RUSHVILLE —

As promised last week, I now present “The Disaster on East Aster,” the street we lived on during our summer vacation to Wildwood Crest, N.J. First, pretend you're nine years old. You're giddily anticipating an entire week of surf and sun with the incandescent beings of wonderfulness that are your 12-, 10- and 7-year-old cousins. As soon as you arrive, you naturally leave all the van-unloading and luggage-unpacking to your parents, and rush headlong with your cousins to the beach. Within minutes, the combination of water and sand has you looking like a brown sugar-encrusted donut. When it's finally time to head home, you wade into the ocean to rinse off a bit of the sand that’s agglutinated to your flesh. You decide to fully submerse. And of course — OF COURSE — you don't bother to remove your glasses. Which are gently removed from your face by a gentle wave, never to be seen again. This is how my No. 5 son began his summer vacation. He ordinarily gets apoplectic when something that might make mom and dad upset happens, but he was remarkably calm about this. In fact, I wish I had a dollar for the dozens of times that we talked about his lost glasses and he would shrug and say with great nonchalance, "Well, it wasn't my fault." In case you're wondering, he says it's the OCEAN's fault. His case was greatly bolstered on our second day of vacation. Several of the adults in our group were soaking our tootsies in the surf and a woman approached and asked us anxiously to "keep an eye out for a pair of glasses" that her grandson had just lost. After hearing that, No. 5 reminded us all week how it could happen to anyone, even someone much older, like this other spec-losing kid. Who was 10. We nearly called our neighbor back home, who was watching our house for us, to ask her to find and express mail No. 5's backup pair of glasses to us. We thought it might help him actually see if he was having as much fun as he thought he was having. But we nipped that idea in the bud when, on our second day of vacation, he needed only 11 minutes to crack the frame of a pair of sunglasses he just "HAD TO HAVE!" Wearing sunglasses is a big deal for No. 5, since he usually can't or won't wear any over his regular specs. He completely fell in love with a $5 pair for sale on the Wildwood boardwalk -- mirrored lenses, a two-tone black and red frame, a sleek wrap-around form. It was merely coincidence that his cousins completely also fell in love with and bought exactly the same shades. They thought they looked outrageously suave with their "tints," as sunglasses are sometimes called. As they strutted down the boardwalk, I'm sure some cool tune like Booker T and the MGs' "Green Onions," or the theme to "Peter Gunn," was playing in their heads. Or would've been, if they knew those songs. A better accompaniment would've been "Three Blind Mice." Darkness was falling on the boardwalk, and their shades made the world so dark they were bumping into everyone and everything. Although now that I think about, almost always cute girls in the 7 to 12 age range. While No. 5 made sure he kept his sunglasses on all the time, even while he slept, we had the opposite problem with No. 3 son (age 15). In spite of harsh, glaring sunlight beating down every day at the beach, he preferred to squint rather than don any tints. I found this hugely peculiar, since a shelf in his bedroom displays, museum-like, each of the 17 pairs of sunglasses he's purchased over the years. He buys a pair practically every time he leaves the house, and ALWAYS comes home with new ones whenever we take a vacation. But this year, he spent every day narrowing his eyes like a Clint Eastwood impersonator. He claimed he forsook shades so his vision wouldn't be impaired while he looked for No. 5's lost glasses. I guess he could've been telling the truth, although his search method was pretty unorthodox: He stopped every cute teenage girl in a bikini and asked if she'd seen them. All while conducting a thorough – and unobstructed by sunglasses – visual search of each girl. uuu TakefiveT5@yahoo.com.