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Chelsea flea market glasses.JPG, originally uploaded by 160507.

I went down to UP shopping center to visit my optometrist, Nella Sarabia. Hadn’t been to Quezon City in a while; I’d almost forgotten what foliage looks like. (We have trees in my neighborhood, but they’re far apart.) Nella has been making my eyeglasses since 1995. Her ancestor was the first Filipino eye doctor. Most of my vintage frames are from Nella’s antique collection. I’ve bought a few frames at flea markets and antique shops, but after a while the plastic warped, rendering the glasses unwearable by anyone who wasn’t drawn by Picasso.

First I tried on the new frames, most of them small, sleek, and squarish. They made me look. . .normal, as if I worked in a bank. (Here’s a favorite lyric from a Ben Folds Five song: “But you just smile/Like a bank teller/Likely telling me/ Have a nice life.”) I wanted large 70s-style glasses, the kind worn by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, or Virgie Moreno.

So Nella brought out her stash of old glasses. They were so ancient that they lacked limbs, or required re-silvering, or had fused together “like the Titanic and the iceberg,” Nella noted. After trying out a pair that would’ve pleased Elton John in the Rocketman era (”We could add lightbulbs…”) and another resembling Hugh Hefner’s current glasses, I found exactly what I wanted. The first was a pair of black shades in odd rhomboid shapes with white stripes. The second was vintage Dior with big, roundish eyepieces from the Annie Hall period.

My new old glasses will be ready on Saturday. The lenses have to be ground, and the frames have to be cleaned, repaired, and exorcised.