Buccaneer Bobbie

It has been a really grueling couple of weeks. I am betwixt feelings of sadness and even a little rage, feelings I am not going to expound on now. People that never showed up or proved incapable of ever showing up.

Hey, everybody loses their parents, it is a sad fact of life. I'm not special. Just oversensitive.

Anyway, sandwiched between the trip to hospice in Maryland were two cataract surgeries.

I have worn glasses for about 52 years by my count, might be off a year or two. Extreme near sightedness and astigmatism. When I was a kid and sported the thick black horned rims picked out by the sadistic stepfather, kids would often refer to me as Chip or Ernie, whoever the nerdy kid was on My three sons.

After the surgery on my right eye I popped the right lens out of my glasses. I wore an eye patch constantly, not so much for light sensitivity as to compensate for the image distortion between my glasses lens and the fixed eye.

What I quickly ascertained was that I was giving something up forever, namely my excellent near vision.  Life ain't perfect and the multifocal accommodators that I was interested in that would be sympatico with my toric right eye are now only available in Europe. So I have joined the reader class. I am scattering cheap readers from the dollar store all around the dusty pathways of my daily life.

It is strange grasping for glasses on the bed stand in the morning that I no longer need. Has taken a couple days to trust my eyes again. But my distance is now better than 20/20 in both eyes.

Anyway I played pirate in Maryland and all was cool. When my brother Buzz and I were kids we were always pirates or hobos for costume parties. Brought the subject up with my mm last week.

The only uneasy time was when another guy with an eyepatch sat down across from me in the airport. I played it cool. I heard his wife say, lookit honey, a patch! What was the chance that another guy seated in the very next row of the airplane was a fellow brother of the patch?

I was afraid of being unmasked a a pretender, maybe forced to remove the patch and show him my empty eye socket. Like those guys that go around pretending they were in the military and eventually get found out. I never gave myself up. Mums the word.