I’m scheduled for cataract surgery in a couple of weeks, and I’m having second thoughts.  It’s not the consent form I had to sign — warnings about death, dismemberment and loss of eyesight are, as we know, just legitimate protections for the surgeon against greedy tort lawyers. What gives me pause is his prediction that after he scrapes away the cataract and implants a permanent lense, I may not need glasses for anything but reading.  That’s the really scary stuff for a guy who’s been hiding behind John Dean wire frames, Buddy Holly all-blacks, and Woody Allen horn rims since age two.

My misgivings about the surgery are aroused by what happened some years ago when I abruptly stopped drinking alcoholic beverages. I was in Lower Manhattan on 9/11 and ended up in crowded bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel that evening, swapping what if’s with a bunch of rounders who kept repeating, “You know, timing is everything.”  Somehow, my double Irish wasn’t mixing well with the dusty taste of copper pennies still in my mouth, or the pervasive odor of smoke still in the air.  Whatever.  I stopped drinking for eight months, astounding my wife, children and friends who knew that my affection for John Barleycorn was more than a schoolboy crush.

I’d always worried about would happen if I stopped drinking.  Would I lose my ability to tell good jokes, or to react with great revulsion to the bleatings of known Republican barflies, or lose my bubbling, charming personality altogether?  You can imagine my shock when I discovered that stopping drinking hadn’t changed me, but had changed everyone around me.  When I would walk into a party, people would start telling jokes with punch lines that weren’t very funny.  Whenever I entered a pub, everyone began talking so loud I couldn’t understand anything being said. If I engaged someone at a wine-graced dinner in a discussion of substance, they responded with arguments that were either illogical or infantile.  Needless to say, I was forced to start drinking again just to get things back to normal.

Now my question is, will not wearing glasses disturb the status quo in a similar manner?  Will it change me?  Or will it change other people?  There’s no doubt in my mind, for instance, that my youthful success as a student was due to two factors: my last name begins with an “A,” and I was always forced to sit at the front of the class; and, I wore glasses, raising academic expectations I had to live up to.  What’s more, the well-practiced axiom that “girls don’t make passes at boys who wear glasses” left me with more time to read than most other boys.  Wearing glasses eventually caused my peers to nickname me, “professor,” and “Dr. Abernathy,” and I’m convinced their perception of me, rather than my actual performance, has been responsible for anything I been able to achieve in life.

So what will emerge as unintended consequences if my cataract surgery is successful and I’m able to see better and discard my eyeglasses?   Will my clients begin to seek out a new communications consultant who seems to be more studious and thoughtful than me?  Will the agents and publishers I’m pursuing with my creative efforts assume that a writer who works from a fully upright position can’t be very serious or determined?  Will women suddenly begin making passes because I no longer wear glasses, threatening my long relationship with the one person in my life who’s always seen me through her own blessedly rose-colored lenses?  Will I change, or will the people around me change?

I’ll let you know in a few weeks.