ROGERS — I'm waiting for my next new pair of glasses. Since I wear contacts almost all the time, my glasses last a long time. It's always a difficult fashion decision when I have to replace them.

Should I go with those small, dark colored frames the kids wear? Should I stay with the traditional wire frames that I've worn most of my life?

The worst pair of glasses I ever owned was way back in middle school. Those were plastic frames with pointed sides and could be used as a weapon in close quarters.

Then I had the really big granny glasses with actual glass lenses - they hadn't invented the light weight plastic lenses yet. The glass lenses were so heavy that the glasses never stayed on the bridge of my nose. For a year or two, I walked around with one hand holding my glasses in place at all times.

The pair I'm replacing are still completely functional, but no longer attractive. The coating is chipping off the wire rims. I would like to startwearing my glasses out in public again so I wanted a pair that looked good - or at least less bad.

My prescription only changes a little bit between eye appointments these day.

When I was a child, my prescription would change drastically. Every year I walked out of the optometrist's office, amazed by my suddenly clear vision. I just knew that some day my eye sight would get so bad, it would no longer be correctable and I would be legally blind. Luckily for me, my vision leveled off as a teenager.

Then there were years when I could see fairly well with my contact lenses. Theeye doctors always tried to talk me into vision correction surgery. I think it would have been fairly easy for them to correct my nearsightedness, but the thought of someone cutting my eyeball was just too creepy. I never told them I was afraid. I used the cost of the surgery as my excuse.

Now I wonder if I added up all the contacts lenses and backup glasses I paid for over the years, if the surgery was actually cost effective.

It was a shock when I had to start correcting for close up vision. After all those years of not being able to see past my nose without lenses, I suddenly couldn't see in front of my nose.

I held off a real correction for a while by wearing my distance contacts and buying inexpensive reading glasses at Dollar General. I spent a good part of those years fumbling in my purse for the reading glasses that never seemed to be where I thought I had put them. Eventually, I started buying them in bulk because I thought if I had enough pairs, I would be able to find them.

Somehow, all the reading glasses I purchased ended up in one place which was never the place I thought they would be.

At work I would look through the view finder on my camera and see very well, but then when I tried to check thelittle LCD screen, I couldn't tell if I even had a photo displayed.

Finally I gave up and was fitted for contacts that corrected one eye for distance and the other for up close. But my glasses were still only for distance. I just took them off when I wanted to read small print. I couldn't make myself take the leap to bifocals for a long time.

But eventually vanity gave way to practicality. I decided vision was more important then looks. Also I realized that no one could tell you're wearing bifocals if you get the no line kind.

Reporter Lynn Atkins can be contacted by e-mail at lynna@nwanews.com.

Opinion, Pages 4 on 09/30/2009

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