My eyes began to fail me along about the second grade, which strikes me as an awfully premature deterioration for such vital organs, especially considering the rest of me was likely to stumble along for several decades more.

Literally stumble, what with the affliction of astigmatism.

Indeed this seems to have been the case, as I’m still around more than 40 years after finishing second grade. Although I blame a general lack of balance, rather than my eyesight, for my occasional tumbles in the ensuing years.

Yet even though most of my other original accessories retain a gratifying percentage of their peak function, my visual decline, after more than a quarter century of relative stability, has recently accelerated.

It’s almost as though my eyes are reliving their childhood, so to speak.

Three years ago, an optometrist who had just given my corneas a good going over assured me, with what seemed a certain smugness, that this fuzzy future was inevitable.

He acted surprised, and possibly was even a trifle skeptical, when I told him that, at age 48, I didn’t have any great trouble reading a book without holding it at arm’s length.

But it was true.

In 2019.

The accuracy of that earlier statement, to my chagrin, has gradually shrunk ever since, to the point at which kernel of truth, so beloved by prevaricators, can today be measured in angstroms.

Indeed, my arms are scarcely long enough to keep any reading material at a suitable distance.

Beyond that threshold I can still discern objects with some precision.

Contact lenses — accessories I have relied on since my parents allowed me to give up the spectacles I had endured for most of elementary school — have continued to keep my distance vision relatively crisp.

Reading a book or scanning my phone, by contrast, has become a migraine-inducing exercise in frustration.

I returned recently to the same eye doctor. Rather than afford him the satisfaction of forcing me to concede, by way of answering his questions, that his prediction had proved true, I told him right off that I needed to buy reading glasses.

He accepted this without any obvious gloating, which I appreciated.

(I doubt he remembered our previous conversation on the matter in any detail, but I imagine my records — perhaps amended with an asterisk, that classic expression of skepticism — mentioned my 2019 claim about undiminished close up acuity.)

I have long had a pair of prescription eyeglasses, which I wear mainly in the evening, when my contacts sometimes leave my eyes feeling a bit dry and scratchy. The adjustment to wearing reading glasses wasn’t especially wearisome.

The optometrist suggested I buy multiple pairs, a recommendation that irked me slightly. He said something to the effect that it’s easy to misplace a pair of spectacles, which I suppose is reasonable.

But it seemed to me he was implying that my inability to focus is but a symptom of a more general decline, and one that will erode my mental as well as physical faculties.

I might as well prepare, his tone suggested, to worry not so much whether I can make out the words on the page but whether I can remember where I left the book.

As it turned out I did buy a package of three pairs of reading glasses.

But that’s only because the price was just a buck or so more than for a single pair, which struck me as a nifty bargain.

And I’ll have the optometrist know that I can locate each of the three pairs without taking even a moment to ponder where they might have gotten to.

***

I remember rather vividly the morning I met Ellen Jovin. I remember in particular how normal the episode was. It was in late August 2019, on the east side of Main Street in downtown Baker City.

The timing matters because I made Jovin’s acquaintance before 2020. Which is to say, we met in those halcyon days when those of us who aren’t virologists, if confronted by the word coronavirus, would have offered by way of definition something like “a hangover induced by excessive consumption of a light Mexican lager.”

(I’m pretty sure that’s what I would have suggested, anyway.)

Neither of us could have known, of course, that little more than half a year later, our casual encounter almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.

Among much else, the pandemic temporarily rendered previously mundane events, including a journalist interviewing a subject, rather more complicated.

On that mild and sunny late summer morning, though, I simply walked a couple blocks from my office, introduced myself and started jotting notes.

But it’s not only nostalgia that makes our meeting memorable, nearly three years after it happened. Jovin was sitting behind a table bearing a sign: “Grammar Table.”

Jovin, who lives in New York City and has degrees from Harvard and UCLA, was touring the U.S. that summer, setting up her table, with its peculiar sign, in cities big and small, inviting people to stop by and chat about grammatical matters.

I’m no grammarian but I have a great appreciation for the process of assembling words into sentences and paragraphs, a type of construction which can be as daunting as putting up a skyscraper or a great bridge.

(Albeit with less potential for ghastly wounds — a phrase that’s out of plumb can crumble, to be sure, but the debris is much less dangerous, to flesh and bone, compared with chunks of concrete or steel girders.)

I figured I would enjoy talking with Jovin, and I did. She had a palpable passion not only for proper punctuation, which can be challenging but at least is governed by specific rules, but also for the vastly more mysterious matter of trying to corral thoughts, which flit about with dizzying speed and rarely come into sharp focus, and round them into an order that rings with pleasant rhythm in the ear.

Jovin was also gathering material for a book, which went on sale nationwide on July 19 of this year. In “Rebel With A Clause” Jovin deftly combines an entertaining travelogue with an eminently useful guide to grammar — a curious hybrid that I suspect would have failed badly in hands less skilled than Jovin’s.

Jovin sent me a copy and I’ve enjoyed it greatly. It makes a fine companion to the peerless “Elements of Style” by Will Strunk and E.B. White and another of my favorite books about writing — William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.”