You Never Know What You're Going to Find

I am the type of person who is normally aware of my surroundings. You can say it started when I turned about thirteen. Before I get into that, let’s jump back two years. At age eleven, my teacher sent a note home to my parents saying I was having a problem reading what she’d written on the chalkboard. She noticed I squinted a lot. Yep, she was right; I needed glasses.

Oh my!! How I hated wearing them. At that age, I was beginning to be aware of my features and it was also a time where the peers of an eleven-year-old could be brutal. “Four-eyes” was the mantra directed at the kids who were doomed with poor eyesight.

While I’d wear them in school so I wouldn’t be chastised by my teacher, once outside the classsroom, they’d come off faster than you coud say the word, “Glasses.”

In one way, I was sort of lucky. I didn’t need the glasses to read or write. My nearsighted vision (myopia) was fine. The problem was that the glasses prescsribed by the optician (yes, optician, not an ophlamosogist) weren’t bi-focal. That meant, if the tteacher wrote on the chalkboard, the glasses went on. If I had to read in the textbook or write in our notebook, the glasses came off. What a pain!

The teacher, not knowing anything about how eyeglasses worked, would chastise me again for taking them off, putting them on, and so on. She insisted I leave them on all day.

To appease her, I ended up wearing them during the entire school day hours. I’ll get back to that and what happened afterwards.

It wasn’t long after my thirteenth birthday, I was walking through the park that was directly across from where I lived. Mom had sent me on an errand and rather than walk aroud the park which would have been a three block walk, it was faster to walk through it.

I left our apartment, walked across the street and began the forty-five degree angle to that exit. As I neared the turn-off to make that angle walk, I heard my name. Actually, I heard my name called several times. Then I saw them.

There was a group of boy around my age sitting on and hanging around a part bench which was about thirty yards from where I was about to approach the beginning of the park’s exit. Most of them stood and waved as they shouted my name.

Being just thirteen, I was overcome with joy. All these boys were shouting for my attention. True, none said, “Hey, come on over and say hello!” They just waved and called out. However, their attention directed at me made my little young heart go pitter-pat.

The biggest problem was, are you ready for this? I was NOT wearing my glasses and couldn’t see their faces. Wait, their faces? I couldn’t even see how many boys there were. How many? Were they six? Maybe eight? I had no idea. I was so embarassed and bewildered.

I waved and shouted back. “Hi, guys! Gotta an errand to run. I’ll see you later.”

Yeah, right! Later didn’t happen. I was so mortified that I had no idea who they were that on my way home, I took the long three-block walk just so I could avoid them and further embarassment.

Fast forward to the current time:

Now, wearing my glasses constantly, I am much more aware of things around me, includig people.

Here I am in my seventies and still wearing my glasses, especially to read. But at least my distance isn’t half bad.

A few years ago, I joined an aerobics class. It’s more like aerobic-dancing. Or at least it was when I joined. We concentrate more on dancing rather than aerobics but we get a really good workout at the same time as enjoying the dance. We meet twice a week.

My dance team always met in a small building near the harbor (in Punta Gorda, where I now live). It was owned by the city which also used the building for other uses. During the summer, it was used as a daycare center. Many times, it was rented for private parties. Once in a while, the city would decide to use the building for their meetings. What there was a conflict of times between my dance group and whoever needed the building, we often lost. However, right next door sits the Punta Gorda Boat Club which is rarely used during the day. They always offered their building to use for those times when our would be used for other matters.

During one of our earlier sessions at the Boat Club, I looked around at the décor around the room. Around the ceiling, the management hung boat burgies that were donated by their members who retired and moved to Florida. That’s when I saw it! There hang almost over my head was a burgie with the letters: AHYC.

AHYC! Huh! Well, I’ll be buggered! I took a step back so I could look at the writing on the side of the burgie where the grommets were placed. Yep, I was right. It read: Atlantic Highlands Yacht Club.

As soon as our dance class was over, I grabbed my phone, activated the camera app and took a photo of the burgie.

Once home (which is a ten-minute drove from the boat club), I opened the text message app. After I searched my contacts information, I chose the one I needed, then placed the photo in the area for the text. Then I wrote my message: “Hey cousin, look was I saw hanging around in Punta Gorda!”

Yes, my cousin lives in Atlanti Highlands, New Jersey but no, it wasn’t his burgie nor did it belong to anyone he knew.

Talk about a small world!

I often wonder if I was still vain enough to not wear my glasses constantly, would I have seen that burgie clear enough to know what it was or would I have seen nothing more than a trangular blur.

I might never know.