Tiny Fractures

Published in Bewildering Stories, August 11, 2025

I call my all-time favorite pair of reading glasses “Greenie.” Greenie’s clear earpieces are just the right shade of mint green. It pleases me to see these glasses sitting patiently on my desk, happy, bright, and waiting to help. I bought them on sale, plus I got the Wednesday senior discount; I paid so little for them that I felt like I was getting away with something.

Greenie fits my face perfectly, snugly enough not to fall off or even slip, but not so tight that they irritate the sensitive skin behind my ears. The front of the frame is multicolored. The top is a swirl of charcoal gray and white. The bottom is opaque creamy green. The magnification is 2.50, the sweet spot that allows me to read small print with ease and without distortion.

I like these glasses so much that I rarely risk taking them out of my upstairs study. When I am downstairs and find myself in need of reading glasses, I sneak a pair off my wife’s desk. They work well enough, but I feel like an imposter and worry about stretching or breaking the frames.

Yesterday, I planned on reading downstairs, so I took Greenie with me. As I put him in my shirt pocket, I reminded myself not to bend over without laying a protective hand over him. Minutes later, I forgot this admonition. When I bent over to pick up the cat, Greenie fell out of my pocket. He landed with a loud clack, lens first on the wood floor.

There was no obvious damage, such as lenses popping out, screws disappearing, or the frame cracking, but I worried about the unseen damage. I imagined tiny cracks in the lenses and frame, the start of an insidious loosening of the firm seating of the lenses, the screws beginning to unscrew. I wondered by what fraction the life of the glasses had been reduced by my carelessness. No doubt the fall took its toll, and I worried about the future. I knew that tiny cracks do not heal. They accumulate, eventually leading to major damage: death by a thousand cuts.

I thought of prior pairs of glasses that have been maimed by trauma. Lost hinge screws have been the most common occurrence. In principle, they can be replaced, but finding the right equipment is no easy task. The proper hinge screws are not likely to be lying around in the typical toolbox or drawer.

Usually, these miniature fasteners have to be purchased when needed. They usually come in a kit, including an appropriately sized screwdriver and a selection of screws in various sizes and shapes. It is a fundamental rule of eyeglass repair that the chance of finding the right screw in this assortment hovers around zero. That is why I have fourteen of these sets in my tool drawer.

Lack of a proper replacement screw leads to the familiar safety pin or partially unbent paper clip jerry-rigging, an aesthetically and usually functionally unsatisfying solution. Common accompaniments of that style of “repair” are a band-aid over the bridge or temples to cushion against friction.

Today I vowed to reduce the glasses-out-of-office experiences from infrequent to never. I started using a pair of back-up glasses. I call this pair Prada, because that name is plastered all over them. I found Prada abandoned and I gave her a home. Prada is flashy. Prada is chic. There is a complex repeating design on the temples, consisting of a small black stone in the center, circled by a ring of silver doodads, which are in turn ringed by oblong black stones arranged in a daisy pattern. They are so far from my style, that I would wear them outside of the home only by accident, or if my life depended on it. Today I moved Prada from the second floor to the first floor to eliminate the need for Greenie to travel.

Now that Greenie and Prada’s traveling days are over, they will never again need to see the inside of a shirt pocket and hopefully I won’t ever have to purchase reading glasses. Greenie, Prada, and I can sail into the sunset together, happy and visually corrected.

* * *

Affection for inanimate objects, similar to a friendship, isn’t limited to eyeglasses. For me, it extends to some items of clothing. Over time they become part of my identity. For example, after 45 years of faithful service, it is hard for me to imagine being without my beige-gray cloth winter jacket with snap-down shoulder epaulets (there is nothing else military about it). It has a sturdy zipper, generous pouch-like pockets on the front, elastic cuffs and a fleece collar.

I liked it immediately when I saw it hanging on the rack outside of a discount store at Lloyd’s center in Portland, Oregon. It has required some rehab; my wife sewed a banding strip over a torn and worn section of the lining near the collar, but the rest of the jacket is original and it still does a good job of keeping me warm.

When I like a piece of clothing like this, I will wear it until it is literally in shreds, which can be awkward. One day I was walking through the parking lot of a shopping center when I noticed that the sole of one of my shoe friends was loose and flapping with each step. After a few more steps, the sole completely separated from the rest of the shoe, leaving me walking on the asphalt in my stocking foot.

By amazing luck, this occurred in front of a men’s clothing store, in which I found a decent pair of not-too-expensive black leather casual shoes. It felt good to be walking on a sole again. The new shoes have never been my favorite, but I appreciated them for having been in the right place at the right time.

