I did something today that I last did as a glasses-wearing 5 year-old.

Due, in large part, to the negligence of an evil family eye doctor many years ago, I have worn corrective lenses for the past 26 years. My condition, in and of itself, while not terribly debilitating, is a nuisance further compunded by the knowledge that no one else in my immediate family (and few from the extended) suffers from inferior vision. My right eye has always been my gem, with its near 20/40 vision, and I rely upon it heavily; it certainly being the only reason why I can still drive.

My sinister eye (the one on your right if you're looking at me) has a mind of its amblyopic own: Without glasses, its wanderlust draws it in to my nose, thus having given me a head start on the kindergarten buddies making goofy cross-eyed, fish-lipped faces. Furthermore, while taking a bicycle tour through Georgia after graduating from High School in 1989, my "evil eye" suffered another, unexplained, setback; I now notice blurry gray "holes" in my vision and, while walking, am often surprised by the sudden and "supernatural" appearance of something on my left side. Constantly I apologize to people for near collisions and/or curse myself for gashing a leg on below-the-knee objects.

When I was five or six, my mother took me to Opelika to meet Dr. Wright, the good optometrist of east Alabama. He prescribed surgery, performed it later (I think), and then put me on a strict regimen of eye "body-building." I hated the "exercise" and still have vague recollections of vision-based torture devices which taught me, while I looked through a strange lens, to optically line up a blue and red dot within the boundaries of a larger circle. This odd and esoteric practice was cake compared to the patch.

For me, the patch was not an infusion of nicotine, but the deprivation of my right eye. Leaf through one of our family photo albums and you'll find Christmas, Halloween, and birthday pictures of a young, cycloptic boy opening presents, wearing a Snoopy costume, and playing hide and seek. To this day I still cannot fathom how the manufacturer's of that damnable eye covering deemed it fashionable to make their product white-person flesh-colored. I was a freak or mutant, and today I still wish that those old photographs depicted a hip youngster wearing a pirate's black patch or an adhesive emblazoned with an Atlanta Falcon's logo. Back then, though, I wasn't shallowly concerned with my image, I simply hated having to wear that patch and train a "lazy," good-for-little eye. I certainly couldn't see well.

This morning I revisted my childhood. For kicks, I guess, I covered up my optic workhorse and attempted to read a short story in The Sun magazine. Although not physically painful, it was upsetting to "see" how difficult it was to make it through a paragraph packed densely with text -- an experience I cannot put deftly into words. My eye distinguished little and I could only read by concentrating keenly on certain points on the page and then allowing my brain to play an interpretation game: Are the next two letters after ST "op" or "ep"? After fighting though these strange puzzles for a while, I gave up and read the rest of the story with unobstructed vision, feeling at least somewhat more virtuous for having tried the experiment.

There's no real happy end to this story, but I can truthfully say (no matter how much it surprises me) that I'm not bitter or even itching to give the evil eye doctor an ear/eyeful. In most cases, I do fine with my right and "evil" eye and am even able to play sports without corrective lenses. A lot of myopics out there would be envious.