Michael, Hans, thanks for your input.
The chips in my windshield are tiny and have been there a long time. At least a couple of them I inherited from the PO.
I went to "Speedy Glass" this morning. They advertise pretty much exactly what you guys describe. Turns out the supervisor there is an acquaintance of mine from the local astronomy club.
I learned that they don't want to fix "pits," which is what I've got. I guess they distinguish this from "cracks" or "chips."
They were willing to tackle just one of the whatevers, but when they looked more closely, they said it had been worked on before. Not by me! Oh, well, I guess they didn't make it any worse.
He told me that even after the treatment -- when it works -- the tiny little mark on the windshield is still visible. That kind of defeats the purpose for me. I'm not so concerned about the safety of the windshield in a roll-over because I would probably be dead anyway. (Just kidding. Don't want it to happen in the first place.) But I was hoping these guys could address the cosmetics of having these little dings in the glass. In a perfect world, they could run their chemicals over the whole windshield and put an end to the myriad of microscopic dings that are only visible when driving directly into the sunlight. I presume the windshield didn't leave the factory with those!
The good news is that connections have pull and the guy wrote me up as a "family discount" and it didn't cost me anything to learn what I learned. That's significant because I don't have collision/damage insurance on my SL. I guess insurance claims are the meat & potatoes of their business. That makes sense.
The bad news is that he looked up our model in their global database and he insists that the windshield sealer used to bond the windshield to the window frame is completely unavailable. So even if I wanted to buy a new windshield, he couldn't install it. I know at least one of us here -- Marcus (aka Jordan) -- has a new windshield, so there must be a way around this problem.
Because I think my windshield is original and still quite serviceable, I plan not to worry about it any more.