From age 7 to my early 40s, I only needed one pair of glasses for distance. I mean one pair at a time. My eyesight was very bad, and while I could read without my glasses, I had to hold the book very close. It was usually more comfortable to read with my glasses but I would sometimes do the one-eye-at-a-time because the book was so close when I was reading in bed. It was so great when they invented ebooks for phones, because I could just make the print bigger and read in bed without my glasses.

In my late 30s, my distance vision started getting better a little less bad. Apparently, most people lose near vision as their eyes change shape in their 40s, but a few people get lucky and some of the change helps the distance vision as well. (Same thing happened to my father, so I recognized it. When my eye doctor at the time failed to recognize it, I changed doctors.) Then I started losing near vision and had to get reading glasses. My distance glasses let me focus at anything farther than arms' length, my reading glasses let me focus at anything closer than arms' length, and there was a little overlap where I could put my computer screen. In 2020, there stopped being any overlap.

I might try the bifocals upside down, but I don't know if I need to. Changing glasses when I'm wearing hat and mask is hard, and it would be almost as hard taking off and putting on the same glasses. So far, the bifocals have let me see what I wanted when I was sitting still. I'm looking forward to trying them for reading small Hebrew print outdoors (my old reading glasses didn't darken in sunlight, and these do.)