The Magnifying Glass

Dear Friends:
The Magnifying Glass

I sat in my office at home, entrapped by myriad means of communication begging use, and there lay a magnifying glass, another crutch in the pursuit of longevity. You can tell a lot about a person who has a magnifying glass.

Mine is a very nice one, a gift, high-powered enough to disc em the millions of tiny grids that comprise a computer screen - miniature worlds within a world. It enables the eye to look closely at a lot of things, like the tiny words in credit card disclosures that say Gotcha>." I even looked at parts of my skin - don't recommend that you do that - depression descended. Apart from decoration and as a practical aid in reading, a magnifying glass no longer holds the creative and adaptive uses made of it in childhood.

You remember those tiny plastic magnifying glasses that used to come in the boxes of Cracker Jacks, don't you? Small, low-powered plastic ones -- pretty harmless except in the hands of pre-adolescent boys. Not like the nice magnifying glass I now have, antler-handled, a sacrifice of great loss of some deer or elk; no, the small Cracker Jack magnifying glasses we had were perfect for use on sunny days ..... starting small leaf fires, burning holes in your friend's homework paper when he wasn't looking, burning holes in his good shirt also. When held to the neck of an unsuspecting friend, it'd bum a nice blister on the skin before you got smacked, but it produced a lot of laughs to those in on the joke. Once I even wrote my name by round bum marks on a paper. And No, it never occurred to us to use these incendiary devices as a chemistry experiment with gasoline. Harmless pranks by bored little boys. Oh, the longing for the return of such days!

But alas, magnifying glasses have become practical tools of enablement, all the fun of creative use now just a memory. My magnifying glass lies next to my Bible to offer assistance in reading some of the small print. It occurred to me that this Book has some magnifying-glass components as well, and among other things it is able to discern and to bum through a lot of exterior things too - things like pride and pretense, for example. I'm real careful when I use this Book!

Well, like I said, you can tell a lot about a person who has a magnifying glass.

Bud

1/20/2007