Monday, September 6, 2010

Socks

The top drawer of my dresser is the sock drawer. Socks are one of the more interesting and under rated items of apparel. They, in most cases, are only glimpsed after application to the foot and ankle, so you may get away with one or more of them inside out. or slightly mismatched, particularly common if you put them on quickly in the semi-dark. No one else, who has anything important to do, will probably notice. The club I belong to, forbids the wearing of ankle socks with plus fours. Gauche I guess! Here, socks are part of your statement. When floors are too precious for shoes, when one remembers, they can be accommodated with slippers,a ego saver in case of a previously unnoticed hole in the toe of one's sock. I have a number of singletons, the match having disappeared in some black hole of an unknown nature. Currently, store bought socks are cheap and expendable. They are never darned in this day and age as I observe, though my mother used to darn socks in the olden days. When I was a student I tried to darn, but I ended up simply sewing the edges of the hole together and the sock became progressively smaller. The alternative I learned was to cut your toenails. It's a curious business that the sock manufacturers always provide a slight change in the shade in the dyeing process so that in good light you can rarely combine singletons if you care. In the process of examining feet, I found people are often reluctant to remove their socks. In fact if they have come with a single foot problem I always removed the other sock and compared and contrasted, to the discomforture of the occasional patient who took the precaution to wash only the problematic foot. My father had a fetish about socks that drooped around the ankle and throughout his life always wore calf garters. My mother said to me years ago that " It's getting harder and harder to find garters for dad. I went to Eaton's the other day and they only had two left in the warehouse. I bought them both!" The pianist provides frequent useful commentary on my customary state of dishabille, but rarely, if ever, about my socks.

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