Mary Roach - My Planet

There was a time when I wanted to wear half-glasses, the way young children want to have crutches or braces until the day they actually need them. Today I do not want to wear reading glasses, not at all. Reluctantly, I wander over to the local drugstore.

The packaging on the reading glasses shows kindly white-haired people in business suits. The eyeglass company has gone out of their way to dress the models like functioning adults, as though people who need reading glasses can still contribute to society, when everyone knows they just sit at home tatting and reading telephone books. I can’t go through with it. There has to be another way.

At home, I do an Internet search for “presbyopia.” This is a mistake. The websites that turn up have names like SeniorJournal or Friendly4Seniors.com. One site informs me that “presbyopia” comes from the Greek for “elder eye.” I don’t appreciate this, not one bit. I’m not elderly. I’m 43. Besides, I know some Greek (spanakopita, Onassis, that word you say when the appetizer ignites), and “presbyopia” doesn’t sound like any of it. I believe someone made up this “elder eye” business, someone cruel and youthful, with four-point lettering on his business card. I look up the etymology of “presbyopia” in my dictionary, but alas, someone has replaced the words with lines of decorative filigree.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m not getting bifocals or reading glasses. I’m going to leave my contacts under-corrected and get a pair of distance glasses to wear on top of them, for driving. I figure I’ve got another five or six years before anyone calls me Elder Eyes. You could say I’m in denial. Or you could write it on a piece of paper, and by God, I’ll be able to read it.

The satellite dish was Ed’s idea.My husband wanted to be able to watch all 162 Giants games, and for this, he said, he needs a special sports channel. I think what he needs is a special sports therapist, but satellite TV is cheaper, and I gave in. So now, in order for Ed to watch one channel, we’d be paying for 843. I had my work cut out for me.

I sat down with our new baguette-size remote, and pressed On. Right away, Ed began talking, though the TV set sat mute. He explained there were now four separate button-pushes involved in turning on the TV. As he demonstrated, the TV came on. It was a Philippine station, and a man was speaking in Tagalog about his washing machine. “You go Satellite, TV, On, Satellite,” Ed was saying. “Get it? For Off, it’s Off, TV, Off.” I got it the way I get Tagalog washing-machine ads. I muted Ed and called the help line.

“You shouldn’t have to push all those buttons,” said the Help woman.

I relayed this to Ed, but he didn’t hear me, engrossed as he was in Antiques Roadshow . A man had lugged in an old museum case of taxidermied birds, no doubt to make room for his new giant remote and satellite receiver, and was showing it to a British chap with a pasted-on smile. “You’ve got a fantastic array of birds here, don’t you?”

I turned back to my pal on the other end of the phone, who was telling me that I was going to have to reprogram my remote . This is like being told that in order to shave a few minutes off your walk to work, you were going to have to have your legs removed and sewn on in a new position, which, as it happened, they were doing on the surgery channel at that moment.

Ed eventually found his sports channel. An Indianapolis 500 winner was philosophizing about his career, which racecar drivers maybe shouldn’t do: “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes the bug.”

“Now, to reprogram your remote, you take out the batteries and press the ‘1’ button for 60 seconds,” the Help woman—clearly the windshield here—was saying. “Then put the batteries back and hold down the ‘TV’ button at the same time as you enter the TV brand code, which you can look up in your manual.” It was going to require six arms, minimum, which the surgeons of Channel 89 could no doubt arrange.

I became intrigued with a button labeled Fetch, no doubt the source of many a humorous exchange between remote-holding, sandwich-wanting husbands and their wives. The feature would allow Ed to input a keyword, such as “Giants,” or “baseball,” or “big, fat waste of time” and, with the press of a button (or 18 buttons), fetch channels that matched. Ed entered “Giants,” and the TV reported that they were appearing on Channel 573. He pressed Fetch. The TV gamely fetched a blank channel.

As it turns out, we only get about 225 of 843 channels, the rest appearing as blank screens, requiring the viewer to scroll endlessly—effectively ruining the all-American channel-surfing experience.

I called the Help woman back, demanding to know how to get rid of the blank stations. She asked if I’d looked in my User’s Guide. I didn’t like where this was heading. If I wanted to read and exercise comprehension skills, I wouldn’t be watching television.

In no time at all, though, I was surfing gleefully. I had wanted to hate satellite TV, but it’s so wonderfully, derangedly entertaining. Here was Barney Rubble ordering chopped pterodactyl livers. Here was the incredible Flat Hose, attaching easily to any faucet!

There was Gene Rayburn on the Game Show Channel, introducing a contestant with “a hobby of opera and swimming,” which one dearly hopes are not practiced simultaneously. I smiled to myself, like the British chap from Antiques Roadshow. “You’ve got a fantastic array of channels here, don’t you?”

When I first met my husband,I did not know about price clubs. I simply thought I was dating a man for whom it was very important never to run out of things. Ed owned entire shrink-wrapped bricks of canned tuna, though by all outward appearances he was not a man passionate about tuna fish. For as long as I’d known him, there was a 500-count box of latex gloves in the closet. He had eight orange plastic-handled pairs of scissors and six glue sticks. I began to think he had run a kindergarten out of his home and that when it was closed down—no doubt owing to parental discomfort over the rubber gloves—he was left with the classroom and lunch supplies.

Then one bold shining day, Ed took me by the hand and brought me to Costco. Initially I was aghast. Who were these poor people who could use up to 112 packets of Alka- Seltzer or a 2-pack of jumbo-sized bottles of Immodium in a single lifetime? Then we hit the food aisles, and I understood who they were. They were the people eating 18-packs of Vienna sausages and 6-pound cans of garbanzo beans in a single lifetime. I began to see the place as a vast conspiracy of bigness, one colossal, insane purchase leading to another. Need a bigger refrigerator for your 30-pound salmon? Aisle 11. Need a 10-pound box of Arm & Hammer to freshen up that big refrigerator? Aisle 5. If you’re buying 72 frankfurters, better get the gallon tub of French’s.

“Two seventy-nine,” said Ed, of the French’s, looking rapt. “You can’t afford not to buy this mustard.” It’s a sickness, and my husband is well beyond help.

Next to the entrancing mustard was a white plastic bucket of mayonnaise, looking like it had taken a wrong turn on the way to The Home Depot. The soy sauce came in a metal one-gallon can of the sort used to transport gas to your car when you’ve been running on empty, as you tend to do when your bank account has been drained dry by army-sized requisitions of cling peaches and Dimetapp. What happened to bottles you can actually fit into your kitchen? Is it worth saving $1.71 if it means spooning condiments from industrial vats into more manageably sized bottles, thereby soiling countless shirts with spots that will not come out even with 406 applications of SHOUT?