ISawArkansas

Sight is a wonderful thing, but we all know that wonderful things are sometimes piecemealed with shocks and malfunctions. You get old, you get cataracts. But there’s a surgery for that.

You rustle up someone who truly loves you to drive you to Rogers at 6 a.m. so someone you don’t know can enlarge your pupils so someone else you don’t know can look into those pupils with a flashlight. Dilation paralyzes the eye muscle and prevents pupils from getting smaller when light is shined in.

The light-shiner person assesses what you need that you don’t understand. What you do understand is that you need your eyeball windshield cleaned. Either way, you agree to go to Rogers twice more at 6 a.m., one trip for each eye. Love from your driver friend oozes out like chilled honey.

Your vision improves dramatically. Sharpness is like when you were twelve. Walking down steps is no longer hit-or-miss, not even tricky.

All’s good until you drive at night and wonder why everybody has their brights on and there are two cars where one should be. You hustle over to the local eye fixer who says it’s a ghost and easily fixed with glasses that take away glare.

Fine. My local eye fixer said get glasses at Walmart, they have a 30-day return policy if the glasses don’t work out.

That’s when alarm hooked up with shock and malfunction.

“I can’t,” I said and told him why.

“Mary Pat,” he said firmly but gently, “get over it. Go to Walmart. Be willing to try.”

I hadn’t been inside a Walmart for 30 years because I didn’t like the noise of fluorescent lights. Also, that drug stores, flower shops, bodegas, appliance stores and individually owned businesses shuttered when they couldn’t match prices with a global corp that buys products by the shipload from countries that deprived them of bragging Made in USA. In my head, Walmart had ruined everything except used car lots and art.

But I did it. Drove early Saturday morning to Cassville’s Walmart to order a pair of glasses. I parked at the farthest spot from the front door, thinking I needed a good long walk to get my head right.

Doors opened automatically. I was greeted. The store was spotless, gleaming. The ceiling had quiet, tubular LEDs, and skylights let earth light in.

The woman who helped me was delightful and knowledgeable. It took her 20 minutes to tell her first-person vision stories, confirm my prescription and insurance, hoot at my frames choice, and send my order. We bonded and nearly hugged. She said my glasses would be here in 10 days.

Ten days later, Walmart called. A woman said, “Did you read about that UPS plane that went down in Louisville? Well, it hit the distribution center where your glasses were. It will be another ten days.”

I felt sad about the pilot, crew and plane, not sad about the glasses, sort of sad for all the other packages, and fine about delaying my second trip to Walmart.

What I felt most was being thankful for a warm morning drive to Cassville through Roaring River State Park, meeting the woman who ordered my glasses, and seeing firsthand that Walmart is not the devil.

Now I want to meet JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Tom Cotton and others I have a poker-faced problem with because really, if I can do a 180 on Walmart, surely I can sit still and listen to what in the world these people are thinking.

Willing to try.