How many fingers?

I had a regular eye exam the other day. Nothing has changed in the past year. Since having my cataracts removed a few years ago I no longer require bifocals, but I now keep reading glasses all over my living space and routinely take my car glasses back into my house and have to go back out to put them back in the coffee cup holder of my car so I can forget to bring them into the grocery store tomorrow to read the label on a can of beans.

Am I getting too specific?

My floaters are as good or as bad as they ever have been. I can still remember using an eye cup to wash out my eyes when I was 12 years old thinking that the squiggly things in my vision were gunk on the surface of my eyes, not bits of crap floating around, hence the name floaters, inside my eyes. Or maybe inside my brain.

Either way I could do nothing about them.

This time there was a new test. The assistant who ran the routine stuff of putting drops in my eyes and shining bright lights into them while having me glare into his face, “Look right here, please, and do this impossible thing,” had a new test he was going to perform.

“Keep your eyes right here, (pointing to his nose,) and I am going to hold up my hand on the periphery. Tell me this;

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I thought. But I did the test, of course.

I dutifully said, “Three, two, five, one, six (huh?)” getting them surprisingly correct. But after the test, I said…

“That reminded me of 1984,” I said.

“?” he said.

“Have you read 1984?”

“No,”

“1984 is a book about political oppression and psychological indoctrination. A man is tortured to make him see what the current government wanted him to see, not what his eyes actually reported to him. They kept asking, ‘How much is 2 plus 2?’ claiming that the true answer was ‘5.’

“Eventually, when O’Brien, his torturer, held up the fingers on his hand minus the thumb, saying, ‘How many fingers do you see?’ Winston Smith actually saw five fingers.

“That’s when they knew they had him.”

What a funny memory.

With no application today, of course.

By the way, how many genders are there today? I forget.

Maybe you can enlighten me, Mr. O’Brien.