Reader....

December 15, 2015 4:10 PM

The Traveling Old-Fashioned Glasses (SL Metropolitan Diary)
posted by roomthreeseventeen (20 comments total)

A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
posted by GuyZero at 4:12 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Weapon? I'm not sure if I want to avoid your parties, or if I'm desperate for an invitation. I may have some old-fashioned glasses I could spare....
posted by ghost phoneme at 4:34 PM on December 15, 2015

Is this about drinking glasses for the cocktail known as an "old fashioned"? Cause I read it about 5 times trying to figure out who buys a case of old-fashioned eye glasses specifically for parties.
posted by bleep at 4:47 PM on December 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

Huh. Looks like it, yeah. I thought they were eyeglasses, too.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 4:50 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is a cute story but is that the whole thing? Nine sentences?
posted by kenko at 5:06 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I liked the piece for its brevity, and felt it was well balanced. It conveys the necessary information: there was this fun thing they did back in the day that brought a couple together. The reader can fill in the rest.

The traveling glasses persist (I don't want to hear otherwise), a friendly custom carried on by people who don't have any other direct ties to the person who started it. It's an illustration of how a community can form and persist even as new individuals enter and older ones move on.
posted by ghost phoneme at 6:09 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Present at the first party: E.B. White, Hemingway, Donald Barthelme, and O. Henry.
posted by gwint at 6:40 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

All it does is convey information. We got some glasses and threw a party and my roommate got married. I dunno, it doesn't even sound like a story to me, just a story's summation by a literal-minded person.
posted by kenko at 6:50 PM on December 15, 2015

Is this about drinking glasses for the cocktail known as an "old fashioned"?

Capitalization is important kids. This was like an example from Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

All it does is convey information. We got some glasses and threw a party and my roommate got married. I dunno, it doesn't even sound like a story to me, just a story's summation by a literal-minded person.

I thought it was interesting, but if you give me a bit I can flesh it out to a couple dozen pages. I will probably describe everything in the room and reflect back to an imaginary childhood.
posted by bongo_x at 7:03 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"I will ...reflect back to an imaginary childhood."
Alternatively you could reflect forward to an imaginary childhood.
That might be more interesting.
posted by Floydd at 8:14 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Uh...can someone explain it to me? I'm guessing that the phrase "made them freely available as a loan" is just supposed to be "made them freely available" because I don't see how the glasses would be returned. And how do you get a phone number for a roaming set of glasses? It seems like the only people who would directly be in the know would be the person currently with the glasses and the person who gave them to her. So the giver or the receiver started a "Spread the word, the glasses are currently in the possession of Suzie Smith (555-1212), call the number if you want to borrow some glasses or invite a stranger to your next party" word-of-mouth campaign so that someone somewhere would give the number a try and invite Suzie to a party? What's up with Suzie (or the giver) where they figured this would be better than just lending the glasses out to someone at their next party?

Basically, I guess I just don't really understand the story.
posted by Bugbread at 9:06 PM on December 15, 2015

Best I can tell it’s about someone’s Pince-nez with a tracking device attached.
posted by bongo_x at 9:14 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's a quaint, alcoholic '60s pay-it-forward.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:37 PM on December 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

I quite appreciate a writer who can keep an anecdote to its natural, spare length.
posted by tavella at 10:12 PM on December 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think this is awesome and I'm really glad you posted it. So, it is the beginning to a story. The story tells of a more trusting time when strangers shared a case of glasses. and then, who knows where they went? I love the idea that they're still out there, circulating, at some parties you're not invited to among some hip people who may not even know the provenance of their old-fashioned glasses. I love this. Of course, I am a big fan of community ownership of anything, and of viral/sequential/networked ventures. Maybe these glasses aren't still around any more, but why not start a new case? IT's a great idea.
posted by Miko at 10:20 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

For the unfamiliar: the "Metropolitan Diary" section of the New York Times is a once a week column in which readers can write in with brief anecdotes of the "only in New York" moments they experience (think like a cross between the web site "Overheard in NY" and Readers' Digest's "Life In These United States" humor pages). In the print version the whole column consists of maybe four or five such anecdotes like this, which explains this one piece's brevity.

(I actually submitted a couple stories once, but they never got picked up; one was an exchange I heard at the Museum of Natural History, and the other was a time when I saw a woman inexplicably using charades to try to tell her friends where she wanted to go, and I got so caught up in watching that I ended up realizing the right answer and shouting it out to them from about half a block away.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:05 PM on December 15, 2015 [8 favorites]

I read that in the voice of someone from a Whit Stillman movie.
posted by teponaztli at 11:21 PM on December 15, 2015

If absolutely nothing else (and I liked the story), this serves as an introduction to the fascinating Metropolitan Diary, which EmpressCallipygos explains above.

I enjoyed this entry. And I'll keep reading.
posted by bryon at 2:28 AM on December 16, 2015

I wear pince-nez glasses as my daily eyesight-improvement tool (for the past...can it be twenty years?!) and have a collection of various other spectacles...so you can imagine my disappointment in the story. Since so many people are also disappointed in the lack of eyeglass stories here, I'll provide some anecdotes.

At my first "big boy" job, I learned after working there several years that the big, powerful VP of Marketing went home after my first day and excitedly told his wife that the guy he saw at the grocery store one time -- that guy with the glasses! -- now works for him.

When people ask how my glasses stay on, my go-to answer is "Magic!" with a little hand-flourish. Then I give them the real answer, because my little 'magic' move in the presence of strangers is slightly embarrassing, but I can't not do it.

I'm not the only one, though; via the internet I've met some other people that wear pince-nez, but few who have a practical pince-nez as a daily wearer. At the Elkhorn flea market in Wisconsin, there's a guy who also wears pince-nez, and every time we cross paths we exclaim, "Nice glasses!" at each other.

One of the people I met on the internet was a glasses collector, who was trying to pare down his collection; he sent me a box with about twenty pairs of old pince-nez glasses in the style I wear -- which has been helpful, because the frames are relatively fragile (the mechanics which run the nose-clip part in particular), and his donation has been useful because I'm on my fifth frame, having broken four, and parts on this one came from others two different times in recent years.

People don't realize that I'm not wearing antique lenses; they are surprised at the fact that, if you go to somebody other than a "glasses in one hour!" place, the optician has a connection with a lab that can grind lenses in any power, style, and shape. Bring them any frame you want, you can probably get modern lenses fitted for it. I had one make me sign a "if we break your frames we're not responsible" statement, but the work is always done so well I imagine that the lab people, bored by a stream of 'normal' glasses, enjoy the challenge when my frames come across their desk.

And, sadly, I'm anticipating that in future years I may be forced to give up my pince-nez due to age. I'm at about the highest prescription that can be put into the high-index lenses that fit this type of glasses, let alone the bifocal part I'm getting close to needing, so if my eyesight gets worse I won't be able to get lenses anymore. Although I won't go to a comparably old frame at that point, I'm set on going with the Browline style of glasses that I identify with my grandpa, which he was wearing in nearly every picture of him from when he was my age.

And, lastly, I love The Matrix because of watching Lawrence Fishburne doing the little clip move to take his pince-nez glasses on and off, that's unique to pince-nez and looks a little silly when you watch someone doing it; the model of pince nez he wears are nearly identical to mine.

Lastly, my favorite non-wearable glasses in my collection are this pair, which I believe has a good short story hiding in its very existence.
posted by AzraelBrown at 5:33 AM on December 16, 2015 [7 favorites]

I love that we got a story about a case of old fashioned eye glasses despite everything.
posted by bleep at 9:48 AM on December 16, 2015 [5 favorites]