It was only a matter of time.

I was nine years old when I found out I was nearsighted and needed glasses to see the blackboard in school. I started wearing contact lenses when I started college and I could see both far and near without any problems. For many years, I read music from miniature scores and people marveled that I could see the tiny notes with pinpoint accuracy.

Age caught up with me, though, and at one point in my life, I couldn’t see closeup while wearing my contacts so my eye doctor suggested wearing bifocal contacts. However I tried those for only a couple of years as those special (and very expensive!) bifocal contacts really didn’t work for me so I went back to monovision lenses.

So I tried regular reading glasses while wearing my contact lenses. That’s what I did when I played continuo for our Bach Mass in B Minor in 2011. (Egad! That was 15 years ago!)

Thirteen years ago, I was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration and have endured monthly eye injections ever since. I stopped wearing contact lenses, since I discovered that my vision for reading the newspaper, music, and my computer was best while wearing no glasses at all. I only used glasses for distance, like when driving my car.

Readers of this blog know that I had an eye infection in my right eye (“Cyclops“) last December, in which I lost my sight in that eye for about two weeks but it gradually cleared up after almost daily visits to my retina specialist for three weeks, eye surgery, and many, many eye drops every day. In fact, I’m still taking the drops daily, ten months later.

I started using my iPad on a more regular basis, especially for reading the newspaper in which I could make the print as large as possible.

Several months ago, I started having problems looking at the text in Zoom chat sessions on my computer. I researched how to enlarge the text in chat windows which I did successfully — that makes that task easier.

I found it helpful to read music on my iPad which has back lighting, and started using the iPad on a weekly basis at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. I created a Setlist for each service and found it easy to put all the music in order, including all the propers, anthems, liturgical music, hymns and alternate harmonizations. Instead of a stack of music on the music rack, I had only the iPad and my handy dandy Flic buttons to turn the pages.

About a month ago, though, my near vision started giving me problems even when using the iPad. Instead of seeing five lines on the musical staff, I saw six! I couldn’t identify the starting note, so I wrote it in using large letters. Once I knew the starting pitch, I could recognize the pattern of the intervals, but scanning music quickly, which I need to do to get through the service, has become a huge challenge and source of weekly panic.

My retina specialist suggested I visit my ophthalmologist for special computer and “organ glasses,” which I have now ordered. That means that I will soon have four pairs of glasses:

1. Prescription sunglasses for driving during the day.
2. Clear prescription glasses for driving at night.
3. Reading glasses, for seeing things up close.
4. “Organ glasses,” for playing the organ and seeing things at arms length.

This surely is a sign of getting older! Some of my students also have “organ glasses” and now I’ve joined the club!

As a followup to my last post about the Hawaii Chapter American Guild of Organists potluck, we ended up with 28 people coming, and were especially proud of our organ scholars:

This year’s recipients of the Hawaii Chapter American Guild of Organists scholarship program: Zachary Hamada, Katherine Nagel, Yuko Nakagawa Dupre, Nicholas Calzada, Dylan Aumer-Wong, Ava Anderton and Noah Stone. Not shown: Kristen Lopez.