Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
One of the scary parts of getting older is that things you take for granted sometimes don’t work like they used to. I have been using my eyes to see every day for almost 75 years now.
I remember having 20/20 vision when I was being evaluated for military service. I remember the optician telling me, “you’ve got great vision, you could qualify to be a Fighter Pilot”. That didn’t exactly make me feel good as I was entering the Air Force during the Viet Nam war and being a pilot that would be required to shoot down enemy planes and cause massive death to the enemy was not why I was preparing to serve my country. I didn’t enlist to become a war hero; I just enlisted because it was expected of me and one way or another Uncle Sam was going to use me however He saw fit. Turned out I was one of the lucky ones that never saw combat. I thank God for that.
I became a postal clerk after I served and thus began a 36-year career moving the mail in many different capacities. My first assignment was on a new machine called a letter sorting machine. Instead of sorting letters by hand there was a team of twelve clerks each sitting at a console that put a different letter in front of your eyes every second. We had about a third of a second to identify the destination zip code and two thirds of a second to type the code that would put the letter in its destination cubby on the back side of this huge machine.
It sounds like something that is impossible to do but as we got more experience, the next thing I knew, the information went from my eyes to my fingertips, bypassing my brain. Of course it didn’t really bypass my brain, it just seemed like it. We had head sets to lessen the noise and they piped in music. I was able to listen to the music and let my eyes and fingers do the work. It was so easy to do the more you did it. My favorite music was “Do You Feel, Like I Feel” by Peter Frampton.
I only did this job for about two years, and I can’t prove anything, but I am convinced that limiting my focus to a steady 12 inches for long periods of time, took away my fighter pilot abilities. I remember night time driving was unclear as I either drove to work or home from work in the dark working the night shifts. That was when I started wearing glasses. It didn’t really bother me as lots of people wear glasses and I’ve been wearing them for about 50 years now.
But other things developed in those 50 years. Floaters and cataracts have developed, and a new glasses prescription is no longer enough to help me see clearly. So, it’s time for cataract surgery.
I’m not excited to go through this but people say I will appreciate seeing what I hadn’t even noticed was missing. Sounds like another story opportunity is on the horizon. I guess I’ll just have to end this story as a cliff hanger. To be continued after the surgery…