Kareem Abdul-Peterson

In a recent email to my sister I shared the story of the first ever varsity soccer game I played in for my high school team - the Marshall School Hilltoppers. I was an eighth-grader and since wire-rimmed glasses weren't allowed on the soccer field (for obvious "poke somebody's eye out" reasons) I had to buy a pair of plastic glasses for soccer-playing purposes. (Contact lenses just weren't nerdy enough for me, you see.)

The other "glasses rule" from the Varsity Soccer Federation of the Universe was that if you wore them, then you also had to have a strap around your neck to keep them on. This was all good and fine, except for that the only strap I had was the same one I had since I started playing soccer as a seven-year-old.

It was royal blue with green and pink dinosaurs on it.

I would always turn the thing inside out, so that only the plain black side showed - but throughout the course of the game, the dinosaurs would always find their way to the surface. "Look at us! We're dinosaurs!"

This first-ever varsity soccer game was an away-game at Proctor High. I was playing outside midfield which meant that I was always closest to the crowd. A group of four or five Proctor High guys was standing in a cluster pretty close to the side of the field and whenever I ran by, they would shout out: "Hey 15! Nice goggles!" Or "I like your goggles! Where'd you get 'em!" Or just simply "Goggles!" if they couldn't think of anything better. Ultimately, this didn't bother me too much. We won the game, and in my heart I knew they weren't goggles, anyway. They were plastic glasses. With a (dinosaur) strap.

In response to this story, which Marit had undoubtedly heard a number of times before, she sent me the following picture with caption:

Tell him he's wearing goggles, jerks.


Yeah, that's what I thought.