I have an ancient pair of green shorts. My wife calls them short-shorts. She closes her eyes when I walk by wearing them. I’m not sure if the sight of my good-looking legs is too much for her to bear or if she has grown weary of seeing this faded, out-of-fashion garment.

Not only can people connect with clothes, clothes can connect people. When we were growing up in Chicago (back when winters were really winters), my mom would go into the basement and crack out the winter gear to see what could be handed down and what new items needed to be bought. From my older brother to me, then from me to my younger sister, coats, scarves and galoshes made their way down the line. Fitting into clothes that my brother had outgrown was satisfying proof that I was growing.

Full winter garb included snow pants worn over regular pants. One snowy, wintry day my mother walked me to kindergarten and then left. Soon after entering the classroom the teacher said, “Everyone take off your pants.” I thought, “She would never say that if my mother was still here!” I immediately burst into tears at the thought of standing there in my underpants. I was relieved when the other kids stopped disrobing after taking off only their snow pants, not their regular pants.

For a too-brief period of time, I was enjoying being the beneficiary of “hand me ups.” For a year or two, my youngest son and I wore the same size gym shoe. Being much more style-driven than his father and growing too rapidly to be a follower of the wear-it-till-it-falls-apart approach, he got new gym shoes much more frequently than I did. I was happy to finish wearing the older ones for him. I enjoyed the variety, and I liked the physical connection of literally walking in his shoes.

* * *

If one exemplar of a type of object is good, why not a lot of them? A collection. The collected object need not be rare, beautiful, or otherwise outstanding, just interesting to the collector. In his essay, “Anything That Can Be Gathered,” Joshua James Amberson describes how he accrued 366 discarded notes written on an entertaining variety of non-paper surfaces, including wood, plastic and metal.

My youthful collections included matchbooks, playing cards, dimes and charms. Collecting matchbooks was convenient because cigarette smoking was rampant at the time (1950s and 60s) and appealing because they came in a spectacular array of colors, a variety of shapes, and they were free. Most of mine came from restaurants. I hung them on a string connected to the bottom of a bulletin board on the wall next to my bed. The only ones from this collection still in existence have a white cover with the greeting “Thanks for coming,” and my name, written in blue cursive on the front. They are from my Bar Mitzvah in 1965, and a surprisingly high percentage of the matches still strike.

The playing cards were souvenirs from train rides to vacation destinations with my family. In that era, only movie stars, politicians, and my Uncle Harry travelled by plane. The face of the cards displayed photos of the cleverly-named train lines that took us from Chicago to the West Coast (Super Chief and California Zephyr) and to the East Coast (20th-Century Limited). The locomotives looked powerful, modern and sleek. I still have some of these packs of railroad playing cards in mint condition, protected by their colorful cardboard boxes with a card, representative of the deck, pasted on top.

I collected dimes because their size and designs appealed to me more than the other coins, and the value was just right: more substantial than a penny but still affordable when an uncommon one needed to be purchased. I managed to fill up all but a few slots in the collection books, lacking only the rarest and most expensive coins.

The charms came from gumball-style vending machines, where you put in a nickel, turn the crank, listen to the purchase slide down a short metal shute, open the metal hinged door and retrieve the charm. The marketing was clever. There were a few super-nifty charms visible through the clear glass bubble top that were operable, like a miniature cigarette lighter, a fan that opened and a gun and holster duo.

The vast majority of the other charms were far less interesting. Nevertheless, over time, I plunked in sufficient coins to accrue a fun collection. My mother sewed my favorite ones, including a harmonica, a cowboy boot and a fire hydrant onto a black felt beanie. I had the most fun with a tiny glow-in-the-dark light bulb. I would bring it into my closet, close the sliding wooden doors and watch it glow in the black cave of that small, quiet space.

I think that there is a collecting instinct; my youngest son had a strong version as a toddler. He had his head bent down most of the time on our outdoor explorations and would hand me his treasures. Frequently these included pill bugs (a.k.a. roly-polies) and a wide variety of organic material. I’d stick it all in my jacket pocket and dump them later.

One time, I forgot the dumping step and, sometime later, the cashier at the supermarket was perplexed because she could smell the cheese that she thought I was about to buy but couldn’t see it in the items that I was checking out. She didn’t charge me for the “cheese” of rotted collected material that I sheepishly emptied from my jacket pocket.

* * *

Where do we draw the line between normal and abnormal when it comes to relationships with objects? Perhaps the mental illness known as “hoarding” is an exaggeration or overgeneralization of a normal tendency to connect with objects, to see them as an extension of ourselves. To the hoarder, parting with a possession might feel like losing a body part.

The strength of emotional attachment to an object might also cross the border of normality. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think that my wife looked at me askance recently when I finished my writing for the day, folded up my glasses and said, “Get some rest, Greenie, see you tomorrow.”