I'm composing this in my head to type later... I can't really see right now.

I've been noticing difficulties reading, trouble driving, muscle cramps from unnatural postures unconsciously assumed to get my eyes to a comfortable range. Been getting that "you're busted" look from women at whom I didn't really think I was looking. (You young ladies who think all men of a certain age to be perverts: when we stare at you in ways the younger men do, we may not be getting fresh, we may simply be getting focused. And we'll never admit that, not to ourselves, and for damn sure not to you.)

So the vision thing had become a concern.

I live my life through my eyes - sequences of letters and/or punctuation fill about 85% of my waking hours, and most of the rest goes into drive time. Every skill I have which can feed a family depends on quick and accurate absorption of written material. I'm a quarter century from being able to stop filling out W-4 forms, I can't be greying out now.

But my sight got bad, in what I consider to be a hurry. I realized a while back that I only have one eye's worth of vision that lets me drive safely, even with glasses on. I'm of an age that is hard on eyes, but I also have a diagnosed syndrome that kills them dead, and it's the latter that will be my secret terror for the rest of my life.

So I went to the doctor.

It's a hard thing to sit and wait for that verdict, through all the various stages of waiting roomness you go through. (I was reduced to reading a Ladies' Home Journal at one point in the wait... do no men get their eyes checked?) It's hard to think about how your family will get along if you're still employable, just not as valuable. (Is this person running me through the first sequence of tests the one I should tell the deeper story of my vision problems, or do I wait for someone calling themselves Doctor to show up?) I found myself working math in my head, trying to figure the reduced annual salary point where the fiscally smart move I can make for my family is to drive hard into a tree. (The kid on the cell phone is the doctor? Really?)

These sorts of thoughts can plague you, alone in an unfamiliar semi-darkened room, waiting with minor burning in your eyes. Chemicals slowly opening those windows to your soul for the man you still haven't met. I found myself today being frightened, and thinking back through all the genuinely frightened men I've known.

My work is to some extent specialty work - I'm brought in to help out, and somebody has to say "we need help enough to pay for it" before I can go see them. Implicit in this is that somebody can't handle all their responsibilities, and that's never a secure feeling. I wind up talking to more men than most do who have fear, who are in the position of wondering whether their livelihoods are at risk. (That's especially horrid when you know that, in fact, they are at risk.) Part of the job for me is always seeming necessary enough to pay for without seeming too scary to keep around. I've developed a sense of when someone is wondering whether their career is too much out of their hands.

So I recognize the feeling right away. Twenty-five more years, I know nobody does what I do that long, but I need twenty-five more years, and I need eyes for that... and I chop off the thought, as it can't help me. Sort of chop it off; it's always a matter of more or less.

By the time the doctor arrives to peer through my windows for me, I'm able to lay it out for him, measure the tones that state my concerns. I've grown used to staying balanced, to maintaining clear communications about worries, because adding the emotional dimension usually just layers another problem to solve atop the real one. He hears me out and gives me the nod of the specialist, one I file for my own use later. He can do that, because that which worries me is judged on a different scale for him, he who has seen situations where he would need to take knives to eyeballs that day.

I know he expects to find nothing from the way he sets up for the exam, or at least that he can make genuine concern seem like routinely conscientious care. By the time the awful light streams through me, I've five times the confidence I'd had when reading the Ladies' Home Journal. Confidence is really the thing for which men will pay other men, and we'll someday find ways to trade it directly on some mercantile exchange. For now, though, I'm simply soaking in confidence through my vulnerable, dilated lenses, and considering the check I'll write to be well justified.

My eyes are fine, just aging; there's nothing really unusual going on. Probably right down to the way I worried about my vision, more before I went in than afterward, when I was making a drive home with drugged and unresponsive eyes.

My bride asked how it went when I got home, and I shrugged it off as routine, and asked what was on her mind that day. Probably about the same way I'll ask my new clients tomorrow what's really on their minds.

It's good to have the reminder of how valuable it can be simply to provide ways to not be scared.

(Really, I wasn't frightened at all. Ever. In my life. Trust me, we're all in good hands here.)