying glasses that we have lying around the house.
Once I put the glasses on I could see my eye clearly in the mirror – but then trying to get both my hands behind the lens to pull down the lid and retrieve the object proved to be more than difficult.
Next, I tried holding the glasses with one hand vertically so that only the unaffected eye could peer through a single lens while trying to pull back the lid of the affected eye with the other hand. With this configuration I was in fact able to see the offending object. But I was out of hands to do anything about it. My next brilliant idea was to locate the object visually with the glasses on and then put the glasses down in an attempt to retrieve the object from its last known location. This was somewhat like playing BattleShip in that I thought I knew where the object was, but found I was continually wrong by putting on the glasses to confirm I had missed my target. This went on for several more attempts, because I am nothing if not stubborn. I finally gave up on the glasses altogether and simply leaned in close to the mirror and pretended that I could actually see. I simply dug around blindly in there with enough vigor and force to extract anything that didn’t belong and perhaps some things that did.
My eye was so inflamed after this that even if there still was a tree limb in there – I wouldn’t be able to notice it.
Now, sometime later, I am sitting here at my desk at work (with my glasses on) noticing my eye feels a little funny… kinda like there is something in it…
excuse me while I go to the ladies room to see if I can rectify this situation…