old eyes and old age
Cataracts, who doesn’t have them, that dull browned-out blur that disenables a man’s ability to see who and how many are out there on that wedging north wall break most mornings. Clear-eyed young blokes ripping and tearing and here you are squinting at their watery antics watery-eyed. Not good.
The lady at the eye doctor’s room asks you to sit, rest your chin on the apparatus and open your eyes as the flickering light within it flashes and glares, then again, and again. Don’t blink she says so, of course you do, blink.
Later she he asks your age. Forms need filling, Information needs to be disassembled and forwarded to various commercial institutions. I am nothing less than an income producing factor. This shit we have live with and for free – meanwhile I’m staring into a machine that doesn’t love me but coverts my money.
The procedure proceeds. Something must be said, after all we are only human, me an she.
So I ask her how old her grandfather is and am told he died last month aged 99. I offer her my sympathy. He was fine she said until his last month when everything about him kind of fell away. Sometimes when you listen to a grandchild talking about his or her grandparents you feel their closeness, their familiarity, their permanently severed loss. We know it. I know it. He never spoke about his war she said and I was reminded of the Vietnam vets who were equally silent about the nightmares of that conflict.
Then I asked if he served in WW2, hoping to hear he may have been in the RAAF as my father was, but no she said, he was a foot-soldier in the German army and was captured by the Russians after the war ended and imprisoned.
He never spoke about it until his last weeks she said. Then she asked why was I interested.
Because sometimes I replied, you ask a question like that and are rewarded with a pearl of recollection. Like yours. This.
The examination of my dodgy left eye continued: look and don’t blink she said again, then when everything was done she sat back asked if I was a psychic. No, I replied, I’m a Catholic.
We both laughed.
petebowes.com 
Epi-retinal membrane removed, then cataract replacement left eye, never better! Go for it ! We become bionic men, through need, not choice, our futures mapped out by technology, not biology, All the best, Gavin