Thing I Know Little About (but something)

2. Eye Glasses

Big Frank wears glasses, so he knows they give you clearer vision. He didn't start wearing them until he was 37 when, after returning to the U.S. after having spent 7 years in Poland, he was told by the driver's license bureau that they would not give him a driver's license until he corrected his vision. When he went to the optomestrist they made Big Frank look through something like the person-end of a periscope that had a couple of disks that rotated. The optometrist would rotate them and ask him repeatedly, "Is this better or worse?" He kept doing for some time until things really did look better, and then he wrote out on a piece of paper a couple of numbers and Big Frank took these to a store where they sell glasses. Big Frank picked out some frames (this was 1987 - so they were BIG and plastic). One week later they were on Big Frank's face (when he drove anyway). Big Frank has no idea how they were made, but he imagines that the plastic lenses were matched in some way with the numbers on that piece of paper. Big Frank had to later go back over the years and do this over again many times. Now he wears the glasses seen in the picture.

Big Frank's dad knew a lot about eye glasses - he was an optometrist. However, he died when Big Frank was only 2 years old, so nothing of that actually got passed on to him. While Big Frank spent his childhood in his namesake - Dickinson, North Dakota, he was actually born in Conrad, Montana - where his dad had his optometry practice. However, after his dad died, Big Frank and his family moved back to Dickinson. It was over forty years before Big Frank revisited Conrad. He drove into town, entered a local cafe and asked the woman behind the counter if there was anyone that she knew who had lived here forty years ago. The woman pointed to a nearby booth, and said that there were three people in it who had lived here that long. Big Frank approached the booth and asked if any of them knew his parents. All three knew them - one had gone to college with his mother, and had lived across the street from Big Frank (for the two years that he lived here). Big Frank's dad died of polio, and this woman's husband was the only other person who had also contracted polio at that time. She also knew where Big Frank's dad's office was and took him over and showed it to him. Now it had been absorbed into a large furniture store, but she knew in which part Big Franks's dad had his optometry practice and showed it to him. It was now full of loungers and side tables - there were no glasses to be seen.