My father always wore glasses, even at the end of his life when, after laser surgery, his vision was almost 20:20.  

“I couldn’t stand it, he looked so weird, we had a pair of glasses made with plain glass lenses,” my mother said.  I think she told me that after he died and I tried on his glasses, which I had never been able to see through, and I saw plainly without having to whip off the glasses in pain.

20:400, my father told us, is considered legally blind.  Being legally blind was not, apparently, an obstacle to serving in the armed forces in World War Two.  My father was drafted and inducted.  By sheer luck of his assignment, reading the manuals for aircraft when the mechanics got stuck, he didn’t find himself in Europe until after the remnants of the Nazi government surrendered.  

I picture him, the twenty one year-old Jew, arriving in the epicenter of the madness, looking around through those strong corrective lenses he wore.   I can’t imagine what was going through his mind, and he never spoke of it.

Thinking of it now, I wonder how he managed the first few years of his tortured childhood, legally blind, trying to see the world that was always blindsiding him.  It wasn’t until well after he entered school, I’m fairly sure, that he got his first pair of glasses.  His untreated legal blindness was probably another reason he believed he was the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — unlike the other kids in his class, he simply couldn’t tell a vowel from a consonant.