It's the glasses. Actually, it's the way you have to move your head to line your eyes up to the one-third of the lens you need to defeat your advancing blindness at that particular moment.

        If you are over 40, you know what I'm talking about. You're shaking your head yes, and happily realizing you're not alone.

        We're falling apart.

        You. Me. Anyone who has kids in high school or had a crush on Hayley Mills or Paul McCartney. If you remember the original Mod Squad, your back is hurting right now.

Replacement parts

        We never thought we'd get this way, did we? Nobody does. My father has reading glasses, and he still stretches the newspaper for miles to see the print. He's the only guy I know who can read the Miami Herald while sitting in Tampa.

        I used to laugh at him. Then awhile ago, I started doing the same thing! Typing to you at this very moment, my fingers are in Loveland and my face is in Milford.

        (Meanwhile, my mother just had a hip and a knee replaced. A few more plastic parts, she'll be Barbie. Or, maybe, Barbara.)

        When my friend Warzala goes grocery shopping now, she “borrows” a pair of those cheap reading glasses from Aisle 6, so she can read labels. She wears the glasses in the store with the price tag stuck to the frame. When she's ready to check out, she puts them back.

        Once, when the store was out of reading glasses, Warzala went shopping for canned peas and ended up with Cheez Whiz.

See it from here

        When you get older, you don't get better. You just get ... older.

        “When I turned 50, my eyes got worse,” said Carroll, now an elderly gentleman of 55. “My joints hurt. Now, my gums are receding. I had surgery on that just the other day.

        “I paid $150 for the glasses, now my mouth won't work. I paid $2,500 for my mouth, and I won't be able to hear anybody.”

        I don't mean to make fun of Carroll. I'm heading for the same boat. I can almost see it from here — if I could see anything from here.

        The last time Carroll painted a room in his house, the area where the wall met the ceiling looked like an original Jackson Pollock. “You can't see because of poor lighting,” he explained, “so you start questioning if you're using the right lens.”

        When Carroll was painting up close to the ceiling, moving his head like a bobblehead doll to get the proper focal focused, one of the neighbors saw him contorting and wondered if he'd missed his medication.

        Carroll has “floaters,” too, those black specks that rhumba across your gaze like ants at a jelly farm. But that's another column.

        He'd have laser surgery, but only in one eye. That way, if something went wrong, he'd still have one good eye.

        Good, in this case, being an entirely relative term.

        Contact Paul Daugherty by phone: 768-8454; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.
       

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