Gotta Go Your Own Way

So on the list of top 10 things to avoid this seemed to rival only gas station sushi and the awkward encounter with the internist about that rash you can’t quite see. It all started when I inadvertently turned on the little night lights attached to my $23 reading glasses. I looked like Cub-legend Harry Caray trying to maneuver his way to the circuit breakers in a power outage. My daughter Sophie says my night light readers are giving off tremendous “boomer vibes dad,” and that I should probably avoid wearing them out in public to save myself, but what do kids know about eyesight anyway.  Never one to listen to my kids for fashion advice, I decided to wear the night-light glasses to the Fleetwood Mac revival, which at first thought seemed like a great idea until Wilma the usher person escorted me off to the senior aisle, mistaking me for an 85-year-old, obviously blinded by the lights when I tried to read the ticket stub. It was a real demotion until Fred and Ethel told me about the free lemonade and front row seating. I was suddenly transported to 1977, wearing my ridiculously awkward glasses with the funny night lights just a stone’s throw from the band, and avoiding any embarrassment if I were sitting by my family. The bright lights from the Foster Grant 2.5’s shined so bright they somehow got attention from Stevie Nick’s stand-in and turned my vision ailment into an on-stage duet with the Fleet themselves. Vision may be our country’s next great epidemic someday if you ask me—underappreciated until the class of 2050 can’t graduate because they can’t find the stage—but at least on this night, under the dark tent where boomer vibes got me a front row seat, my own blurry vision condition became so cool it got me an encore. Fred was so excited he even offered me half of his egg salad sandwich as I came down from the stage. As the Fleetwood Mac would say, sometimes if you’ve been ‘fraid of changin’—well sometimes time makes you bolder, children get older, and even though I may be gettin’ older too…I gotta go my own way…