I own a pair of Christmas socks. They depict a flying saucer abducting a number of reindeer silhouettes, one of whom has a red nose. They are the only Christmas socks I own.
My dear wife bought them for me for Christmas, a year or two back. I thought they were hilarious, and I wear them sometimes, in the Christmas season. But it wasn’t until tonight, while discussing Christmas socks, that I realized that I don’t buy socks. Women buy me socks.
When I say it like that, it sounds like I have women lined up around the block to bring me socks in order to pay tribute to my manliness and perhaps interest me in breeding rights. I hasten to point out that this ain’t so (as entertaining as the idea may be.) But no… all the socks I own today were bought for me by my beloved wife, except for a few ancient pairs of work socks … that were bought for me by my ex-wife.
And I had to sit down and ponder when it was that I last bought my own durn socks. It took a while. But it came to me in the shower: Fall, 1986. The Time Of The Unified Sock Theory.
And the memories fell upon me like a sudden fall of leaves…
It was at Valentino’s, the ancient and legendary pizza and beer joint, off campus at Southwest Texas State University, and pitchers were being purchased and consumed, as was the way of things… and someone brought up the subject of tube socks.
I don’t know where the subject came from. There were four of us, and a couple of pitchers had been downed, and we were making small talk, and I believe it was Rocket Boy who mentioned that tube socks could be obtained at Wal-Mart for two dollars a bag, twenty socks to a bag.
Mr. Zulu agreed that this was a fine deal, if one cared to wear generic white tube socks, as opposed to anything with any sense of style.
Wild Man, however, was quite impressed, and resolved to go buy some posthaste.
And I agreed that this was a good deal; it was late October in south Texas, summer’s end, and an end to flipflop sandal weather, and the need for socks was coming. “Dang, at that price,” I commented, “you could almost just wear the socks once and throw them away. It’d be cheaper than washing the things.”
“Oh, that’s bull,” said Mr. Zulu. “And even if it was true, that’s a hella wasteful.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t have to pay for laundry,” said Wild Man. “We live in apartments, or the dorms. Machines take quarters there. A load of laundry is up to almost a buck now…”
“Hm,” said Rocket Boy. “You know, that’s a good question. WOULD it be cheaper to wash them or just throw ‘em out and buy more?”
Two more pitchers were ordered while we pondered the issue. Looking back on it, I am moved to wonder what we considered weighty issues at the time. Not to mention how many pitchers we’d drunk before we reached that point.
Arguments were made. Figures and charts were jotted onto cocktail napkins and debated. And we finally resolved to try the issue out: I would be the one to buy new socks for a month, and Wild Man would be the one to launder them, and at the appropriate date in November, we’d compare notes over pitchers at Valentino’s and see who’d saved more money!
And another round of pitchers was ordered to seal the pact.
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And it didn’t work out that way; Wild Man’s landlady threw him out the following week over some hideous infraction or other, and this time he failed to sweet talk her into letting him slide, and he wound up having to move, and the experiment was forgotten… on his part.
But by then, I was curious. So I figured I’d try it BOTH ways; October, I’d wash socks, and November, I’d throw them out, and first day of December, I’d check budget numbers and see which was cheaper. Why not? It was the eighties, and for the price of a full load of laundry, a pitcher of beer could be had!
The first problem I ran across was determining the cost of washing the socks. How much space per load did a week’s worth of socks take UP? And after an hour of calculations, I finally just said the hell with it, and went to Wal Mart and bought twenty dollars worth of tube socks. “That way,” I thought, “It’ll be a whole LOAD of socks, all by itself.”
The experiment had been underway for a couple of weeks when Penny presented herself.
Penny was pretty. Penny was perky. Penny was pneumatic. And Penny was lots of fun to be with. And we hit it off, and we began dating, and somewhere around the third or fourth date, she got curious about my apartment, and wanted to see it, and I was fairly sure I’d washed the dishes and hidden the bodies lately, so I took her home with me.
And Penny became a regular fixture at Castle Bedlam. And I think it was on her third visit that she asked why I kept a bag of garbage in the corner of the bedroom near the closet.
“Oh, that’s not garbage,” I said. “That’s socks.”
And Penny looked at me and raised a pretty perky eyebrow.
And I had to explain to her the nature of the experiment to prove the Unified Sock Theory.
And Penny got up and approached the bag of socks.
I stared at her. What was she doing? She wasn’t going to OPEN the damn thing, was she? Why would you do THAT? Hell, even I didn’t open it except to slap another day’s socks in there, and only for a split second! No, WAIT–
And she looked in the bag. And she made a noise. And I knew there was trouble.
And I wound up doing laundry that night. I noted that fifty socks didn’t quite make a full load of laundry, but I still spent the buck fifty to wash and dry the full load, under Penny’s watchful eye, followed by a glum evening of balling up socks into pairs. Apparently, I had transgressed in some way against Penny’s feminine instincts or her nestmaking gland, or some damn thing, and for the remainder of our time as a couple, the subject of my laundry was a tender spot with her; she was perhaps the first person since my own mother who made it her business to see that I did my laundry once a week.
I mean, I ALWAYS did my laundry once a week; I wasn’t an animal. It was just the socks. But somehow, I had convinced her that I couldn’t be trusted on that score.
We didn’t last. We tried, but between her taste in movies, and, apparently, her fears that I might begin accumulating dirty socks again like some demented pack rat, we fell apart. And we moved on. And by then I’d lost track, and it was easier to just wash the socks with the rest of the laundry and be done with it, and I forgot about the Great Experiment.
But I also didn’t need socks again for quite some time. Well into the nineties. And by then, I’d dated a number of other women, and married one of them… again, one of those women who seems to feel that men are barely sapient primate creatures, perfectly acceptable at bringing home paychecks, but in dire need of a woman to lead them by the nose and keep them from making messes on the carpet, or overeating and getting sick, or overdrinking and ordering things on eBay.
And she never let me buy my own socks, either. I think she was a little appalled at the idea of a man who owned three suits and two ties, but more than forty pairs of tube socks. Over time and attrition and damage and, I’m pretty sure, her throwing the things away when I wasn’t looking, the tube socks passed the way of all things within a couple years of marriage. And when socks and underwear were to be had, she insisted on veto powers, durnit.
My first wife bought me socks because I couldn’t be trusted to make my own fashion decisions. My second wife buys me socks because she thinks they’re funny; I’m not sure why she thinks of me when she sees socks with dinosaurs running across them or socks with baby dragons on them or socks printed in a pink flamingo pattern, but at least I understand why those socks are attractive, as opposed to why one set of black socks is more fashionable than a different pair of black socks.
But between the few remaining pairs of black socks, and the new Christmas socks and dragon socks and flamingo socks… I literally haven’t bought socks since the eighties. Haven’t needed to. Women buy them for me.
I wish that made me as studly as it sounds…