Readers have noted, with varying amounts of good and ill-will, that some of my blog entries are afflicted with typographical errors. It\u2019s true, and there\u2019s a good reason for it. My contact lenses, which I cannot at the moment afford to replace, are finely coated with what a friend says is protein \u2014 not the good kind that builds muscle, but the bad kind that\u2026well, makes a person feel like he\u2019s peering out of a frosted-over windshield. Each lens has patches that remain perfectly clear; if I can maneuver one of those so that it lands smack on my pupil, all is well. If not, then, as we\u2019ve seen, I might end up composing in cipher. <\/p>\n
But even protein-rich contact lenses are better than none at all. If I hadn\u2019t accepted this on faith, I\u2019d have discovered it a few mornings ago, in those frantic minutes when I woke up to find them missing. When I say \u201cmissing,\u201d I mean they were missing from my eyes, which is where they were sitting cozily when I fell asleep.<\/p>\n
You see, nearly every night, sleep sneaks up on me while I\u2019m reading in bed. It\u2019s been like this since I was very young. \u201cHave a NIGHT!\u201d my mother would scream, meaning, prepare for the end of the day by getting undressed, removing your contact lenses and switching off the lamp. Well, that might work for most diurnal creatures, but not for me. The business of sleep has always been a catch-22. If I court it by observing the prescribed rituals, it will never come. If I play coy by lying in bed fully dressed, contact lenses in, trying to make sense o Thomas Merton, it will pounce and pin me for a healthful eight hours.<\/p>\n
At some point that night, I must have stirred. Feeling a speck of dust between one of my lenses and my eye, I probably removed them, and, too groggy to make it all the way to the bathroom, placed them one of the books that tends to pile up at my bedside. If the book was, as I suspected, The Art of the Personal Essay,<\/em> an 800-page anthology edited by Phillip Lopate, then it was a saner move than it sounds. The cover is white; my contact lenses are tinted blue \u2014 not in order to change the color of my eyes, but in order to announce their presence should they fall on bathroom tile. Whenever they visit a crowded place, a friend of mine buys his absent-minded wife a balloon to hold. Same idea.<\/p>\n But when I checked the cover of Lopate, they weren\u2019t there. They weren\u2019t on the covers of Zorba, the Greek<\/em> or Granta 54: Summer, 1996, <\/em>either. Brushing my fingertips against the carpet in a rough perimeter, I felt nothing. And here, finally, is where I began to panic.<\/p>\n Yhe contact lenses I\u2019d been wearing were the only ones I owned. I\u2019d had a spare pair, but a few weeks earlier, the management of my apartment complex announced that a pest-control company would be spraying down every unit, and ordered us residents to clear off all shelves and drawers. I\u2019d put my spare contacts in a large Glad bag along with my other toiletries, my travel iron, my boxes of envelopes, some DVDs, my dustpan and other items, and set them on my bed. When it came time to unpack, the dustpan and the contact lenses were gone. I chalked it up to the price of doing business with a rental company.<\/p>\n I should also explain just how nearsighted I am, and why I don\u2019t own a pair of glasses. The answer to the first is: very. I wore glasses until I was thirteen, and they were of such a thickness as to make a boy look like a genius, and a man look like a serial-murdering retardate. Thirteen years of that is enough; I no longer wish to appear so, even before God. The prescription? Exact figures escape me, but it made the Ft. Hamilton eye doctor who examined me on behalf of the Marine Corps scream at me for wasting his time and Uncle Sam\u2019s. And this was in the last year of the Cold War, when willing bodies were in demand. <\/p>\n Like Oedipus hunting an errant pebble of cocaine, I crawled along the floor of my bedroom, picking up anything that looked like it might be a contact lens. At a distance of more than three inches, this included everything from a tangle of hair to a shred of paper from an old pack of cigarettes. After fifteen minutes, I was still shy contact lenses, but my floor, I had to admit, was cleaner than it had been in weeks. <\/p>\n Now it was time for real panic \u2014 the hyperventilating, ask-why-me-O-Lord panic I told myself that my contact lenses couldn\u2019t have gotten up and walked away. Much as it sounded corny, like something a third-grade teacher might say (and which mine probably had), its logic was irrefutable. Just as I as stepping back from the abyss, I heard myself wondering why I hadn\u2019t invoked the aid of St. Anthony. <\/p>\n This in itself was cause for alarm. Besieged by alien thoughts<\/em> is considered a symptom of insanity, and imploring the aid of saints is not the sort of thought I usually have. One reader of mine remarked that Catholics of a certain generation grow ashamed of their grandparents\u2019 style of piety. Well, for me, the resistance is even more deeply ingrained, since neither my grandparents, nor their grandparents \u2014 nor, I suspect, even their grandparents \u2014 were the types to make a big deal of anyone\u2019s cultus. <\/em><\/p>\n The greater part of the Catholic side of my family came originally from Ireland, specifically, Cork and Waterford, by the Irish Sea. Their name is Foley, which derives from the Gaelic \u00d3 Foghladha<\/em>, or \u201cthe plunderers.