The Eyes Have It
Big data does not tell us how many people are walking around squinting because they are unwilling to damage the feelings of their optometrist. Early estimates suggest it is not a trivial number.
What drives this phenomena?
Let us state at the outset that this fellow deserves all the regard we can throw his way.
After a career of looking into eyeballs, which are rumored by the poet Shelley to be windows onto the human soul but which otherwise deliver a certain amount of interest but no more than that, there cannot be much secret about the dark side of human nature to the optometrist.
These instruments of his shine right down there into the regions marked ‘Soul, This Way,’ and what with swinging the light back and forth like a flashlight in a cave he’s probably seeing all sorts of things that are otherwise unknown to the world.
He hides this somber knowledge well enough, bustling among the instruments in the exam room in a noncommittal manner. Just as well.
He hides too what must be his frustration at the fact that nearly all of us come to see him an average of 3.9 years after we are supposed to.
This is not like the case of seeing our accountant on Thursday when all in all he would have preferred Tuesday. This comprises entire seasons of the year and full years of the decade down the line.
On your way out the door at the previous visit — whenever that was, whenever the hell that was, all you can remember is that everyone was driving Japanese cars all of a sudden and the first Indiana Jones movie was playing on the local screens — you stand there and make an appointment for the next checkup with the clerk guy behind the counter.
He marks it carefully on a complex calendar he keeps and writes it down for you on an official-looking piece of paper that you fold carefully and place in your wallet, in the manner of one who has worked the date into his life plan.
All other things, events, and appointments, your attitude says, must take this date into account and work around it. If you are in the child-bearing years you seem to indicate that the birth of your next child will be arranged so as not to interfere with this date.
You do all this with a straight face.
No matter how many post card reminders, email notifications, gentle nudges of one sort or another you get, in your heart of hearts you know that some things are going to be put off in this life, and the eye doctor appointment is almost certainly going to be one of them.
It would not surprise you if the doc at some point tires of the constant throb of low-key remindings and instead starts sending you colorful images drawn from horror movie posters of an eyeball out of its socket dangling on a patient’s cheekbone with the message: “Don’t be like him! He waited too long between eye doctor appointments.”
It cannot be easy to maintain good cheer in the face of such a reluctant client base.
If it were me, seeing person after person walk through the door rubbing their eyes 23 months late for their appointment, it would have a souring effect on my view of human nature, and skew a whole range of perceptions.
And sometimes, I have to admit, it shows.
These appointments spread across the years and the patient ought not, really, to pretend that he has recently been here in the office in accordance with a regular schedule, nor to chatter away just as though he had.
Me: And how are the kids? The oldest must be ready for grade school right about now.
The eye doctor (resignedly, and who knows, maybe with suppressed fury): No, no, we were at the oldest’s wedding out in Denver in the fall. Maybe you’re thinking of the children she is going to have.
Or:
Me: Man, that was some presidential election we just had, wasn’t it? Were people wound up about the debates or what? In fact I think we were talking about it last time we were in here.
The eye doctor (resignedly, and who knows, maybe with suppressed fury): We did chat, I recall now. You mean the Bush-Clinton debates. The first Bush. The first Clinton.
But all in all he soldiers on. The hearty handshake, the pleasant greeting…if he is not genuinely glad to see me he nonetheless puts on a convincing show. What a good fellow!
I resolve then and there to be the best patient he sees that day, perhaps that week, month, quarter, or fiscal year.
I muse on him while he readies the instruments. I would like to think that elsewhere in his life – say, the cable repair or pizza delivery guy – someone somewhere shows up when they’re supposed to and not several years late, but this I doubt, meaning that it is even more incumbent upon this patient right here to balance out the score with bucket-loads of good cheer.
I observe him, considering my strategy.
He goes about his work in a perfectly competent but I wouldn’t say ardent manner. Whatever grand passion he once might have had for the science and art of optometry has dissipated over the years, this much is clear.
Well, that happens. Having his hundreds of patients stare at the same three dots projected onto the facing wall while he gazes deep into first one orb then the other, the charm would have started to wear off right around the billionth eyeball.
I worry about this, this lack of ardor and passion on his part. It may have gone too far in this case. I’m uneasy considering the possibility that we have all worn him down to the point that he no longer takes pleasure in his work.
Do not ask who has done this to him. We have done this to him.
