Pirating Sunglasses

My mom was always a great parent volunteer when I was in elementary school: she helped out at the school library, chaperoned field trips, and was the classroom mother who organized the holiday parties. With all that activity, it's no surprise that she also agreed to run a booth at the school carnival. She and a fellow mother ran a pirate game that was actually pretty cool for kids of that age... and, come to think of it, I would still enjoy now.

Creatively, my mom constructed two large pirate ships out of cardboard that stood opposite of each other. For the game, kids split up into two teams and got behind each ship where they found buckets of water and sponges. From there, they attacked their rival buccaneers by hurling sponges in a wet pirate brawl.

There was one important rule: all little pirates had to wear protective eyewear. I'm not sure how a soaked sponge would poke an eye out, or why an accident leading to an eyepatch would do anything but increase the game's pirate reputation, but, you know, safety first. Rather than using goggles, my mom brought a bunch of plastic neon sunglasses my sibling and I used to wear.

Somehow, at the end of the carnival, all of the sunglasses went missing. My mom speculated that the other mother had "accidentally" taken them during the cleanup process, but they were never returned. This was pretty upsetting to me because, like any child of the 80s, I loved neon colors, particularly on things as fashionably cool as sunglasses.

More than a year later, while my family was on a road trip on a Vermont highway, we coincidentally found ourselves driving in the lane adjacent to the other carnival mom's minivan. As our families waved to one another, we were able to see that the kids in the backseat were wearing the pilfered neon sunglasses.

It might have been a pirate game, but clearly somebody had taken the pillaging aspect too literally. Here they probably thought they were safe to finally wear the glasses now that they were across multiple state lines, but we caught them in the act! There was no point in confronting them on the theft; just seeing the kids wear those cheap, silly, neon sunglasses was enough to convince me how dorky and unstylish they had been all along. Good riddance, I decided. They could keep them, as far as I was concerned - I wasn't the one who needed sunglasses to cover my guilty eyes anyway.