How many sunglasses will be lost forever because COVID choked our stick supply? We'll never know.
Don't worry, you'll understand in a minute.
The other day my wife was out weeding — I suppose that's redundant, because there's not a lot of weeding that needs to be done inside — and the neighbors stopped to chat. They were pushing a stroller, which contained a small, adorable child. The boy was playing with his mom's sunglasses, and because his parents were distracted, he dropped them down the sewer grate.
I know what you're thinking: Those drain to our critical waterways. Next thing you know, an endangered turtle will be swimming along, and suddenly wonder why everything got dark.
The neighbor laughed and shrugged it off: "Well, that'll teach me to turn away for a second." If I'd been there I might have said something trenchant like, "He's discovering gravity. Maybe he'll be the next Isaac Newton!" And then there would have been an uncomfortable silence, because we really don't need another Isaac Newton. Kid grows up, goes to college, tells everyone he's going to discover gravity — at some point someone has to take him aside and explain "it's been done."
My wife recounted the tale and said she felt partly responsible. "If I hadn't stopped them to talk, he wouldn't have dropped it down the sewer."
"If you hadn't stopped them, they might have been hit by a car as they crossed the street," I pointed out. "All things considered, I think they'd prefer to lose the glasses."
"We should get the sunglasses out of the sewer," she said, a phrase you would normally expect to encounter in a dream where someone is holding a fish and standing on one leg in a bucket of honey. "We could use a stick with some tape on the end, or a hook."