We have beaten down his spirit with our inconsiderate behavior.
My thinking, always subtle, does not stop there.
Some of us are of a nature – there must be a name for it somewhere – that denies personal satisfaction unless convinced that everyone in the room is perfectly gratified with their life choices. If this doesn’t seem to be so, well then, someone has to bring them back around to that certainty of purpose they felt in dewy youth.
This duty, in this instance, falls to me. I mean, who else? I’m the guy in the chair, aren’t I?
So I more than meet this guy halfway.
Once I actually show up, I am the readiest, and the cheeriest, and the most admiring, and the most grateful of patients, quick with a response, thoughtful in my replies, seeking at every turn to make it easy on him. He’s have a hard enough day, he doesn’t need another difficult customer.
The slightest bit of humor from him has me guffawing helplessly and actually slapping my thigh like one of those fellows in the front rows of a comedy special on TV, and when he remarks on the nice weather we’ve been having, I commend him on the acuteness of his observations in the meteorological line. He’s really got an eye for this weather stuff, I tell him. Remarkable! We speak of our losing local professional sports teams, and his stray observations are so right-on that I ask him if he has ever spent time coaching in the pros.
I lay it on pretty thick, but this I view as my obligation. The man’s questioning his whole existence due to us, we ingrates who can’t even be bothered to keep our appointments, and If I don’t balance out the ledgers, who will?
When we are to the stage of slipping one lens past the other, each minutely different than the one before, while staring at the same lines of letters we’ve all been staring at for decades, I am happy to be prompt in my replies.
When he asks, “Is that better…or worse?” I make no bones about whether it is better or worse.
“Better!” I all but shout.
“And now?”
“Worse!” I confirm next time with a happy grin, going strong.
At this stage I could be Head Yell Team Leader for the entire medical specialty of optometry and for this shop in particular.
I imagine in my mind that this must be uplifting for him, if a little jarring when I let my happy emotions get the best of me and my voice seems to boom around the room with a concussive effect.
This spirit holds for only so long. The closer we get to the end of the exam, the finer the cuts of lenses, and the finer the decisions that must be made.
One line of letters looks perfectly fine, then he slides the next lens over the eye and says, “now, is that better…or worse?”
Anxious to maintain my record and please him, to end this appointment on a high note, I say the first thing that comes into my head, “Worse!”
“Worse?” he says, in an alarmed or in at least a ‘I-made-the-wrong-career-choice’ tone of voice.
This takes the wind out of my sails.
“Let’s try it again,” I say, “my mind may have started to wander.”
“There, now, is that better…or worse?”
“Better!” I say brightly, glad this time to arrive at the right answer.
“Better?” he says, more in sadness than anger, but there’s a bit of heat in the word too.
“I meant worse!”
“Worse?”
“I meant better!”
This goes on for a while.
By now I’m uncertain entirely what the words ‘better’ or ‘worse’ even mean in the grand scheme of things.
I mean, who’s to say? My mind, such as it is, is racing.
You can get into a world of art theory and the whole beauty being in the eye of the beholder thing and the distorting effects of cultural and gender and class norms trying to decide what is so-called better and what is so-called worse, that can of worms I can do without opening, so I fold my arms over my chest and just clam up entirely.
I’m not at my best in these befuddled states and I can’t quite track the course of my internal logic in retrospect, but it goes downhill from there, this eye appointment. By the end of the scheduled time, the optometrist is barely speaking to me, assuming perhaps that I am mocking him. He all but flings the glasses prescription on the desk of his assistant, turns his back on me, and stalks out of the room.
So, here I sit, wearing glasses that are pretty good, but which in the dark hours of the night I suspect might be better, if only I hadn’t gotten all caught up in making sure that everyone felt good about their life choices.
I think I’ve heard since that that fellow, the eye doctor, went into lumberjacking or brick-laying soon after; anyway, some line of work that didn’t require seeing people or setting appointments that they’ll never keep.
No, that’s not right, it comes back to me now. He went into library science, that’s right, and works the Circulation Desk, specializing in late fees.
Though as pleasant a man as always, it is said there is no negotiating with him on overdue books; if your book doesn’t keep it appointment with the library, you will pay.
He rules with an iron fist in these matters, unusually so, and while motivations are sometimes murky and hard to discern, I would guess it’s something in his past.
