"The Places Where Her Glasses Go"
by:
Virgilio F. De leon Jr.MD
My wife has this weird habit of losing her glasses, even though our master bedroom really isn't that big.
She'll get out of bed, touch her forehead, turn this way and that, and ask,
"O, asan na naman ang salamin ko?"
Where are my glasses again?
There are the usual places.
First is her office table, where she keeps an unusual plate that I jokingly call the V-plate because, well... it looks like that particular part of the female anatomy.
She always corrects me afterward by saying that it's a cloud.
I just nod and agree.
Then there is her dresser, where she actually has a designated holder in one corner. It's lined with velvet and fur and looks suspiciously like Santa's boot. This is where I usually put her glasses whenever she falls asleep while I'm around, or whenever I happen to find them lying somewhere they shouldn't be.
And if the glasses aren't in either of those two places, there is one more likely location: a particular part of our bed.
The part where I usually sleep.
We call this area the Abyss.
The Abyss is normally inhabited by our stuffed sharks, Shiloh and Shasha, along with Aven's gift to us—a microbeaded lobster whom I lovingly named Pinchy.
But the Abyss contains much more than marine life.
It holds hair clips, her phone, the TV remote, and an impressive assortment of things she may have been holding when she eventually fell asleep.
Most of the time, her glasses can be found in one of those three places.
But that particular night, they were nowhere.
We checked the office table.
Nothing.
The Santa-boot holder.
Empty.
The Abyss.
The sharks and Pinchy were there, of course, along with half the contents of our bedroom.
But no glasses.
My wife finally sighed and said something that I found ridiculously cute.
She wished her glasses would simply return to her hand like Thor's Mjolnir.
And, naturally, my brain immediately supplied the image.
My wife standing in the middle of the bedroom, holding out her hand dramatically as her glasses flew across the room—
whoosh!
—only to fly straight past me and into her waiting palm.
I don't know why that amused me so much.
Maybe because after being married long enough, you start developing your own little mythology for ordinary things.
The Abyss.
The V-plate.
The Santa-boot glasses holder.
The legendary glasses that apparently deserve to be summoned like a magical weapon.
Eventually, we found them.
They were sitting quietly beside her dresser the entire time.
Of course they were.
We had dinner afterward.
Nothing particularly exciting happened.
No dragons.
No magic.
No Mjolnir-like return of the glasses.
Just the two of us having dinner after solving yet another very small mystery in our very ordinary home.
And somehow, I think that is what I like most about our life together.
Sometimes happiness isn't found in grand adventures.
Sometimes it's simply knowing where your wife's glasses are—
even when she doesn't.
