My dad’s old steel-rimmed glasses are on my brother’s bedroom shelf at home. My brother and I have bad eyesight, and we used to say that we got it from our father. Dad was usually the one who took me to the opticians and the one who would chastise me for not wearing my specs enough. “You’re missing out on the world because of your vanity,” he would joke.
I wore glasses from the age of about nine and always looked forward to the twice-yearly visits to the optician, which usually took place after school. I took ages to choose frames, relishing the creation of a new identity with each pair, but Dad had the patience of a saint, coupled with a Rik Mayall-style of piss-take humour, which meant he would rarely rush me and would always end up laughing at glasses that didn’t suit my chubby face. I would feign offence and ask for the designer ones instead, but was only ever allowed the cheap ones until I paid for them myself. Usually, by the time I got home I regretted my choice anyway.
During my teen emo days, a thick, black, square-framed pair from Boots were the first set of glasses I actually enjoyed wearing, because they were in fashion. Later, when I turned my nose up at these in favour of contact lenses, it was Dad who took me for an eye test and paid the monthly subscription.
When Dad used to remove his glasses, I remember thinking as a child how much smaller and squintier his eyes looked – but also how much more blue they appeared, like tiny sparkling sapphires on a pillow of pink and white. I never saw him cry until he was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him many years later. As depression began to follow him around like a black cloud, I saw his glasses discarded more frequently to make room for his tears, which fell in hospitals, in our house, in the shower. His cheerful nature and silly humour were slowly replaced by a disposition that was a darker blue than his eyes.
Dad spent a lot of time in bed while sick, utterly bored but never complaining, so I fed him my university book list to keep him occupied when I moved back home after graduating. We discussed all the books I had read as part of my English course (and the ones I hadn’t) and I often came home from my internship to see Dad tucking into one of my recommendations, his glasses on the wooden dresser and his rapidly shrinking body beneath my pink bedcover. With the cancer rotting his bones, he was no longer able to make it up three flights of stairs to his bedroom, and I was in the spare room.
Dad was the one who moulded me into a voracious reader, and who taught me to write when I was three. A few years later, he helped me make my own handwritten mini-books with wallpaper leftovers, adding some of his skilled illustrations to accompany my fairytales.
Dad also enthralled me and my brother with his animated voices at bedtime (especially Roald Dahl).
I now know that I did not inherit Dad’s short-sightedness. DNA tests after his death proved that he was not my biological father. But I’ve come to realise two years later that it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Dad’s glasses are a fantastic reminder of who he was – a smart hard worker who was patient and resilient to his core – and I would like to think I inherited some of those qualities from him.
Of course, I was at first distraught to learn we weren’t related. But now his specs don’t remind me of our technical differences, but more of the strength of our love for each other. They are a physical reminder of the non-physical attributes he bestowed upon me.
