Betty and the Lost Glasses

Gale Cady Williams

This is an essay I wrote in the spring of 2009. In honor of my mother's birthday June 13, I am sharing this with you all. 

Not so long ago, I lost my “good” glasses; not the $5 drugstore reading glasses, but my custom-made, no-line bifocal, $650 dollar designer glasses from Lenscrafters. Since I often misplace my glasses (along with coffee mugs and other portable objects) on a regular basis, at first I did not think much of this event. But as the days wore into weeks and the weeks into months, my lost glasses became a bit of a major thing, because well, after all, it is nice to be able to see – and one cannot really walk around in the world wearing 2.5 magnification reading glasses without tripping over the blurry bricks in the blurry sidewalks of the world.

Not that I hadn’t looked for them; I had looked on more than one occasion in all the places I always leave things: Under the bed. On the kitchen windowsill. On the table behind the couch. Under all the furniture in the living room. Under the computer desk (and behind, over and on it, too). And on at least four occasions, under the couch, my usual perch. I had convinced myself that our cat, Emmy, who I swear is part ferret, had carried them off to whatever unknown spot in the house it is that she hides all her loot, to add to the stack of single earrings, sparkly doll hair accessories, and other stringy, sparkly, crackly toys that she steals from us.

Last June, this all came to a head one day when I became frustrated for the final time at not being able to see the TV, so I said, half to myself, Where are those glasses? And a small, silent voice in my head said, Look under the couch.

Slightly annoyed at the voice, I responded aloud, I have already looked under the couch several times. They are NOT there!

And the voice said, Look again.

So I complied. I pulled the heavy hide-a-bed sofa (thank God I had had the foresight to have casters put on it years ago) out into the room at an angle, and looked behind it in the triangular space there. Nope, no glasses, I said.

And again, the little voice said, Look again.

Now, because no one else could nag me in quite this way, by now, I knew it was my mother, who died Dec. 9, 2003, but has never been out of my thoughts or my soul for even a minute since that day. She is with me everywhere, giving me advice, listening to me, calming me down and encouraging me to be strong; to be more than I am; to achieve; and not to stop reaching for my dreams, no matter how old I become.

Answering her, I said, “I have already looked there! Do you not see that they are not there?”

And the voice said this time, Pull it all the way across the room, clear over to the fireplace.

By now, I was openly arguing with her. Mom, I said, they are not there. But even as I argued, I was tugging and pushing the couch to the center of the room.

Now, a detail you need to know is that my sofa is upholstered in a skirted, pleated, tuxedo-style corduroy covering. The pleated skirt brushes the floor.

When I pulled the couch all the way across the room, there, lying just where the edge of the pleated skirt had been dragging them back and forth with it on previous attempts, were my sparkly brown glasses, unbroken and all in one piece.

I looked at them lying there, and I said to the little voice, Thank you. I should have listened to you earlier!

And I could almost hear her laughing.