Driving While Old

It’s night-time and the headlights coming at me on the small, two-lane road seem to have a halo around them. I’m mesmerized by the blinding beams of yellow light but, fortunately, reflexively shy away from them. Somehow, I’m able to figure out where the road bends to the left, only because I’ve driven this road through my neighborhood a thousand times.

But I don’t like driving it at night anymore. In fact, I don’t like driving at night pretty much anywhere nowadays.

My vision has never been great—I used to cheat on the vision test back in elementary school, memorizing the letters of the chart at the front of the classroom as kids who went before me would recite them. I started wearing glasses in my teens, and as I’ve gotten older the prescriptions have gotten stronger and the lenses thicker.

Still, with those glasses, I saw well enough, I thought, to read any contractual fine print or check out a food label.

But night driving is a different matter, at least it has been the last few years—particularly when I’m driving in an area I don’t know. Sure, my reaction time may not be what it was and my motor skills not as sharp as they used to be, but this new unease is really because I don’t see as well as I used to.

Where is the turn? How sharp is that curve? What did that street sign say? Why does that damn car coming at me have its brights on?

And I know I’m not alone. As we get older, the crystalline lenses in our eyes lose some of their elasticity and the eye is no longer able to produce a clear image. The pupils shrink with age and less light gets into your eyes. We have fewer rod cells in our retinas, the ones responsible for the black-and-white vision that’s essential for night driving. Our eyes struggle more with glare, find it harder to judge distances and need more light to see clearly.

Then there are cataracts. Like many of us, I have them, in both eyes. (As my ophthalmologist recently told me, when you get to a certain age, you’ve either had cataract surgery or will soon have cataract surgery.)

But my cataracts, he told me, are still too small to do anything about. They’re big enough, however, to emphasize the headlights’ glare, big enough to create that halo effect I now see more often.   

I’ve asked my friends. No, I’m not the only one who is increasingly on edge when behind the wheel after dark—needing glasses or not, with cataracts gone or not yet.

Still I do it. Ain’t no subway where I live. I don’t want to limit myself to only seeing friends at midday. I want to still be able to go to an evening movie or have dinner out. I don’t want to be trapped at home, when the sun goes down, watching bad television.

But I get behind the wheel after sunset with trepidation: looking away from those glaring headlights; employing fifty years of driving experience to figure out where the road is supposed to go; hoping it mostly goes straight.

Neil Offen, one of the editors of this site, is the author of Building a Better Boomer, a hilarious guide to how baby boomers can better see, hear, exercise, eat, sleep and retire better. He has been a humor columnist for four decades and on two continents. A longtime journalist, he’s also been a sports reporter, a newspaper and magazine editor, a radio newsman, written a nationally syndicated funny comic strip and been published in a variety of formats, including pen, crayon, chalk and, once, under duress, his wife’s eyebrow pencil. The author or co-author of more than a dozen books, he is, as well, the man behind several critically acclaimed supermarket shopping lists. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.