Sockless Joe

When I dropped the children off this morning I was wearing socks. Not just socks, as Mary thought best on Saturday, but an entire pile of clothing, culminating, at the base, in socks, and also shoes. When I picked them up I was without socks. My socks had gone missing. Written that way it does take away from my responsibility in losing them, as I had hoped; my recent track record being quite good with regard to holding onto things. Take the children, in five years I have not once lost the children. Misplaced perhaps but never lost, and I think this is really commendable. My father was one of the parents shouting, "Allyson, if that thing was not attached you would lose your head", and he was right, my early years were fraught with lost items, generally small things, but significant in that we spent countless hours searching for books and homework and as I got older, car keys.

They were once left in a snow pile on a very big hill. Kathy, Laura and I had decided to "Ski Kansas" and they apparently tumbled out of my pocket as I tumbled down the hill. They were recovered, months later, once ski season was over and the snow had melted. Countless times they were found in the car, the locked car. One time I packed them in my luggage, that was lost by the airline, and had to rent a car to get myself home. They were left in a friend's car, which was not terribly bad, except that she was moving to Washington D.C., and I was waving good bye to her from Chicago, and then had no way to get back to college, in Kansas.

This is all very important because my sister still loses everything, even though she denies this, which is only evidence that she has lost her memory as well. She has lost phones in toilets and garbage disposals, at current count, I believe she has lost two bikes, I have no idea how. Keys are a given, she will lose her keys if given the chance. For my part things have improved, my keys do go temporarily lost, as does my phone, but they are always found, almost always. Two years ago I lost my phone, the only phone I have ever lost, never to be found, but I know exactly where it happened. It fell out of the car as I unloaded the children on a cold and snowy Wednesday night in March, in front of our church, Ash Wednesday. Losing your phone at church certainly gives you a pass in the lost responsibility record books, or it should.

But my good standing has been jeopardized, today I lost my socks. Presumably while swimming, although that offers no real explanation, other than that they were not on my feet the entire morning, there was a window when the socks could have wandered off. Perhaps some other woman put them on mistakenly and spent the day in my socks. Imagine the horror at finding, at the end of the day, your feet snugly wrapped in another person's socks. She has no idea that I am a relatively clean person, that it is unlikely that my socks carry with them raging foot disease; if I were to wear a strangers socks all day I would boil my feet at the discovery, and then soak them in alcohol.

They were nice socks, black cashmere, soft and comfortable, and relatively new. Losing them through off my entire day. Thankful for the reasonably seasonal temperatures, I didn't suffer from frozen ankles when I went outside. Having spent hours in search of my socks I was running late, and then there were no brown line trains and school was out in 10 minutes, so I found a taxi, after almost being hit by a car, with a very old driver, not lively and quick, who responded, as best he could, at my urging to please hurry, I'm late, I can't be late. But I was, about three minutes late. As I fell out of the taxi, frazzled and sockless, the children were already out on the playground, but not my children. Now I had lost the children as well, which is what happens, lose one thing and the rest follow. "Do they have Spanish today?", from a parent whose daughter did not start after school Spanish today, like my girls.

"Oh right, Spanish". I flashed my bare ankles, "look, I lost my socks", as clearly no further explanation was needed.