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  "path": "/you-wouldnt-think-having-eyes-is-a-challenge-and-yet-here-we-are",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-26T13:41:56.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "Elder Wisdom",
    "bad brains",
    "eyesight",
    "getting old",
    "old man yells at what might be cloud"
  ],
  "textContent": "I have a sort of hazy memory to share. I was a kid, riding in my parents' car on a bright sunny day, and we were sitting in traffic on a bridge over the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia. I looked to my right, where you could see several miles of the highway stretching off toward Dulles Airport. Hundreds of cars streamed in both directions.\n\nFar off, _wayyyyy_ the hell out there, where the cars were just little dots, the sunlight glinted a little differently off the chrome armature of a police cruiser's rooftop lights, on the half of the highway headed toward our bridge. Because our family's succession of beater cars often had (or seemed to have, at the scale of a small child's experience) things like busted taillights and expired tags, and because by then I'd been in the backseat at least a couple of times when my dad had gotten alarmingly irate about being pulled over, I had learned the habit of looking out for cop cars and speed traps. So I said, to no one in particular, \"There's a cop coming,\" and pointed.\n\nWhat made this memory stick in my mind was that when my mom, in the passenger seat, turned and looked, what I was pointing at was so far beyond the range of her eyesight that she could not discern that there was _anything at all_ there, much less that there were individual vehicles, much less that one of them could be identified as a police car headed our way, distant enough that we'd have to wait a couple of minutes to be able to verify it. For all that she could see, I could have been pointing at the clear blue sky. I might just as well have told her I saw Neil Armstrong's bootprint on the surface of the moon.",
  "title": "You Wouldn’t Think Having Eyes Is A Challenge, And Yet Here We Are"
}