Getting Eyeglasses in Taipei
Here’s a story about what has been going on lately. Nothing wild and crazy. Just life.
Years ago, almost decades ago, I got glasses while I was living in South Korea. I didn’t really need them to do anything important. I was a little bit nearsighted, I guess, which means that I could see things up close very well. It was only some things in the distance that got a bit blurry when my eyes were tired. It wasn’t a big deal, and I probably wouldn’t have done anything about it except for the buses in Seoul.
To really describe the buses in Seoul back then would take a book. I’ll just say here that they go very fast, and, at that time, picking up passengers was an afterthought for the bus drivers. They had an odd kind of salary system based on the number of times they completed their route in a day. From that point of view, picking up passengers slowed them down and lost them money.
To get a bus to stop for you in Seoul, you had to run out into the street and wave it down or throw yourself in front of it. But to do that, you had to see your bus coming, and that is where my need for glasses came in. After a long day of teaching and commuting, my eyes were always tired, and at night, I simply couldn’t focus on the bus numbers from a distance. By the time the number on the front of the bus snapped into focus, it was too late. The bus was right on top of me and even if the bus driver saw my frantic waving, he’d just blow right past and keep going.
This happened a number of times, and I realized I had to get glasses if only for stopping buses. The experience of getting glasses that first time is lost in the mists of time. I don’t even have a glimmer of a neuron firing with stored information about that. It’s just gone. It’s probably in a journal somewhere, but those journals are buried in my brother’s crawl space on the other side of the planet.
Well, I got a pair of glasses in Seoul, and I was pleased with them. They looked okay. They sharpened up the world for me at those times when I needed it – late at night and watching movies in a theater. I kept those glasses for a long time, too. If I gave it some thought, I could probably come up with how many years I had them, but let’s just say it was ten years. Then, long ago, I was planting trees in northern Alberta. I was sleeping in a tent, and the greatest pleasure of my day was when I could finally crawl inside that tent after a brutally hard day and by the light of a flashlight, read a book for a few minutes. My eyes were burning from fatigue and I put on my glasses to see if they would help me read.
Somehow, and I don’t remember the details, I left one morning from my tent and left my glasses out of their case and lying on the tent floor. This is very unusual for me. I’m generally quite methodical with stuff. I put stuff away. I have cases for stuff and I put stuff back in their cases when I’m done with it. So it’s a very bad thing for me to break that routine. I’m not expecting glasses to be sitting in the middle of the tent floor when I get back. So I threw a heavy pack into the tent that night and heard a crunch. I’d crushed my glasses, and that was the end of my first pair.
I replaced that pair many months later (years later? time is very foggy these days) when I was in my hometown in Canada. I got my eyes checked by a Canadian optometrist and I bought two pairs of glasses on a two-for-one deal. I didn’t need two pairs. I only needed the one. However, since it was “free” I asked for two pairs of the exact same glasses, except one pair had prescription clear lenses and the other pair had prescription sunglass lenses. I thought that was very clever of me.
I suppose it was clever, but, to be honest, I hardly ever wore the sunglasses. Even after years went by, I only felt the need to wear glasses when I was driving at night in the rain or watching a movie in the theater. And sunglasses were not a good idea in either situation. Still, I had the two pairs, and I carried them around with me.
I carried them around with me for about another thousand years – until last year in fact. Last year, I was back in Canada, and I was taking trains back and forth from my hometown of Sarnia to my friend’s organic sheep farm near Montreal. My eyes were often tired, and as I looked out the window at the vast open spaces of Canada, I put on my glasses from time to time to better see things far away. For some reason, I broke habit again. Instead of putting my glasses back in their case, I hooked them through the mesh netting of the seat pocket in front of me. Even as I did it, I knew it was a mistake. But I did it anyway. Maybe I thought it was cool, like a movie star hooking his glasses over his shirt pocket. Whatever the reason I did it, I did it, and when my train pulled into Toronto or Sarnia, I got up from my seat in a rush and forgot my glasses. (If anyone found a pair of glasses in the seat pocket of a Via Rail train in Ontario last year, let me know.)
I’ve been without glasses for the ten months since then. For most people in the world, it would be a simple thing to get new glasses. It’s an errand, and you just get it done. Me, I delay. I procrastinate. I dither. I postpone. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, I walked down Bade Rd. during my lunchtime here in Taipei, and I saw that that section of Bade Road was drowning in eyeglass shops. I took my courage in both hands and went into the fifth one I passed. It was a pretty fancy place as it turned out – all Hugo Boss and Versace. A young Taiwanese woman with the English name “Pecky” on her nametag brought me to the back room and ran me through the eye tests. We didn’t exactly speak each other’s languages, but we muddled along. I looked into the fancy machine at the fence receding into the distance and ending at a farmhouse. I read row upon row of numbers getting tinier and tinier. I felt absurdly pleased, like I’d passed a difficult exam, when the woman complimented me when I could actually tell that the little number was a five and not a three or an eight.
She put those crazy optometrist glasses on my face – the kind that are perfectly round and orange – and started popping lenses into them. “Good?” ‘Not good?” “Good?”
I eventually went outside wearing the crazy glasses and, looking like a lunatic, wandered up and down the street to see if I could read things near and far. I could, and Pecky and I made a date for my next lunchtime slot to pick out frames and lenses. About that time, I saw the prices on the various frames for sale in the display case. They started at around NT$10,000 and went up from there. It was a bit more than I wanted to pay, and then I remembered I still had the sunglasses from the 2-for-1 deal a thousand years ago. I asked about bringing those in and just changing the lenses. Pecky was fine with that, and today at lunchtime, I dropped by the shop and it was a done deal.
A glass of water, much bowing, my agreeing to expensive Zeiss lenses, a bit more staring into strange machines, the handing over of a deposit and my old sunglasses, more bowing, and I was out the door. Tomorrow, at noon, I will go back to see Pecky one more time (still wondering if I should tell her about her nametag – I think what she means is “Peggy”), and I will once more have a pair of prescription glasses for movie nights. Spielberg and Cameron will be very happy to hear that when I see their next masterpiece on the big screen, it will be sharp and bright. Let’s just hope I put my glasses back in their case when the movie is over.