Waking Up Lucky Every Day

Vintage glasses are in style and the Huffington Post Living section proves it.

This works out well because my late father retired with thousands of frames. In the '50s he would buy out entire storerooms as optometrists went out of business. They went out of business because they were trying to sell rhinestone cat eye frames to farmers.

If everyone has a Katrina miracle this is ours: the water came one inch below the side door, 5 feet high, and would have eaten every one of the Lucite Frame France models boxed up in the hallway during the months we couldn't go home if it had risen any higher.

It was a comparative lack of personal devastation to come home to. The worst of it was my husband's '67 Ford Galaxie 500, stacked headlights, factory air, imploded from months under water. I dated him because of that car. It's still there -- he has aspirations of making what's left of the hood a coffee table or giant wall monument.

While we were living in his basement studio, my brother applied to Pimp My Ride on our behalf ­I can't imagine how many New Orleans applications they still get. Nothing came of it. And our bicycles in the back shed rotted, the bicycle crew we rode with has scattered to the winds anyway.

But the glasses survived. It's the online business that helps us afford NOMRF philanthropy on a good month. I never did become good at marketing. We once gave cat eye frames to the B-52's and Kate, complete with her red beehive, modeled a white rhinestone pair. It was so exciting I forgot that there was a camera in my purse. Some people promote, some later remember what they should have promoted.

The glasses survived, and my family photos, all the memorabilia you get to store when you're the only sister is there for me to dig through when I'm ready. So yes I'm homesick, and yes this has been a crappy two years.

But with boxes of photos of my dad, I still wake up lucky every day.