Making a Spectacle of Myself by Helen Chappell
We, the vision impaired, have been wearing some of kind of contraption over our eyes for hundreds of years. If you look at some 400- or 500-year-old paintings of the Great and the Good, you’ll note that a few of them have some form of spectacles perched on their beaks or clutched in their long bony hands, usually with a book. A prop, I assume, to show their nearsightedness came from reading too
much, as well as to convey the idea they were real smart guys. Or at least rich enough to have a portrait painted. When it was discovered in second grade that I am as blind as the proverbial bat and needed glasses, my mother was so horrified or bored or dramatic that she dragged me around to all my aunts’ houses going, “Do you believe she needs glasses?” as if I’d suddenly grown
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