"Look At It This Way" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Going through an old Saturday Evening Post Magazine when I came across a story that was titled "Look at It This Way".  The accompanying artwork was by Norman Rockwell and featured a drawing of a young boy being fitted for a new pair of glasses.  Brought back memories from a long time ago when I also had to go through the same thing.  I read the story and felt you might too have a young boy who may be experiencing the same as I did years ago....and might enjoy how he...and I...felt when we had to get a new pair of glasses.  So....read on....

Put a pair of glasses on a kid and you've shifted the course of their life.  Their spectacles might see them from getting punched, help them get better grades, or just make them look smarter.  Or it might make them subject to teasing.  When this cover appeared in 1956, for instance, it was widely assumed among kids that glasses made girls homie and boys sissies.  Certainly this young man believes it.  His pugnacious, just-barely-tolerating-it expression makes clear how little he wants glasses.  He had Norman Rockwell's sympathy.  As a child in the 1900s, little Norman learned he needed glasses.  His pair were fitted with round-lens frames, a style just then coming into fashion.  To his peers, though, the circular lenses had a lunar appearance, and he was nicknamed "Moony."  Norman already had a previous strike against him in the taunting world of young boys.  His mother had saddled him with the middle name Perceval.  When this became public knowledge, it earned him a second nickname: "Mercy Percy."  He tried changing his image.  He began lifting weights, doing pushups and deep knee bends.  After a month of exercising before his bedroom mirror, he saw an improvement.  His loss was our gain, because he decided, with his corrected eyesight, to take up art instead.  As for me...well my new eyesight gave me a better chance to see the baseball when I was on a midget-midget baseball team and I led the team in hitting....something I would never had done had I never received the glasses.  So you see...there usually is a reason for everything...be it good or bad.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. 

 

At the Optometrist, May 19, 1956