Vision Tarp Part II

I entered the store with my pair of glasses, so new a few months ago—but now utterly ruined. They had scratches, abrasions, looked like the ice after an especially brutal hockey game. Sitting at the fitting table in the optometrist’s shop was the rotund little woman I’d spoken to last week. I’d held up the glasses on that day, asked her to look at them, told her I needed new lenses. She took the glasses, turned them this way and that, said that they were “a little scratched,” and that she could do nothing for me. With her pursed lips and distrusting eyes—close-set in her chubby face-- she regarded me as if I were Osama Bin Laden, come into her store to spread terrorism and ask for free lenses. Her expression was unchanged, regardless of the situation: A customer could come in and buy five hundred dollars worth of eyewear, or present a defective pair of eyeglasses—it was all the same to her. The customers who wandered into her shop were simply a moving and noisy nuisance that she needed to be rid of as quickly as possible. For those idle times when people were not bothering her with their unreasonable requests, she considered Dorito possibilities or maybe how long it would take to eat a whole package of fig newtons, if she found herself alone in those enviable circumstances. I told her evenly that she could have helped me if she’d wanted to, and left the shop—where she was alone with absolutely no one else to occupy her.

But on this day, things turned in my favor. I approached the kindly-looking woman who was not the rotund one, said I’d spoken to that other last week, and that I really needed some help with these glasses—for which I’d paid a premium price. She took them from me, said immediately, “Let’s get you some new lenses.” The squat little woman looked up from her work-station, was not pleased to have to oblige this demanding and nuisance customer with his terrible demands. But on this day I had the DISTRICT MANAGER on my side--the woman whose job it was to oversee the operations of all the stores. She set the other woman to work on my order, getting the necessary paperwork filed so that my new lenses could be sent out as quickly as possible. I was not obnoxious, as I am right now and most of the time, actually; I was simply grateful to finally get some help with this issue, didn’t even mind that it had required two trips to resolve the matter.
“You ordered the top-of-the-line lenses,” the district manager said. “They’re made by Nikon.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” I told her, which—I added—was all the more surprising that they’d only lasted a few months.
“It happens,” she said. “Sometimes you get a defective pair.”
This woman knew EVERYTHING about eyewear, how the sunglasses worked and which colors were best for different kinds of conditions. I mentioned that I was looking for a pair of sunglasses to be made with my prescription, and she showed me the frames that would work, and that didn’t cost too much. I ordered a pair of them, recognizing the thirty years of experience the woman brought to our interactions was probably the best I could hope for in my quest for eyewear. I looked forward to the last days of warm weather, with the top of the sports car slid back, letting in the autumn sky and the stray colored leaf brushing past me, and my new glasses keeping the glare and insistent stares of bystanders at bay. You see, when I'm at the wheel of the little car—and it is often—I am suddenly successful, somebody to be reckoned with. I’ve promoted a concert for Edith Piaf in her early years in Paris, where she triumphed over a packed crowd that knew not what to expect, and she and I embraced—the confusion of her success still not quite sinking in—and unspoken were the conquests that awaited, and the terrible times we both knew lay ahead, but were drunk now on that potent mixture of lights and cigarette smoke and wild applause and brilliant music. Outside, with the late-night Parisians still gathering at nearby hot-spots, we sat, tete-a-tete, at a café’s table. Out on the sidewalk played an accordionist, with the tottering revelers throwing a few francs his way.

It’s a wonder I can keep the car going straight.