My socks are one of a kind

Being as I wrote about shoes last week, I thought that I would move on up and report on the subject of socks. You may remember my fairly recent story about battling with the washing machine as well.

Although my washing machine didn’t quite eat one of my children, it does manage to regularly eat my socks. Fortunately, in recent years, it has not had to compete with a whole family of sock destructionists, which means that hanging on to socks is easier than it used to be.

You probably thought that socks were to be worn under shoes to keep feet warm and comfortable, didn’t you? My kids were quite inventive and devised a great number of alternative uses for socks which partly accounted for their disappearance, although they usually blamed the washer.

Socks can be used for grenades, footballs, baseballs, slippers, floor polishers, galoshes, skis, accessories for the backyard, sleeping bags for GI Joes, chewing materials for the dog, flyswatters, shoe trees, truce flags, kite tails and marble bags.

Fortunately some of those uses don’t necessarily require a complete pair of socks. However, when a kid needs a sock for a science experiment, he is not likely to look in the unmated sock basket. He is going to look in his sock drawer, and if he needs one sock, so be it.

Of course socks will come to sad ends that have nothing to do with being worn out under shoes when they are subjected to nuclear testing. And then the ones that aren’t blown up, chewed up, or dissolved, are just simply lost.
Lost! I am conducting my own personal investigation, and what I want to know is whether anyone has ever lost both socks of a pair. If you have I want to know about it.

Whose washer eats socks by the pair? My washer likes to consume one of this and one of that. The Butterbean demolition society operates that way as well. I never did see two GI Joes lying side by side in matching sleeping bags. It was rare that I saw real mates worn side by side on one kid’s two feet. Usually they wore the kind that “no one will notice they don’t match.”

Sometimes they wore the kind you would have to be colorblind not to notice they were mismatched. I used to select my kid’s school teachers based on their inability to distinguish colors. If there was one who was color blind, that was the one I wanted.

One of the dilemmas of life is deciding whether to throw away the remaining sock after the first one is lost, The alternative is to keep it, hoping the other one will turn up when the snow melts. But should you throw it out, its mate will turn up within the week.

By the same token, both socks of a pair do not wear out together. One day you will put your foot in one end and out the other of a sock. Close inspection of its mate, providing you can find it, will reveal a sock without a single blemish or a broken thread.

I fail to see how the “use it up or wear it out” adage applies here since it is kind of hard to use one sock of a pair at all in spite of what my grade schoolers used to do. So I tend to follow my own adage which is “throw it out and buy a new one (or two).” It took me a few years of squirreling away unmated socks to come around to that attitude though. I finally found that by the time I found the lost one I couldn’t find the found one.

One of my kids used to leave a pair of socks in his snow boots every time he took them off. I guess they just slid off more easily that way. One day he wondered why he couldn’t get his foot back in. That was when he pulled five socks out of one boot and four out of the other. He should try that with rabbits sometime.
So you see why there were never neat little rows of mated socks in their drawers—the washer did it.

If there ever were pairs in their drawers, those were the ones they wore outside in the rain or used to polish their shoes, which partly explained their range of color. My kids got to wear white socks once for each new pair. After that they could be any color.