On my bachelor party trip to Atlantic City, one of my colleagues fitted me with his Serengeti shades – the classic wire-framed gradient sunglasses that made me look …well, like you’d expect a bachelor party-goer in AC to look. As it turns out, I cleaned up at the craps table, and with my ill-gotten gains I returned to California and bought a pair of Ray-Bans. Unlike any previous sunglasses I’d bought since reverting to contacts in 1992, though, these had brown lenses. Polarized, of course, with the result that I had glasses that altered colors but did an amazing job enhancing contract. Green foliage, for instance, popped like never before. And they were the shades I took to England on the honeymoon, with the result that I started thinking of the amber as my own rose-colored glasses – only when I wore them, things did legitimately seem to go better.
Then in June 2006, I sat on them. I still have them, but they’re not really wearable at this point, so I drove up to Sunglass Hut and bought a pair of New Wayfarers (RB2132) in tortoiseshell brown with the amber polarized lenses. And since it was the middle of a heat wave, I kept driving north until I saw fog, mainly to get proof that God had not abandoned us to heat and death. And amazingly, a day or two later the heat broke and things got back to normal.
June 2006 was when my surrogate big sister moved in with us for a year, and when we moved offices in Cupertino to a new off-campus facility that provided us with tons of space and me with a new office with better air conditioning. Things were much greener there – actual trees, as opposed to a lot of dirt and railroad tracks. When you cross the tracks around here in the summer, and there’s nothing but cloudless blue sky and still air and dead grass and dirt, it just feels hot as hell even if it’s only about 80. But we had lots of willows around and that most precious of commodities…shade. I had friends in town for WWDC, I had a pre-production iPod jammed in one pocket, I had an Intel-based 13-inch laptop at home…it was probably the tail end of the high-water mark of my time at Cupertino Hexachrome Produce, Ltd.
Summer of 2006 meant World Cup soccer, followed by the race to pick out a team for the Premiership. We stumbled into Newcastle United, and gave them as loyal a following as we could manage, and they promptly tanked their way right out of the EPL a couple years later. And then I lost Setanta on the cable, and that’s how I wound up casting back and forth between Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur (with occasional sidelong glances at Everton). It was also the swan song for Danny; over 200,000 miles on the odometer and with strange sounds coming from brakes and axles and engine alike, it was obvious that the time was coming when I’d need a new car (and the research hit fever pitch pretty quickly).
Now the new car has 60,000 miles and we’re preparing for new roommates again. But the most remarkable thing in this whole tale is that five years later, I still have the same pair of Wayfarers. I don’t know anyone else who’s gotten five years out of expensive sunglasses without losing or destroying them, myself included – except for Wayfarers. The moral of the story: if you’re going to spend the dough, buy classic.