Today, I was in the back yard, swimming with a friend of mine, and the nephew of the people I’ve been living with this summer. I was wearing my sunglasses, a pretty standard, black pair of Oakley, polarized sunglasses.

I bought them just after I got Lasik because my brother had bought several pairs of Oakley sunglasses, and I wanted to be like Big Brother, but I had to wear glasses, so all I got were silly clip-ons.

Anyway, I set my sunglasses on the table by the pool, since we were getting a little rough playing around in the pool, and I didn’t want to break them.

Nick, the younger kid, asked why I took them off. I explained that they were expensive, and if we were going you roughhouse, I didn’t want them to get broken.

“Why, they’re just sunglasses,” he said.

“Well, these were one hundred-sixty dollar sunglasses!”

“Oh, well, why were they so much? Did you pay that much to get that “O” engraved on the side?”

After laughing for a few minutes with John, my friend who was also swimming with us, I thought about it a second, and I realized that yes, yes I really had paid $160 for the “O” emblazoned across the temple of each ear piece. I’d never quite thought of it that way, and now, it just seems so silly to have been that fixated on a single letter.

After this and the pen wisdom from one of my campers, I think wisdom truly does oft flow from the mouths of babes.