Glasses: Life Undeniable

I have a birthday creeping up on me in October. No, I'm not telling if you don't already know. All my life I've looked younger than my age, so I don't necessarily mind claiming any random year I happen to be in, but there is one thing about this aging gig that is bothering me which will give away my age a bit.

It's the glasses. I have never had to wear glasses for sight before now. While I don't necessarily look my age, and mostly feel like that number on my driver's license is an alien compared to how I feel, when I can't read the page there's no denying it.

It is truly the only thing that makes me feel my age. When I was in college, I always felt like I should have glasses when I sat down to write a paper. It just seemed like it would add some intellectual edge to the paper writing if I used glasses at that moment.

Now I am at the beginning of this glasses journey, and I often still sneak by without them. I'm generally okay on the computer and in good light down to about 10 point type. Poor light or small type and all bets are off.  I'm getting good at sort of estimating the shape of words when I have forgotten my, uh, limitations. The beauty of digital reading devices is that you can adjust the letters to your needs and voila, no glasses needed.

My significant other is four years older than I am and has been using the cheater glasses for several years. Sometimes I look across my glasses at him across the room in his glasses and I think, "Holy crap, we're getting old! How the heck did that happen?" We both have good genes that have given us a semblance of youth for many years which has been a mixed blessing. Yes it's nice to not look your age as the numbers pile up, but for many years we were assumed to be not really qualified because we were too young (this is when I wished they could ask your age on job apps.)

It's sort of a weird thing to go from looking too young for any given job to needing glasses to read the application. I'm also noticing in addition to the need for a little glass to enlarge and focus the letters, the younger people are assuming my age a little higher than they used to in the guessing age games. The trick to that is stick to asking the older people how old they think I am, as they guess decades younger than I am and I can exult that at least someone thinks I'm still that young. Sadly I don't play the game myself, so it's usually some friend saying to a random person, how old do you think they are?  With the glasses, it's getting easier to peg us.