\u201d These details matter, because the Foleys have always seemed, like the people who plundered that region into beggary during the Dark Ages, related to the inventors of the Volvo. Solid, practical people, all of them \u2014 wrung dry of any primitive Celtic genius. In the Old Country, they did not fight Black and Tans; here, they did not fight blacks. They declined to join the Whyos, Westies, Molly Maguires, the Pogues or even the fire department. Their religion was of a similarly bland and respectable sort. Though they sent their children to parochial schools, and managed to produce a nun in every generation, they\u2019d no sooner have begged help from a dead Portuguese friar than danced the limbo at a confirmation party. <\/p>\n I won\u2019t say I traced the entire etiology of my revulsion as I sat there, imagining myself writing with my eyeballs pressed against my computer screen. However, I did feel very strongly that praying to St. Anthony would lead me down a dark and treacherous path. I remembered St. Anthony\u2019s famous prayer: <\/p>\n \u201cDear St. Anthony, I also recalled that Liberace, upon recovering unexpectedly from a serious illness, cried, \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle! Praise St. Anthony!\u201d That settled it: St. Anthony, namesake of the Alamo, was the saint of last resort for imbeciles. <\/p>\n Having a good argument with yourself tends to enliven dull, fruitless tasks, and serves as a cushion against anxiety. Snuffling across my carpet for the second time, I began remembering the advice I received from my friend, Pina, when I wanted to leave the foreclosure department for a better job. Pina\u2019s full name is Giuseppina. She belongs to a more southerly and expansive tribe than the Foleys. A true daughter of her people, she regards squid ink on the teeth as the very height of fashion, and observes some strange superstition involving white flowers. When I decided I could take no more foreclosing, she practically ordered me to pray a certain prayer every day for a solid month, and direct it toward her patron, St. Joseph. The prayer ended with this saccharine formula: <\/p>\n \u201cA blessed life, St. Joseph, may we lead, But I was desperate. After Pina assured me I\u2019d be hitting up St. Joseph the Worker (as opposed to St. Joseph the Realtor, who must have been taking an awful beating), I started reciting the ridiculous thing. Seventeen days later, I landed a job as a mortgage fraud investigator, at a slight pay increase. <\/p>\n Just then my fingers grasped something. It was the skeletal remains of a pair of shades I\u2019d bought back in the salad days. They were real Dolce & Gabbanas. I\u2019d destroyed them by sitting on them, but could never bear to throw out the frames. Unsure how to enshrine them, I\u2019d left them to sit in the farthest corner of my room, between my bed, the bookshelf and the wall. <\/p>\n Call it a Proustian moment. I remembered prosperity and nice accessories, an uncomplicated life of consumption. Then I remembered St. Joseph. Thinking again on my contacts, not wanting them to remain in situ<\/em> as relics of an age, I recited: <\/p>\n \u201cDear St. Anthony, It wasn\u2019t quite so easy as that. (Is anything ever?) I did have to start from the point nearest where my head had rested, and search the carpet one quadrant by another. Still, after five minutes, there they were \u2014 no more than a foot away from the corner of Lopate, and only three inches apart. Oh, and get this \u2013 later that afternoon, I found the spares. Somehow they\u2019d fallen into the far corner of my bathroom cabinet. I\u2019m guessing the act of hauling out the bottle of Clorox knocked them out, too. From no contact lenses to four means improvement by a factor of infinity. <\/p>\n Now, what all this says about the veneration of saints or Italian folk wisdom or the spiritual crimes of the lace-curtain Irish, or even good bedtime habits, I have no idea. I have decided, though, that if I ever have a kid, I\u2019m going to name it Tony, or Toni, depending. My cover story will be that I\u2019m honoring Tony Blair. Since he\u2019s practically patron saint of conflicted converts, it won\u2019t be a total lie.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Readers have noted, with varying amounts of good and ill-will, that some of my blog entries are afflicted with typographical errors. It\u2019s true, and there\u2019s a good reason for it. My contact lenses, which I cannot at the moment afford to replace, are finely coated with what a friend says is protein \u2014 not the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-saints"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nPlease come around.
\nSomething\u2019s been lost
\nThat can\u2019t be found. <\/em><\/p>\n
\nBy your kind patronage from danger freed.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n
\nI beg by the Rood:
\nHelp find my contacts,
\nOr, baby, I\u2019m screwed.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n