The Loupe

I carry a jeweler’s loupe in my jacket pocket most days, the kind on a cord you can pull out and hold up to your eye in one motion, and I started carrying it years ago strictly for glass, checking for hairline cracks and flea bites on the rims of old pressed glass pieces that you can’t always see with the naked eye under bad lighting. It’s a small, specific tool for a small, specific job. Except it didn’t stay that specific, and now I catch myself reaching for it for things it was never meant for.

The habit crept over into books first, checking foxing patterns and paper quality closer than I strictly need to for pricing purposes, just because I’ve got the thing in my pocket already and it’s easier to look than not to. Then it crept into games, which is the part that actually surprised me, holding a component up to check whether a chit’s edge has that clean factory cut or whether it’s been trimmed by hand at some point in its life, whether a card’s coating is starting to separate at a corner in a way you’d miss at arm’s length.

I don’t think this makes me better at my job, exactly, or at least not proportionally to how much time it eats. Most of what I’m looking at through the loupe doesn’t change the price I’d have set anyway, I could eyeball ninety percent of these calls and land in the same place. But there’s something settling about the ritual of it now, pull it out, hold it up, actually look instead of assuming, and I think somewhere along the way it stopped being purely functional and became more like a habit I use to slow myself down when I’m moving through a lot too fast.

My father never used one, still doesn’t, says his eyes were always good enough and he trusts them over any tool, which is true for him and has never once been true for me. I used to be a little embarrassed pulling it out in front of a customer, like I was performing carefulness rather than just being careful, but nobody’s ever actually reacted badly to it. Mostly people seem to find it reassuring, somebody taking the extra step to look closely at something before deciding what it’s worth.

It’s a small object to build this much of a routine around, a couple dollars’ worth of glass and metal on a cord, and I don’t know that I could explain to someone who doesn’t do this work why it matters to me the way it does. But I’ve had it in my pocket most days for going on a decade now, and the few times I’ve forgotten it at home I’ve noticed the absence all day, reaching for a habit that isn’t there.