I recently received an email forward from friend that enumerated all of the anomalies people of my generation experienced and yet we survived. Things like no seat belts during the first years of our lives, no baby/children car seats, thermometers with mercury, and a host of other things either truly forgotten or best forgotten.
Tonight, while removing my contacts, my eyes flashed over the instructions on my contact solution bottle. One of the caveats on every bottle of contact solution is to observe the proper hygiene always and forever. I can understand this because eye health is of prime importance, especially as I get older. But, my mind traveled back to about 1962 when I was fitted with my first pair of contacts. They were the old, huge hard lens, dyed blue so if I dropped one - and I did - they could be more easily seen. I wore hard lens successfully for over twenty years until my eyes developed a condition where my corneas molded into the shape of the contact lens and I had twenty-twenty vision for about one month without any corrective lens. My corneas gradually regained their natural shape and I had to go contact-lens"less" for about two years.
While wearing hard lens all those years, I developed the phrase "contact attack", which was not an unfamiliar cry of all hard-contact users. For some reason, hard contacts invited dust particles into the eyes and when a dust particle came between the lens and the eye's surface, the pain could be unbearable, bringing you literally to your knees. The beauty, which would have made my optometrist gasp, of a hard lens was that you could extract it from your eye, put it in your mouth for a bit and reinsert it into your eye. Nine times out of ten, this lens-cleansing method was successful and you could continue wearing your contacts for as long as the day/night demanded.
Make no mistake, vanity is a powerful incentive to do foolish things and the mouth-wash method of contact cleaning was, indeed, foolish........but we all did it back then and we survived, as did our eyes.
So many things I survived then that today others would shudder at. Like taking sandwiches to school every day filled with cooked (Well, mostly cooked. My family did, and I still do, like my beef or venison barely cooked.) meat or fish. Leftover meat made tasty lunches and there was no way to refrigerate lunches then. We didn't think to put ice cubes in some container and place it next to the sandwich in the brown paper bag. Nah. We just shoved the sandwich in a waxed paper sleeve, threw it in a paper bag, and stuffed it into our school bags.
No backpacks, either, back then........and yet we survived that, too.
Shoot, we even had to walk uphill to and from school, even in the winter.
And still we survived.
Ancora imparo
