I’m not much of a shopper, so other than the nonstop squinting I’ve been forced to do for the last year to keep the sun off of my baby blues, not replacing my lost sunglasses wasn’t all that hard.  I’m good at squinting, which I suppose accounts for all those cracks and crevasses along the corners of my eyes, and besides, finding sunglasses is never fun.  Over-priced plastic, a tag always placed to either dig into your nose when you try them on or make it impossible to actually tell what they look like, a little, narrow, warped mirror to look at yourself in, and then the worst part, my big wide head.  Unlike blue jeans, sunglasses aren’t something you want to squeeze yourself into.  There’s nothing sexy about tight sunglasses.

But I broke down and bought a pair the other day, and not only did they fit, but they came with several pairs of interchangeable lenses and a lifetime warranty, both of which sound great when the words first come out of the clerk’s mouth, but after a bit of thought, prove worthless.  A lifetime warranty?  I can’t ever remember owning a pair of sunglasses longer than two years before I left them sitting someplace I could never remember.  The warranty, unfortunately, doesn’t cover poor memory.  Oh well.  What about the interchangeable lenses, I ask the clerk.  That sounds pretty good.

Call me old-fashioned, but I kind of like my sunglasses dark and black, you know, to keep the sun out, and I was imagining several pair of dark lenses waiting there in the case on standby, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice to replace one of their lost or scratched comrades.  The interchangeable lenses, it turns out, came in yellow, orange, and one that I still haven’t figured out, clear.  Clear sunglasses?  The only thing I’ve come up with is that they’re for pulling pranks on all your blind friends.

But the boy sure likes those colored lenses, and takes every opportunity to sneak behind my back and change out the dark lenses for the colored ones.  He seems to prefer the orange, which I have to say, certainly does brighten up the world, almost to the point of being surreal.  Driving around in them kind of gives me the feeling I’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up on Mars.  As for the rest of the world, I’m not sure what they see when they look over and see me drive by in those things.  For all I know, they probably think they’ve just spotted an overweight Bono driving around town in an old mini-van.  I think of it as a low-grade Elvis sighting.  Too bad Bono isn’t famous for jumpsuits.  If he was, I think I’d buy a couple, just to complete the illusion.