It occurred to me when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning that I would never see myself the same way again.

My perspective is about to be forever altered. 

I remember exactly when it occurred to me that I might need glasses for something slightly more serious than just acquiring a look of scholarly sophistication in high school, that just so accessory meant to perch on a nose and make others think I actually knew what I was talking about, whether or not I did.  I was driving with my college roommate, Anna Tueller, sometime in the middle of the 1970's and suddenly had to reach for the glasses sitting on her own nose and shift them quickly to my own to see traffic.

From that time forward, corrective lenses in one form or another have been a necessity, and not an option, an essential luxury at times, a nuisance at others.

Sometime in college I started wearing contact lenses on a regular basis, first the hard ones in various colors--brown, green, and blue--to suit my mood, with all the nonsense that accompanied them, electrical sanitizing contraptions and plenty of expensive liquids, one to clean, another to rinse, another to sterilize.   From there I graduated to soft contacts and eventually, thankfully, to disposable daily wear, which I wore faithfully and lovingly until a couple of years ago when half of one decided to stay behind in my eye.

I suspected it was there.  Intellectually, I knew it was limited in its range in my eyelid, which is where I felt it was.  It could have been that it fell out with the other half, and I was just irritating my eye by tugging at it and looking for it.  Professional inspection seemed to be in order.  The eye doctor's assistant was quite sure there was nothing there, and the physician, when he finally entered to take his own look, concurred.

"Wait a second," he said.  "Let's put a little fluorescein in there."

 It was when I heard him say "Forceps, please!" to the assistant that I knew it was trouble.

From that day, I've been a four-eyes, more than semi-reluctantly, but equally reluctant to resume daily wear of contact lenses.

Today, all that will change.  I will never see myself the same way again.  Or anything else.

Would that surgery could correct what we see beyond the glass, with perfect clarity, bring us wisdom, bring us insight, bring us light.

Tomorrow, it will be a different person looking back at me, a different world.