Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,

But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,

And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,

And of all your friends he is the joculist,

So over his facetiousness let us skim,

Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,

And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do.

You need two.

One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and

Keats’s “Endymion” with,

And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with.

So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,

And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are.

Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,

I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.