RIVER CITY JOURNAL: FIRST GLASSES MADE EVERYTHING GO DOWNHILL

Anyone with bifocals will understand this.

As you get older and rely more and more on artificial aids to help you see, you get testy from time to time about the blurred images. Then you remember what it would be like not to see at all.

These thoughts came to mind when you saw that Sarah Long of Poplar Bluff would be the new regent at Southeast Missouri State University. You don't know Sarah, and you're not sure if you know her husband, Jerry Long, an optometrist in Poplar Bluff.

But you remember Walker Long, Jerry's father and Sarah's father-in-law. He was your eye doctor when you got your first pair of glasses more than 40 years ago.

The trip to Poplar Bluff for the eye exam, you remember, was a big deal. Any trip away from the farm in the Ozarks hills where you grew up was a big deal. Being anywhere else but the farm meant you didn't have to hoe the garden, mow the lawn, milk the cow, haul hay if it was baling time or pick corn if it was ready. Get the picture?

But a trip to Poplar Bluff was extra-special. This was, by comparison to your favorite home town, a city full of unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells. Actually, your home town had just about everything. Poplar Bluff just had more of everything, including the hospital where your tonsils were removed.

Dr. Long's optometry office was a fascinating place for a young boy. You would describe the office in detail, if you could. But you remember, all these years later, you couldn't see much to remember. The good eye doctor was, in your best recollection, what you might call a mite snappy: dapper and precise.

In any event, Dr. Long checked your eyes and pronounced you were pretty much sight-challenged. Well, he would have if political correctness had been around. Basically he said you couldn't see very well, but a pair of glasses would solve the problem.

So you picked out a pair of frames guaranteed to be the least breakable of the lot. This was important, because when you live a long drive away you can't go running to the doctor's office every time your glasses get out of whack.

And then you left Poplar Bluff and headed for home. No glasses. They had to be made somewhere magical where they would take Dr. Long's scribbling and turn it into a pair of glasses just for you. The glasses would be delivered by way of Postman Gene Grassham of Rural Route 3 of the U.S. Post Office Department. This was way before the Postal Service.

The big day finally arrived. You came home from Shady Nook School, which was two and a half miles over in Greenwood Valley (uphill both ways, a fact you were finally able to prove to disbelieving sons many, many years later), and there were the glasses, in a cardboard box, ready to be tried on.

You shut your eyes as you put the glasses on for the first time. When you opened your eyes, you could see really well. But everything was slanted. Dr. Long had warned that might happen. You had to learn to walk with everything going downhill until you adjusted.

Nowadays, you wonder what it might have been like never to have worn glasses, but they are so much a part of you that being without them is a weird sensation. Not to mention you are blind as a mole in a cave without them.

Glasses keep getting fancier and fancier. The ones you have now have trifocals, the blended kind where you have to jerk your head around until your eyes hit the right spot and focus on whatever it is you want to see.

Try playing pingpong with trifocals.

You are grateful, every day of your life, for the wizardry of optics and the knowledge of all the Walker Longs who help you and millions of others see better.

There are other signs of aging, though. Your younger son says you should become Beltone-literate. Wonder what that means?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.