Of Men and Manatees
I took off my glasses and got in the shower this morning.It's drafty in the house, and a little cold. This is Michigan. So I was looking forward to a few minutes of very hot water and steam, because I would be warm.
I was just feeling nice and toasty when I realized that the soap was a sliver. Barely a sliver, really.
Thus ended the toasty feeling.
I turned off the water, opened the shower curtain, stepped on the mat, and reached way over to open a cabinet that had the soap. No problem. I could get back in the hot water in ten seconds, tops.
It was a package of eight bars of soap, sealed with cellophane. Unopened.
All rightie, then. I just needed to get this open--well, I couldn't get it open, because my fingernails are incredibly soft, and I needed to work a nail under where the cellophane folded over to open it up.
I was holding this package of eight bars of soap about three inches in front of my face, because I'm blind without my glasses, and I was soaking wet, and cold, and I couldn't get this package open, and and I realized that without my glasses I was basically a manatee on land.
Then I wondered, as I stood there, now freezing, what did people do in the "old days" when glasses weren't available?
I looked up the percentage of people who need vision correction. It's 75%.
No wonder people only lived to their thirties in medieval times. By then, some kind of vision-related death (a fall, run over by a horse-drawn cart, etc.) would surely claim them. Or a predator that they never saw coming.
Unless they were living in Australia, where the average life expectancy was probably ten.
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