Week 56: Mystery Car: Hemi Cuda

My eyes have become fussy four year olds at dinnertime.

TOO CLOSE, I can't See! That's TOO FAR, it's Blurry!! I kinda see that, but my right eye doesn't like it, only my left eye! I can't read that!! I want something larger!!

The Kraft macaroni and cheese to my fussy eyes is my progressive lens eyeglasses,  trifocal lens meant to keep all my failing ranges of vision happy, even if it means flipping my eyes around like a kid's fingers on an X-Box controller in order to see, or, as is more often the case, tilting my head like a curious dog in order to read the sign to the men's room.

Trifocals are an amazing gift to diminishing vision, when they can be found.

Even with how great they are, I still take them off to read, as I did yesterday to read Racer A and Baby G a picture book about Jamaica.

The problem was, I neglected to put them back on.

And Baby G found them. And toddled off with them.

Losing your eyeglasses is a singular aggravation unlike other irritating circumstances. You can't see well enough to see them again, some type of anti-zen koan, and even though you take those glasses for granted every second of the day, once they are gone, you feel like some rogue suddenly sneaked in and stole your teeth, they are that much a part of you.

My glasses were gone. I looked and looked and looked. Gone.

Finally, there was no other choice.

I had to look under the couch.

Today's Daddy's Tiny Cars is a 2011 Mystery Car, one of the cars you pick that is encased in a black blisterpack that hides the vehicle. The car turned out to be a most awesome Hemi Cuda. Mystery Car is significant, because with three kids in the house, looking under the couch is a mystery, and not something anyone takes lightly. There be monsters.

The first thing I encountered under the couch was some type of raisin. Without the benefit of trifocal technology I wasn't sure what was going on, but this raisin seemed wrong, a distorted dried fruit dweller of the underworld.

That raisin was a warning.

I kept going, looking for a familiar outline of eyeglasses, but the more I looked, the more I found the forgotten oddities of the toddler world -- Cheerios, fruit rinds, Lego people assembled with arms for heads, sparkly stickers on anything and everything, a surreal landscape of crunchy, textural filth art.

How does this stuff get under there? Why? How? My god, how afraid my eyeglasses must be.

But they were never found.

I went a whole day using a spare pair of glasses, ones with a single focus. I felt seasick most of the day, but at least there was at least one distance when everything was crystal clear, regardless of how I moved my head or eyes. Now if I could just get everything to stand there, I would be fine.

My trifocals did show up today, sitting peacefully on a toybox. At the time of this writing I have yet to put them on as it has taken a day to adjust to the single focus lens, but the relief of finding them is immense.

I may have my glasses, but I won't use them to look under the couch.

There are some things that are best left to the shadows and blurriness.

Photo of awesome Cuda by Phil Pekarcik.