Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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Eyes

June 08, 2007

As of 1:04 this morning, I'm 56. No, it doesn't feel different. Next year I'll move from mid-50s to late. Maybe that'll feel different. Maybe not. I have enough friends who are already in their early, middle, and later 60s, and they're not giving up on life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever they were pursuing in their late 50s, so I'm counting on doing likewise till the universe tells me different.

Tuesday I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver's license; in Massachusetts you do this every five years. The Registry had moved since my last visit, in June 2002 (when June 2007 seemed about a million years in the future). It used to be in Oak Bluffs, across Wing Road from the fire station, near the intersection with County Road. Now it's at the Airport Business Park, off Barnes. The signs were easy to follow right up till the end, where I overshot the turn -- the VTA, Vineyard Transit Authority, signs overshadowed those for the RMV -- and didn't realize it till I reached a sign pointing back in the direction I'd come from. No problem. I took a number, 114, from the dispenser at the door and sat down. The room was bigger, brighter, and more sterile than the old Registry. Apparently the number dispenser was missing some figures, so when the clerks called out "110? Does anybody have 110?" we'd start speculating about what had happened to 110, or asking, "I've got 112 -- does that count?" So people fell to kibitzing even if they didn't already know each other.

Something else had changed since June 2002: my eyesight. The retina in my right eye detached in August 2004, and it took two tries to repair it. Since then the vision -- the corrected vision -- in my right eye has been minimal, something like 20/150. (My optometrist says it'll improve by at least 30 percent once the cataract is removed -- cataracts are an almost inevitable side effect of retina reattachment surgery -- but that isn't going to happen till I have either insurance or enough money to pay for the procedure.) Since childhood the idea of doing anything without glasses or contacts has been ridiculous, and my corrected vision was good; however, my eyes don't work together all that well, so I always got a little nervous at license renewal time. What if I flunked the eye test? What if I couldn't drive? Early on I figured out that if I blinked my dominant eye quickly while reading across the line of letters, my other eye would take over and I'd get to the end without missing a beat.

This was something entirely different. If both my eyes were like my right eye I'd never get behind the wheel of a car, never mind give me a license to drive. Pass the eye test? Out of the question. So at my checkup last year, I mentioned to my optometrist that my license was up for renewal in 2007. No problem, he said. As soon as I got my renewal form, I should come in to see him, he'd test my eyes and write me a note, and that would be that. All of which came to pass, and indeed that was that. Now I know why there are so many half-blind drivers on the road: they all got to skip the eye test because they had a letter from their eye doctor. Since I am now one of those half-blind drivers on the road, I will henceforth limit my complaints to blind drivers on the road.

The whole experience made me realize that getting older is like traveling into a different country, and that made me think at once about the brilliant speech Ursula K. Le Guin gave when she was guest of honor at WisCon 20 in 1996. Le Guin was about 66 at the time. The speech is called "An Envoy from Senectutus." (Link is to a .pdf file. If at first it doesn't work, try opening Acrobat Reader before you click on it.) It begins:

I thought I might make a report to you from a planet most of you have not visited yet, though you have seen it from afar. I live there now, and am just visiting Earth. I am an Envoy from Senectutus. I am the Mobile from Geriatrica.

This is a piece, like Adrienne Rich's "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," that I try to reread regularly, but evidently it's been a while. I'd forgotten the part about eyes:

Now, these semi-visible inhabitants of my world have some trouble seeing Earthlings, too. For one thing their glasses usually either don't fit, or they need a new prescription, or they can't remember where they put the Goddamn things. Glasses problems on my world are pandemic.

In May 1996, when I heard Le Guin speak, I thought I knew everything there was to know about funky vision. Hah. Now I have two kinds of contacts and three pairs of glasses: glasses for reading, glasses for working at the computer (which in a pinch will serve for driving), and cheap reading glasses from the drugstore to wear over my contacts because my contacts are for far-seeing and they're only good for reading if the material is farther away than my arm can reach.

I'd also forgotten the part about "the weird nineties," which "came in with everybody screaming at each other on election debates and talk shows and rap tapes." During the weird nineties, said the Envoy from Senectutus,

I was forced to emigrate to Geriatrica; not at lightspeed, but still a lot quicker than I wanted to. And during the journey, I began to feel that people back on Earth weren't talking the way I had learned to talk. In fact, many of my friends weren't talking very much at all. They were quiet. They were tired. If they talked they got called bleedingheart liberal knee-jerks. They got called shrill castrating feminists. They got called politically correct. And that wore them out so they kind of quit talking, except to each other.

Well. I'm about 10 years younger now than Le Guin was then, but I'm beginning to feel that kind of tired. Maybe time is accelerating and we're getting tired faster. At the moment, selling Mud of the Place is on hold because I'm working on Squatters' Speakeasy and Squatters' Speakeasy is on hold while I write an essay on the utopian impulse and feminist f/sf of the 1970s, and that's on hold while I rush to meet two bloody deadlines. Every once in a while I catch myself wondering what the hell's the point. "Nobody listening," said the Envoy from Senectutus, "is even worse than nobody talking."

The worst thing of all is that I'm a pretty good writer and a pretty good editor so I think I ought to be part of the effort to turn this around.

Come to think of it, that's not all that bad.

 

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