Brain scattered

For the last half an hour I have been moving round and round aimlessly. I traced my steps and then retraced them, but all to no avail. My reading glasses are misplaced and I am blind without them. I cannot read a thing, other than the headlines in the newspapers, and I can’t hear very well too. 

I know there is no connection between seeing and hearing. There should not be. Otherwise my ophthalmologist and the ear specialist would be one and the same. I would even save a lot of time and energy flitting from one clinic to another. But the fact remains that when I see fuzzily I hear woozily also. 

It is amazing how, the minute my spectacles are balanced precariously on my nose, there is instant clarity to my vision, hearing, thinking, inhaling, exhaling and all the rest of it. Even my faded and jaded memory comes to life and I can recall in photographic detail, whatever needs to be recollected. But without it I am lost, literally and metaphorically. 

I generally find them in the usual place, which is at the top of my head. That is where I push them when I am looking at something that is at a distance. With much practice I mastered this, because glancing through them towards a distant space results in blurred vision.  Being hyperopic has its disadvantages. 

But when the top of my head is empty, and a cursory glace at the mirror doubly confirms it, I get panic stricken. And that is because then there is absolutely no telling where I could have abandoned them carelessly. In my family, the tales of my absent-mindedness have reached legendary proportions. The more anyone talks to my relatives, the more they get trivial details about my brain-scattered behaviour. 

So, I left the car keys in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, tried to ignite the cooking gas with a ballpoint pen, found my sunglasses half buried in the potted plant, walked into a party with one white and another grey pearl earring, returned a library book with my flight tickets inside it, attempted to open hotel rooms with my credit card, almost threw the puppy out with the bath water, applied shaving foam on my toothbrush, washed my hair with insect repellent and so on and so forth. The list is exhaustive. 

My reading glasses have also had quite an adventurous time with me. I have rescued them from the bottom of the shopping trolley, behind the vegetable peel, under the newspapers, next to my gardening gloves, on top of the trash bin, in the laundry cupboard and once, inside the washing machine. 

My friends have suggested I buy a cord thingy that is attached to the two sides of the frame and allows the specs to hang around the neck when not in use.  But it fits so much into a mental image I have of octogenarians, that I would rather die than subject myself to it. As long as I hold on to vanity I will never become a senior citizen, hopefully. 

Lost in thought and finally giving up on the fruitless search, I sat on my reading chair and heard a faint crack. Jumping up I saw the sorry spectacles broken into two neat halves. 

“A string in time saves nine,” our daughter misquoted. 

“A stich in time…” I corrected her.

“Glue to the rescue, rhyme fine?” she smiled.

“Perfect,” I smiled back.