I don't do well with glasses. For years, I wore contact lenses and then stopped due to some veins or arteries or capillaries or something forming on my eyes. Apparently, when you wear your lenses too long, these
things develop and they aren't good, so I got a pair of glasses to lessen the time I spent wearing contacts.
Then I ran out of contacts and never went back to get more, I just wore my glasses.
I picked up my last pair of glasses the week before I left the south to come to the Midwest, which made them approximately five years old. These are the glasses I wore when I was reunited with Baby J.
Baby J has a slight obsession with "eyes", which is what she calls glasses. Do you see where this is going??
Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Being the sneaky little thing she is, she decided she wanted to see
MY "eyes", so she helped herself to them!

Now, I should have been thinking, "Get the glasses from the child!" but instead I grabbed my camera, because, seriously, how dang cute is she? Really?
Of course, I thought she was
JUST as cute after she broke them as she was before she broke them. I have no idea who took this photo, but that's Baby J, leaning on my knee while I try to figure out how the heck she mangled my frames so badly in such a short time!
I think she's trying to figure out what the big deal is! They're just "eyes" after all!

Thankfully, Baby J's older sister had a pair of frames she no longer used, so we took her frames and Baby J's parents paid to have my eyes checked (which hadn't been done in five years) and had new lenses put in them so I could actually see. (Gratitude doesn't begin to cover it.)
New glasses! Wah lah! (Disregard my goofy face and look at the new glasses.)

I LOVED these frames. I ADORED these frames. These frames were going to grace my face for the NEXT five years.
Or not.
Last night, one of the lenses popped out because a joint near the nose piece had come undone. "No problem!" I thought. They can glue it or screw it or do whatever they do to
FIX things like this because they will
FIX my glasses. They will
FIX them, good as new!
So I go to the store. I wait fifteen minutes for them to open. I promise myself that, no matter what,
I will not cry in the store. Even if they can't fix them and I'm proverbially screwed, I will not cry. Even though new glasses are about as "in" my budget as a round trip vacation to Tahiti, I
will not cry in the store. I walk in the store. I am greeted. She looks at the frames in my hand and says, "Oh no. You have
pieces. That's not good."
I hand them to her. I beg her to fix them.
She says, no can do.
BUT she has some frames that may work with those lenses. She walks off. I bit the inside of my lip and start to tear up. I remind myself that I will
NOT cry.
She walks over, hands me a pair and said, "These will work great! They're a hundred and nineteen dollars."
And then I cry. Outright. In the store.
"Thank you, but I can't afford that."
She starts asking questions about the frames and the store that did them (they were done out of town, on my trip, remember?) and she asks me to hold on.
She looks a few more places and brings me back a pair of
pink frames.
Pink, people. I hate pink. I mean, I really really hate pink.
She asks what I can afford. I tell her I have fifty bucks on me. She motions me over to another counter where she procedes to whip the demo lenses out and put my lenses in their place. She does that bend here, adjust there thing they do and then hands them to me.
"How's that?" she asks.
I put them on. They fit great. Aside from the pink, they look good. I can see. Seeing is a necessity. These fill my necessity.
"Wonderful, but how much?"
She starts entering numbers into her little computer thing and I see her type something about a "customer complaint" and fifty percent off.
"If anyone asks, you yelled at me, so I gave you a discount." She smiled.
"They don't have a code for crying customers?" I ask.
She just smiled. Nicely. Kindly.
I wanted to hug her, but I had snot on my sleeve, so I thanked her profusely and paid her. (It was under forty-five dollars.) She told me it would get better. I told her it already had and wished her a very Merry Christmas.
There are still good people out there in the world, even in corporate America.
Maybe a good bit of karma coming back to me, I don't know. What I do know is I appreciate the fact that I can see. I value her assistance in helping me.
And yeah, they may be pink, but I can deal with pink.
"Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses." Confucius