I began wearing glasses for nearsightedness at age eight or nine – I was the classic kid who couldn’t read the blackboard, back when children were not as routinely tested for vision problems. My vision got continually worse over my lifetime; I was accustomed to needing new glasses every year. At least my near vision was okay – until I hit middle age when, like everyone else, I also began to lose the ability to focus close up (presbyopia). Around 2008 I began wearing progressive trifocals, which gave me clear vision at a range of distances. It was never perfect correction – I had trouble reading street signs while driving, for example.
I had long been under observation and treatment for high pressure in my eyes, to make sure that this didn’t develop into glaucoma. For many years this was controllable with eyedrops, but after a while any given formula tends to stop working. My ophthalmologist tried me on several different kinds over ten years, but my choices are limited by a severe allergy to one whole family of these drugs – I spent about a month wanting to rip my eyeballs out to stop the pain and itching before we figured that out.
You’re at a tech conference, one that you are attending as a tech professional with interest and expertise in the subject matter. You’re standing talking to a man – perhaps he’s a speaker whose talk you just heard, or someone with influence in your field, or you have any other professional reason to speak with him. There you are, deep in conversation, when another man suddenly swoops in and starts talking to the man you are talking to, about a completely different topic, as if he didn’t even notice you were there.
Usually, he is allowed to completely disrupt the conversation you were having. Your original interlocutor may not even notice that you were interrupted. If he does, he may throw a sheepish look at you, while going on listening and responding to the interrupter. You wait patiently until the interrupter finishes and goes away (possibly without ever acknowledging your presence), then finally resume your own conversation. No one thinks anything unusual has happened.
By a combination of circumstances, somewhat my “fault”, my University of Texas roommate Robyn ended up living quite near me in Europe: she has long been in Neuchatel, Switzerland; I lived for 17 years nearby in Italy, first in Milan, later on Lake Como. So we used to exchange visits fairly regularly. We especially enjoyed going up there for the local wine festival every September. It wasn’t an internationally-famous event, but did draw visitors from outside the region.
One memorable year, we stayed late at one of the tents, sitting at long, communal tables, eating good, rustic food and drinking the more-than-decent local wine out of plastic cups. Buxom, middle-aged Swiss farm wives danced the Macarena on the tables, and a good time was being had by all.
In 1976, after a period of unemployment in Connecticut, my father accepted a job with Save the Children (US), as country head of their operations in Bangladesh. He and I and my stepmother Nancy moved to Dhaka (then spelled Dacca) around October, 1976. We didn’t take much with us. Our furniture, dishes, etc went into storage in the US. I took a few treasures – some board games, my plastic animals – and whatever warm-weather clothing I owned at the time.
Before leaving, we all got lots of vaccinations, and the dental work that we hadn’t been able to afford for a while – Nancy proved to have a mouthful of cavities.
I guess we flew from the US east coast to the west coast and then to Korea, where we were hosted by the Korean arm of Save the Children as an opportunity for my dad to learn from projects that the organization was carrying out there.
The name “Deirdre” has never been terribly popular in the US – it’s much more common in Ireland (logically – Deirdre is a character out of Irish myth) and somewhat common in England. But there are always a few of us, and we tend to notice each other.
Somewhere around my own generation, Deidra seems to have a popular variant among American blacks. And it’s very common for people (of any race) to mis-understand or mis-pronounce my name that way.
