They went — and I am not making this up -
"My eyes are dim, I cannot see,
I have not brought my specs with me,
I have no-ot brought my specs with me."
I’ve since looked it up. It’s the chorus from The Quartermaster’s Store, a song that was popular with both British and Anzac soldiers during World War 1, and later with the scouting and guiding movement.
Now, I played little part in WW1 and I was never either a boy scout or a girl guide, so I cannot tell you how I learned this song, nor how it has been stored as electrical impulses in the wet stuff upstairs for who knows how many decades, nor yet how the optometrist visit prompted it to pop up, unbidden, and ready for use.
Does anyone know exactly how memory works?
It was crosswords and street signs that sent me to the optometrist. With my $10 reading glasses (magnification 2.75) I can still just about read crossword clues, but not the numbers in the little boxes on the grid.
And when driving around town in search of Glaucoma Ave, I have to slow down at every turn-off until I am close enough to read the sign and discover it is actually Twenty-twenty St, whereupon I accelerate again, to the intense amusement of vehicles behind me.
When I walked into the optometrist’s office — surgery? den of wizardry? — I recognised him immediately. We have met only twice, in 2001 and 2014, yet his face was firmly ensconced in my wet stuff.
How many thousands of faces must there be in that gallery? The brain is some beast.
There is pleasure in surrendering to expertise, of any stripe. Having a podiatrist’s fingers probe a sore foot is halfway to making it better. And so it was now with my eyes.
They have been weakening noticeably year on year. In the corridor of my days they are a wallpaper of decline.
But now I was handing them over to be attended to, and the view immediately brightened.
High on the office wall was the standard chart of Hungarian place names. The optometrist covered my right eye.
The left eye read four lines perfectly and guessed at the fifth and felt quite pleased with itself.
He then covered my left eye. The right could make out only the three enormous capitals. I was ageing asymmetrically. He said that was common.
Then came the trick I remembered from previous visits and was looking forward to. On to my nose he placed a frame like an ox-yoke, and into the yoke he dropped lens after lens and asked me each time whether it was better or worse, though I suspected he always knew which it would be.
Every time I said better or worse he said "good" which made me feel praised and clever and keen to please him more. Oh how readily we go back to school.
And then, with a flourish, he dropped two finishing lenses into their slots and every Hungarian place name became etched in crisp clear letters even down to the ant-like bottom line.
"That," he said, "is more or less the vision you were born with."
It was a form of magic. Here was how things had looked through the ungrateful eyes of infancy, when the dew had not yet faded from the world, when any notion of decline seemed impossible, when to wake of a morning was to grin and start running.
It seemed impossibly clever, to reverse time like that, a wonder trick that no optometrist would ever tire of performing.
I said as much. "Well," said the optometrist politely, "I have done rather a lot of them."
He then sat opposite me with only a machine between us, and he looked deep into my eyes in the manner of a spaniel while I had to focus on the tip of his ear.
After a while he announced I had the beginnings of cataracts, but that I shouldn’t worry.
Cataracts were as inevitable as death. Unlike death, however, they were fixable.
Shortly thereafter I ordered my first pair of prescription glasses. I had thought it would feel like defeat. It felt like victory. I left his office — surgery? den of wizardry? — on buoyant feet, and drove home singing.
"My eyes are dim, but I’ll soon see
For I will bring my specs with me
For I wi-ill bring MY SPECS WITH ME."
(See, you know the tune too.)
■Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
