Say 'Rose-Colored Glasses' One More Time

I once had a friend from Ireland who cocked his head and shot me a not unkind side-eyed glance.  

“I sure wish I had a pair of those rose-colored glasses you walk around wearing all the time,” he said.

“What rose-colored glasses?” I asked, feeling the top of my head to see if I had forgotten that I had pushed some sunglasses up there. 

I also had a different friend who, when I said something stupid, would shake his head and give me a gentle smile and a light pat on the head and go, “Oh, Lisa…,” and I think that would have been a really appropriate gesture in the above moment. 

Side note: The head-patting friend was a really great-looking guy, a tall, dark, and handsome strapping specimen who literally—I watched it happen on at least a few different occasions—turned heads whenever he walked into any room.

He was meeting me and another friend of mine at a baseball game one summer, and my friend had never met him and had no idea what he looked like.  “Just watch for a really good-looking guy,” I instructed her. “Like, really good looking.  That’ll be him.”

“Uh, okay,” she said, rolling her eyes.

About 3 seconds later, I watched her jaw drop and her eyes widen as she looked at a spot over my shoulder.  “Holy cow,” she breathed.  She shook her head.  “There’s no way you can be talking about the guy I’m looking at right now,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.  “He’s way too hot to be your friend.”

I spun around and felt my face light up into a big smile as the guy she had just ogled broke into a jog to get to me and give me a huge hug. Yep, it was my buddy.

“No way!” my friend repeated, now laughing as I introduced the two.

“Told you!” I said, laughing too. The moment was sweet.  I love I told you so’s and what’s even better is that I get to use them all the time since I’m always right.

Anyway, back to the point of the post:  I don’t have my rose-colored glasses anymore.

Over the last two years, as those trusty rose-colored glasses that I had so blissfully worn my entire life were metaphorically ripped from my face and tossed to the ground (then run over and shattered by a 40-ton semi); when my worldview went from naïve Rose Nyland to cynical Dorothy Zbornak before you could sing “Thank you for being a jerk,” it was a little hard for me.  Okay, it was a lot hard for me.

My older sister made fun of me.  “It’s about time you caught up to the rest of us,” she said.  “Now let’s talk about those repressed memories you have about our unfeeling narcissistic mother.”

One thing at a time, big sis.  ONE THING AT A TIME.

No, unfortunately I don’t have the rose-colored glasses anymore.

But I DO have a kayak, and on some days, that’s almost as good.*

Cocoa Beach, Florida

*I just thought of something...was that last line a rose-colored glasses kind of line?  I CAN'T WIN

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Magic

Image
I used to be one of those people that things just happened for. It was part of the innocent charm I was born with:  without even realizing I was doing it, I simply believed good things would happen for me, and they did.  I’ve mentioned before that I was a person who ambled through life wearing rose-colored glasses, stopping to smell every flower.  I didn’t think about failure.   I didn’t really think about anything. I walked blissfully through life, letting good things befall me because I didn’t question that they would.   And they always did. My friends both marveled at it and hated me for it. Senior year of high school, I had no doubt that I would be voted homecoming queen.   So when the assistant principal’s voice crackled through the intercom and she started announcing the ten girls who had been chosen by their peers to be on homecoming court, I sat back in my chair and waited patiently.   I knew I would hear my name.   I wasn’t even stressed when she got to the ninth name
Read more

The Town Hag

Image
I have such a raging Type A personality now in my mid-forties that I get things done well before their deadlines.  It annoys most people because I brag about it all the time. Like, I’ll be in a teacher’s meeting and suggest that we move dates up: “Why wait until January 5 th to finalize grades for the quarter? Why doesn’t everyone just have them in before we leave for Christmas Break like I do to make it easier on the secretary since she’s the one who has to print the hard copies?”   I put that phrase “like I do” in italics because I hope it helps you to visualize how I drop my voice a hundred octaves and flare my nostrils self-importantly when I say something like that.   It sounds more like “LIKE IIIIIIIIIIIIIII DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” in the obnoxious tone of a braying beast. It reminds me of this annoying girl who lives a couple of neighborhoods over from me. I call her the town hag and I try to avoid her, but in a small-ish city like ours, you can’t help but r
Read more

Zip Lining

Image
Every year at the start of August*, when my pool days are dwindling and I’m getting the itch to get back into my classroom to set up, I begin to think, with a mixture of summer nostalgia and a touch of excitement for fall, of my favorite summer memories… …like the July several years ago when my dad got a tick on his back and allowed it to suckle until it was as fat as a pulsating cantaloupe because his metal spatula, as he explained later, wasn’t long enough to reach it and scrape it off.   So he decided to just “let it hang out for a while,” naming it Omar and using the spatula as a mirror so he could say hi to Omar’s reflection when he “felt a little lonely.” (My dad is a bachelor and all of us kids are long out of the house but don’t let him fool you when he’s trying to gain sympathy or attention—he prefers it that way until he has a tick stuck to his back.) My brothers and sisters and I didn’t know anything about Omar, but we began to get a bit concerned when we would visit Dad
Read more