Featured Story

Column: Seek and ye shall find

James Bornemeier
James Bornemeier

Last year I had my a cataract in my right eye removed, meaning I had to start wearing a contact lens in the other eye. I began wearing contact lenses in high school, but back then they were hard little chips of plastic that seem so primitive compared to the filmy soft ones today that become part of your eyeball.

Like most old-time wearers, I have my share of lost-and-found lens stories, sometimes retrieving them from some rather vile places. And the occasional scratched cornea, which was borderline agonizing.

Once I popped in my first contact lens in decades last year, a venerable story played out in my memory banks. It goes like this.

We were finished with dinner, my parents, brother and I, in our suburban St. Louis ranch home. It was in the early 1960s and it was football season. My brother, the high school scholar and demonic linebacker, sat sullenly across from me. My father was lighting his post-dinner Lucky Strike as my mother bussed the table.

On this night, my brother casually mentioned that he had lost one of his contact lenses during football practice after school. This announcement carried no import whatsoever. My father was the general manager of his uncle’s optical firm and could easily replace the contact lens, probably the next day. End of story.

But no.

At the sink, my mother said, “Maybe we should go look for it.” In a move that could have been lifted from innumerable sitcoms, we three at the table slowly and simultaneously turned our heads toward her in astonishment. A couple beats of silence went by until my brother said, “You cannot be serious.”

In hindsight, and perhaps with more forgetfulness than I own up to, growing up with these three people was pretty uncomplicated. My brother, after serving for a couple of years as my interpreter, due to a mysterious period in early boyhood when I was unable or unwilling to speak understandable English to my parents, benignly ignored me until we bonded years later when we overlapped one year at college. My parents and I actually believed that his typical sour temper was due to an early tonsillectomy that he seemed to never forgive the world for.

My father could be a bit of a crank and we had our moments. His instrument of discipline was a shoe, a venerable loafer, applied on those occasions when my mother ratted me out, probably for some back-talk, which I was prone to. But we never had one of those troubled relationships that needed to be sorted out over the years. We became best of pals, drinking and listening to Duke Ellington late into the evening.

My mother was quite pretty, very rational and extremely earnest. She kept us honest in her own low-key way, and her opinions, on the rare occasions when she would offer one, were valued and generally followed. So when she said we should look for the contact lens in the November gloom on a ravaged football practice field, it sank in that she was serious and, more amazingly, that we would soon be setting forth on an absolutely insane episode that would surely find a niche in family lore.

I think that’s why, after the initial disbelief, that we so amiably went along with it. In my book, it was the high-water mark of her Nebraskan frugality.
The school was nearby. Ten minutes later we stood, armed with flashlights, before the practice field. It was about the size of normal football field, but unlike a normal football field, not a blade of grass interrupted the expanse of soft wet dirt, pocked by thousands, perhaps millions of half-inch deep indentations formed by football cleats.

We divided the field into fourths and began the search for the lost lens in our assigned territories, making coordinated sweeps so every square foot of the field would be scanned. If the cops had rolled by we surely would have been questioned as to our purpose. I have often wondered how that discussion would have gone down.

After close to an hour of peering at the mangled earth, long enough for the fun to wear off and the goofiness of it all to take charge, we began to waver. We had, improbably, given this our best shot and it was time to go home.

Over the years, all four of us variously staked a claim to finding the lens, but in truth it was I who saw it, a glint of reflected light as I made a final sweep of my flashlight. It was resting convex side up on a pillar of mud, surrounded by a circle of potentially devastating cleat impacts. This was not remotely possible, I thought.

The FBI couldn’t have found it. Of course, the FBI would never have undertaken such silliness. We went home victorious, but chastened somewhat that we men had mocked my mother’s decision to send us into the night on the ultimate fool’s errand.

Late in her life, she and would I recall the event from time to time during our weekly phone calls. And to the end, she would say it as a no-brainer. It was lost, we knew where it was and we should go look for it.