I noticed around sixth or seventh grade that I was having trouble seeing the blackboard.

Instead of telling anyone, I squinted until I discovered that pulling the skin around my eye socket would warp my eyeballs so I could tell the difference between six and nine on the blackboard.

It never occurred to me that I needed glasses.

Nor did it occur to the nuns at St. Cecilia Elementary School in Ames that bad eyesight was affecting my academic performance, as well as my ability to serve as an altar boy or as a golf caddy.

One responsibility of altar boys was to light tall candles on the back of the altar before Mass, but the long candlelighter extended well beyond my focal point.

When there were two or more acolytes, I could duck that responsibility. But on days when I was the sole Mass server, I fumbled around, passing the candlelighter over the candles in hopes of igniting wicks, which were often sunken and difficult to light even for boys with good vision.

Nor was I any good at caddying for priests who hired altar boys when they played golf. Not being able to see golf shots, I had no idea where the ball landed and was no help at finding errant tee shots.

Despite my bad vision, I was relatively good at sports – football and basketball, anyway. Hitting a pitched baseball was more difficult, and it never occurred to me until much later that the smaller, faster baseball is more difficult to see with bad eyes.

St. Cecilia only went through eighth grade, so in ninth grade I began attending Ames public schools.

As part of the transition, I was given an eye exam. I flunked miserably and received my first pair of glasses, which for social reasons I really did not want to wear.

But the first time I put them on, I was amazed. More than 60 years later, I still remember looking out our living-room window and seeing individual blades of grass on the lawn, instead of a blur of green.

I wore glasses for less than a year before my parents bought me contact lenses. Those early lenses were rigid, not malleable like modern lenses, and took some getting used to.

I wore them through high school and college, until I left them in too long one night and they scratched my eyeballs. The pain was the worst I’ve ever experienced, and it resulted in my spending two days in a dark basement with my eyes closed most of the time.

When my eyes healed, I switched off between glasses and contacts for many years.

In the mid-1970s, I tried soft contacts – the kind you squeezed together to put in and take out of your eyes. I couldn’t see that well with them, so I stayed with rigid lenses until gas permeable contacts were available.

Eventually, I gave up on contacts and wore lineless trifocals.

In the early 2000s, I was diagnosed with glaucoma and began taking eye drops twice a day. Glaucoma is when pressure builds up in the eyeball. If it gets too high, you can lose peripheral vision. The drops help lower the pressure.

Recently, I had cataract surgery on both eyes. For the first time since ninth grade, I can see blackboards, candles, even golf balls, without glasses.

There was one minor complication. Because of my glaucoma, and because I didn’t take my glaucoma drops the day of the surgery as I was supposed to, pressure built up after the surgery. It started as a sinus headache and advanced to what I can only assume was a full-on migraine-like headache, which I had never experienced.

The cure amounted to a miracle. My doctor told me she would “burp” my eye. She inserted a steel instrument not much bigger than a toothpick under my affected eye and pulled down gently. She likened the procedure to letting the air out of an air mattress. 

I didn’t hear a burp, but instantly the pressure was released, and the pain immediately disappeared.