Gotta wear shades

No, I don’t think I’m Joe Cool.


I think I’m the person who forgot to put her glasses away in their case when driving to watch Kid One sing at an outdoor festival and then fetch her home. I am also the person who didn’t realize the glasses were in her lap when she got out of the car, thus dropping them on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago. And I’m the person who didn’t know my glasses were gone until I got home and looked in the case for them. By which time they had been run over and smashed to the proverbial smithereens. I know. Tony found them in the gutter.

Further, I am the person that had only one pair of clear prescription glasses, even though I know I have an unusual prescription that no eye-care store has ever had in stock. So I am now the person stuck wearing prescription sunglasses day and night, indoors and out, for the next one to two weeks.

Seriously, it’s a little (OK, a lot) weird to wear shades all the time. I can’t really get by with out them; if I didn’t have them on now, the screen at the end of my fingertips would be nothing but a vaguely glowing blur, and the difference between my two eyes gives me a headache and makes me nauseated within 15 minutes if I try walking around without corrective lenses.

Baby Three, 18 months old today, doesn’t much like having me in sunglasses all the time. She tries to take them off my face, then looks at my eyes and smiles and lets me put them back on. Then she finds her sunglasses.

Everyone else I deal with seems to be coping (except for me, because I feel compelled to explain the sunglasses to everyone I see). But I give my sincere thanks to my colleague Ala, who told me the sunglasses provide a don’t-mess-with-me kind of look. “I like it,” she said.

Tony would be OK with it, except that it had the indirect result of him getting a flat tire. Because he didn’t want me driving around in sunglasses after dark, he drove me to and picked me up from a meeting I had to go to. But when we got home, he ran over a shard of broken glass near the curb (broken glass, not glasses), cutting a gouge in the sidewall of the front tire and making the whole adventure even more expensive.

But now, at least, I have another story to use on the kids when they don’t put their things away. I can say, ”Do I have to remind about the time I forgot to put my glasses away?” and they can roll their eyes and put their belongings away because it’s just easier than listening to another lecture.