Washington, D.C.!

When I begin packing for a trip, some primeval survival instinct takes over and I behave as though wherever I am going is likely to be about as foreign as another planet, and I need to take a fairly sizeable representative sample of everything I own to keep from dying of starvation and heat or cold and lack of proper hair care products. This turns me into a stressed-out basket case, and makes me hate packing.

For our trip to Washington, D.C., though, I found a perfect solution: wait to pack until it’s about forty minutes before departure time. I actually packed less than twice what I needed, and was still out the door on time without extra hours to worry about having forgotten something.

Which meant, of course, that I forgot something—sunglasses. This didn’t seem quite so vital in the gray rainy morning of the Midwest, but when I stepped outside onto the blinding pavement in Washington, D.C., it suddenly became vital. We redirected our tourist instinct from finding large pieces of history to photograph to finding a store that sold sunglasses.

Union Station was what we came up with, and a small drugstore near the entrance from the Metro had what I wanted. The first pair of clip-on sunglasses I picked up was expensive, and I was on the verge of returning them to the rack to look for something cheaper when my father stopped me.

“Are those flip-up sunglasses?” I examined them more closely, and discovered that they were indeed the kind that clipped to the nosepiece and had a hinge, allowing the dark lenses to be flipped up above the glasses or down over them as desired without the bother of detaching them from the glasses. My father had an overlarge pair clipped to his already fairly large glasses, now flipped up for convenient indoor seeing, making him look like Mickey Mouse with the dark semi-circular lenses perched above his eyes. “They’re so convenient!” he insisted. “And that pair is cheaper than mine was.”

I bought them, with some misgivings about how dorky I wanted to look, but found that he was right—they are convenient. When I walk outside, I flip them down with my fingertip. In the dark of the Metro or the shade of a building, I flip them up, going back and forth between the two without a thought. I figured they were dorky, and probably touristy as well, but not much worse than anything worn by all the other people visiting our nation’s capital.

Or so I thought until the Metro ride that night. My father and I sat side-by-side, lenses flipped up in the dark tunnel to turn us into Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A man several rows down, facing us, suddenly pointed in our direction, nudged his wife, and made an up-and-down gesture in front of his eyes with his first finger. She looked a bit tired and nodded, humoring him, but he was chuckling.

“They’re talking about us!” I exclaimed, poking my father.

“Oh, yes, they wish they were as cool as we are,” he agreed, nodding with practiced oblivion.

The next day, I stood with my father in the entryway of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, sunglasses once again flipped up, waiting for the security guards to be satisfied that my mother had nothing threatening concealed in her numerous bags. A small boy, six or so, darted through the knees of the crowd and pulled up abruptly in front of me. He stared upwards, brown eyes wide. I smiled encouragingly, assuming he’d misplaced his parents. But he grabbed the arm of some other small child, arm raised above his head to point first at my face, then at my father’s, gesturing above his own eyes. My encouraging smile vanished. We don’t just look dorky and touristy. Evidently, we have become a tourist attraction.

But hey. They’re so convenient!