Socks

I used to be ordinary. When I was 7, or something. I wore white fruit-of-the-loom underwear with two blue stripes on the elastic band and white tube socks with no stripes that stretched halfway up my shin to my knee and went no further. Back then you wore white or black socks. There were no Bigfoots dancing with Ronald Regans, or sharks eating boatfuls of dynamite on socks. The only variance was on the white ones. My white tube socks gleamed in the sun and would blind you if you looked at them for too long. They never got dingy and they only got stretched out when someone else wore them. Someone with big calves. I didn’t have calves until I was 12.

When I was 13, I shocked the world and left the white tube sock boy union and bought a pair of giant blue soccer socks that covered my knee caps. I didn’t play soccer. I wore them when I played baseball and roller-bladed, but I fell in love with them and wore them all summer until they got holes in the toes, then I wore them some more, even with holes in the toes. It was my way of rebelling, I guess. Or maybe I just liked them. Who I was in them. Maybe I wasn’t an ordinary tube sock boy. I wasn’t the black-clad goth kid or the skater punk who stunk like patchouli, but I wasn’t a pair of white tube socks.

I began buying women’s socks because women were allowed to have crazy socks. Back then, men were only recently introduced to colored socks, and they were dress socks. But women had knee-high ones with stripes on them like the Wicked Witch of the East’s, or bright colors like the munchkins or the Oompa Loompas. It didn’t matter to me that they were women’s socks. That the receipt said women’s hosiery as though to embarrass me. 

I wore women’s socks, crazy socks, for years when I played football with my friends and all summer long with shorts and black Chuck Taylor shoes that used to cost 12 bucks. Occasionally, someone would ask aren’t those women’s socks. Yeah, I suppose they are, I’d say. I didn’t understand what it mattered. But to some people it did and I was called a fag and gay, playfully sometimes, other times in a derogatory and violent way that made me laugh. All because of a pair of socks. 

It’s been a few years now since they’ve introduced crazy men’s socks. Nutcrackers fighting mice amid falling tinsel and guacamoles cut up on lime green polyester/cotton-blend universes. There is practically nothing you can’t get on a pair of socks and men don’t have to shop in women’s hosiery to get them. No one calls you names and threatens to beat you up anymore. The same people that did are wearing socks with hula girls on them, or elves on shelves, or dinosaurs. I don’t tell anyone that I was doing it twenty years ago.

I’ve got two drawers full. I’ve lost many along the way. To girlfriends who slept over, to my teenage daughter and son, to anyone who needed to borrow a pair I reluctantly gave them knowing full well I’d never see those socks again. I’ve lost my share to Father Time. To holes and moths. To the dryer. And I turned worn out ones to sleeves, unable to let go of the cactus socks I got for Christmas one year by someone who is gone. The Christmas light ones that remind me of her. Or them. They are much more than socks. They are the ghosts of Christmases past and every one of them reminds me of someone, or a time and place.

I reminisce as I mate them. Spilled out on my floor. I feel sorry for the ones who have no mate. I don’t toss them away, in case the other comes back. Maybe it is in a drawer somewhere where I used to stay and someone is holding on to it, in case mine is returned to her. I wore maroon ones with Indian chiefs on them when I made love to her for the first time. They became my lucky socks. I wore purple space alien ones when I married her. And tiger ones when I lost her. Lumberjacks when my youngest daughter was born. Cowboys when she turned one. And blue whales when I saw her last. I can tell you which ones I had on at any special time in my life and I’ll never let them go. Neither the socks, nor the memories. Neither the people, nor how much I love them, even in absence. 

I don’t know what socks I’ll be wearing when I fall in love again, if I do, when I graduate law school, when my daughter marries, or when it is my time to disappear in the dryer. When there are too many holes in me to be kept in the drawer of life. I guess I will see. For now I will mate the ones I have and make room for those I’ve yet to meet. They all have their place and time. We all do.