How I Learned That I Needed Glasses

For about two years, I attended high school in a small town in Southern Illinois. My grandmother had moved there to take care of her ailing brother, a brooding man that I can remember exchanging exactly two sentences with. Diabetes had taken his left leg and he passed not long after I arrived, the hip-high prosthesis that he never wore gathering dust in a corner of his small kitchen.

As a freshman, I was on my high school football team. There were no tryouts. The town, then and now, had a population of about 4,500 people. We barely had enough kids to fill the rosters of the various teams, this despite the school serving some of the neighboring towns. Within a few games, I’d already been moved up to varsity, not due to any particular talent, but because injuries had already decimated it, and there was no one to replace them. We didn’t have strings, many of us playing both sides of the ball. And we were in a league with towns four times our size.

We got creamed.

One home game, late in the season, I was playing Safety when the opposing quarterback threw a floater deep downfield. I have no idea to whom he was throwing that ball, but it was coming right to me. The crowd was going wild.

I was going to catch that ball and run it all the way back for a touchdown. I was going to do that because it was my time. Even an interception would have been a watershed moment, a signal that maybe our sad-sack fortunes had changed, that maybe we could eke out a win somehow, against someone.

Instead, the ball bonked off of my facemask just as my arms, raised high to receive glory, crossed in front of me like in one of those 80s comedies about football teams that eventually turn it all around.

But we didn’t turn it all around. We lost every game that season.

Later that year, the Lion’s Club gave free glasses to those that needed them and an eye exam showed that I did. Badly. Before that exam, I never knew. I thought I was uncoordinated and that everyone couldn’t see fifty feet ahead of them.

I think about that situation sometimes. At the time, I lacked something that I didn’t even know I needed and beat myself up unnecessarily.

Now, I try to remember to be good to myself, even if I don’t know why I seem to be doing badly.

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This post was previously published on Curious.

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