42 - 3/10/11 - Marshside Storytime VI

Initial Impressions

Christopher Setterlund

42 – 3/10/11

Marshside Storytime VI – Not Without My Glasses

This edition of Marshside Storytime at Initial Impressions is a classic tale of love and loss, not knowing what you have until it’s gone.  Nobody likes to feel like they are getting older, the signs start to come with occasional wrinkles or gray hairs.  Getting glasses is one of those things as well.  For some people it is just another stage of life, for others the glasses become like an arch enemy.  For Maui they became an arch enemy.

            He would talk non-stop about how much he hated his glasses from the moment he got them even though they did help him to see better.  It was what the represented that made him hate them.  In time he began to wear them less and less, leaving them in his truck, or at home conveniently.  I was set up as the middle man, to read the orders to him so that he would not have to use his glasses.

            His worked well when I was there but on days off he was forced to swallow his pride and wear the glasses.  One day he had them on while he was doing some prep for lunch and dinner; this was back when we did breakfast as well.  He had been working for a few hours when he realized that he was not wearing his glasses anymore.

            First off, I don’t know how you can be wearing your glasses on your face and then not be but not noticed it for hours.  That’s another story though.  So Maui took to looking all over the prep room, in the walk-in fridge, in the freezer, there was no sign of his glasses.  He went out to his truck, nothing, he checked in the bathrooms and out by the coffee makers just in the off chance he had dropped them there.  The glasses were gone.

            He checked the little nook where the phone and our time cards were, nothing.  He looked underneath all of the counters, tables, over the river and through the woods but there was no sign.  His frantic search surprised me since he always said how much he hated his glasses, but he said it was more of the fact that they were prescription and expensive not because he liked them.  Finally he decided that if he stopped looking for them they would suddenly appear.

            The timer went off and Maui realized that the chickens he had put in the huge pizza oven were done so he opened the middle door and slid the sheet pan of steaming chicken out.  It was then that I heard a groan of shock and disbelief.  There on the sheet pan among the chicken sat Maui’s glasses!  They were almost totally melted to the metal and covered in chicken juice.

            He had taken them off and put them in the front pocket of his chef’s coat and while he was working on it they had slipped out and landed silently on the sheet pan among the raw chicken.  Maui had cooked his own glasses.  Sadly they had to be tossed and he had to rummage through a few pairs in the lost and found to find something suitable until he was able to go and get a new pair from the eye doctor.  I think he had worn a pair with tiger stripes on them for a moment before we all suggested they looked really stupid.

            So there you have it another classic story of love and loss.  You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and Maui didn’t appreciate his glasses until he cooked them and had to wear terrible tiger striped ones afterward.  That was several years ago and to this day he still hates his glasses, but anytime I bring up laser eye surgery he gets angrier.  I said it is safe but he will not hear of it; maybe he secretly loves his glasses and doesn’t want to get rid of them?  Who knows?  Cheers!