Midlife Meditation

Check out the horn-rims on those guys. The year was 1975, the place, the First United Methodist Church of Emmett, Idaho. I was in the eighth grade. My father, who was also my pastor, was proudly pinning my God and Country badge on my Scout uniform. He was 48; I was 14. I had just discovered girls, though it would be another nine years before I finally went on a date with one. The boundaries of my world were the walls of a decrepit middle school, a brand-new public library, a tiny manufactured home that was the parsonage, and this church. The parsonage was eventually sold (presumably so the pastor could live in something with room for a family), the school relocated when a new high school made the old high school building available, and the church was eventually torn down, with the congregation buying to a former Church of Christ as they, too, moved to a larger facility. Only the library is as I remember it--though now it is doubtless showing the wear and tear of its forty year...

Yikes! I wanted something somewhat goofy for this selfie, because I am, in fact, feeling odd about what happens in about 48 hours: lasers will reshape my corneas, and for the first time since I was six years old, I will be able to see the world without corrective lenses. Unless you knew me in my youth, chances are you've never seen me in my glasses. I got my first set of contacts in 1982, when I was 21, and since then, I've rarely worn glasses in public. I have this week in preparation for Friday morning's LASIK procedure, and it's got me feeling slightly nostalgic for the bad old days when looking up (and over the rim) meant not seeing anything clearly. Only slightly, though; there are many things about both glasses and contact lenses I will not miss in the least. Let's start with blindness, which I define not as the absence of vision, but the inability to function visually in the world. I can see without my glasses, but what I see is distorted to the exten...