how can I make safari menu bar visible

It sounds like you are in Safari's full-screen mode. Press the escape key to return normal function.

Well, that's a start. I, too, find the fonts too small on some of my newer Macs. I get around it by doing System Preferences > Displays > "Display" Tab. Check the button that says "Scaled." Other resolutions will then be available. Select one that has smaller numbers than the current setting: Example. If your current setting is 1280x800, you should have an option for 1152x720--try it. Everything will be bigger at the latter setting.

I do not know if this works with Retina displays. I don't think they use Retina on the MacBook Air. I have done this with my 13-inch macBook Pro non-retina with no loss of sharpness.

I'm out most of the evening--will check back in the morning with more stuff.

I survived! We led the music for New's Years Eve Mass at 5:30PM and then headed straight to dinner theater with friends. I'd hoped to be home by 10 or 11 but we decided to watch the new year come in with said friends. I didn't wake up until around 8AM today but, having ingested only token amounts of the fermented grape last night, am in fine shape!

I looked at an older version of Safari on a 2004 PowerMac I keep active and, as far back as version 4, there was no option to show button names with the icons. If that is important you can look at FireFox or some of the other browsers. FireFox still has the text/icon/text+icon option:

FF is here:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Even with changing the screen resolution, there is one more helpful function within Safari for those of us with the wisdom of age and the vision problems to match. From Safari's View menu:

choose "Customize Toolbar..." to get this screen:

Note the "A" icon pair. Drag this combo to your toolbar and you have a zoom command available in case some sites (Apple is notorious for this) use a too-small font. In conjunction with this icon combo, you can also instruct Safari to zoom the entire screen or just the text, using an option near the bottom of the "View" menu.

What size iMac screen did you order? I have a 2010 27-incher and have the desktop resolution set to 1920x1080, down from its default of 2560x1440. My wife's 21.5-inch 2011 has a default of 1920x1080 so is usable for my eyes as is.

Remember when choosing from the array of resolutions offered that some are for external monitors that may not have the same aspect ratio of width:height as the built-in display. For fully filling the display without cutting off the ends of the desktop or distorting it, you need a res that has a 16:9 ratio. The quick way to check is with a calculator. If you divide the larger res number by the smaller, any combo that will work on your 16:9 iMac monitor will have a quotient of 1.777777...

2560 divided by 1440 = 1.777777...

1920 divided by 1080 = 1.777777...

a quick check with the calculator will insure you have the best image fit to your screen.

Well that grew long. TIme for the morning walk! May 2014 bring good things to you and yours!

Well, your two sentence response cleared this up for me. Thank you.