Becoming one with my glasses

Otherwise called making a spectacle of myself.

To make a short story long, I was helping my friend Jim move some stuff out of his house and realized late in the day that I'd misplaced my glasses. I had a spare pair in the truck, so I've been able to carry on with minimal trauma. I can read, therefore I can be. (Take that, Descartes.)

The very next day, I e-mailed Jim, who only had a million other things to take care of, and he suggested that I contact another friend of his who had helped schlep things away and who may have found my missing glasses. I e-mailed her, and lo and behold, she had found them in a box of office supplies. Going to retrieve them has proven to be a little complicated, as we both had other things to do after work and on the weekend, but something will work out, and in the meantime I have have my old prescription to get me by.

How exciting can losing one's glasses be? Unless it's a sign. A sign of what, I can't say, but everything is a sign of something, right? Everything of any significance at least. Otherwise, every thing is just what it is, and what fun is that? Semiotics is all about signs, symbols, symbol systems like languages, their use(s) and meaning(s), and it's all very complex, convoluted, and potentially confusing like a vast forest of interpretation.

Admittedly I look for signs everywhere. Isn't that half the point of watching this movie in which we're all cast, crew, writer, director, and audience? So I wondered, as I used my seven-year-old glasses to search for my one-year-old glasses, what this has to do with anything. Jim's move to New Mexico; my meeting his friends from Karma Thegsum Choling; standing in their meditation hall with its dazzling, colorful, mind-focusing images; hearing about the lineage of this center in relation to other Tibetan groups and ultimately to the Dalai Lama.

Juxtaposed with a long weekend of meetings at the Old North Church, it's hard not to compare the two communities. My modest (small U) unitarian universalist quest to integrate art and life, work and play, sacred and secular has taken root in a (big U) rural UU congregation, and that is the organization that I'm comfortable with. I don't see myself as a Buddhist, but I sure have been running into a lot of Buddhists lately. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Meanwhile, back at my desk compiling a list of discussion topics over a six-year period, I was rummaging through e-mail messages, and scribbled on the back of one was a book title, The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco. Serendipity strikes again, bringing this book to my attention, so I reserved it at the library and checked it out.

The protagonist, Roberto, is shipwrecked alone amid strangely familiar (but still strange) surroundings, little by little piecing together his observations with memories of other times and places. Remember the role of lenses and reading, libraries and coded message in Eco'sThe Name of the Rose? Maybe I'm making it all up, but even if I am, why shouldn't I? Everything has consequences, most of them unintended, so even the seemingly minuscule events will play out somehow, whether I or anyone else notices them or not.

This would-be epic will surely turn out to be unspectacular. I made an appointment for an eye exam the following Monday, and that went smoothly enough. Dr. Stein was his usual crusty, expert self, although he didn't seem to remember me from the last five times I've been to see him, which is understandable, since he's even older than me. I am sure my new glasses will work just fine, once I adjust to the new frames and the "progressive" no-line trifocals that supposedly will not require me to tilt my head to read the signs!

Heather, the lovely manager at Pearl Vision, showed me several nice frames and helped me make a decision on a style that would fit the large bridge of my large nose yet rest below my large brow. Wire-rimmed or plastic? Round or square? Rigid or flexible? With or without magnetic shades? How about titanium? I finally made a decision, but I won't get to see the results for a couple of weeks. If this is all about deferred gratification, I'm already disappointed.

To escape the mall I had to walk through Penney's, where there was a sale on jeans. Picking out two pairs of jeans (for $38) was a relatively simple matter. Straight-leg or boot-cut? Do they fit? Okie-dokie.

Returning to the office after my long lunch hour, I edit another chapter of a book on practical law. Soon my eyes need a break from the two-dimensional succession of black marks on a white page, so I go downstairs to breathe different air, move different muscles, behold different shapes and textures. The plants, stones, and iconic images decorating the inside of my cube make a huge difference, but it's not enough. Maybe office designers should construct translucent orbs with a desk and a chair inside, or little geodesic domicles instead of cubicles.

Today as I was purging old file drawers full of out-of-date page proofs, I put the headphones on and rocked out to Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (good stuff, and better after a few listenings) in order to screen out the other audible office phenomena. Maybe the office space of the near future will come with eye and ear implants, meaning nose and throat can't be far behind: a breathing tube so I don't have to go outside for fresh air, a blue-tooth phone attached to the larynx. Shirley Somebody has these devices already.

I managed to meet the finder of the lost lenses after work on Wednesday, so they're back in their habitual place on my face, where I hardly notice them. Reading the fine print and the computer screen is easy again, and my owlish face is back to normal. Kind of anticlimactic but I'll take it.