About 14 months ago, my employer gave me five pairs of wash-and-wear polished cotton everyday pants to wear. Every pair had a hole in the back left pocket, not large enough for my wallet to fall through, not worn through the back of the pocket to reveal skin or Fruit-of-the-Looms, but if you glanced at my backside as I walked away, you might have been tempted to say, “Hey Pedro, are you as devout as your holey pants?” People didn’t say that, but I’m sure some wanted to say it.
I was grateful to my employer 14 months ago and early on as some of the holes grew in size. Spilled paint here, scuffs and new unsightly wear in front took their toll. I think they were Wal-Mart pants. All but one pair became unwearable at my work place where my hours were reduced to five a week, and especially at my aviation museum. I continued wearing them because eating regularly, if not well, was more important to me than new pants. They had become a political “statement” for me, a railing against unkind FATE, the way a bloody, unchanged bandage might be after a minor accident, shared in public to proclaim my discontent with the world.
Even my employer noticed the holes and mentioned them to me. I reminded him the holes had been there when he GAVE them to me. He offered to give me more used pants, but I declined. I had determined to purchase new pants from JC Penney in late May. My protest would be over.
Then I fell at my employer, broke a tooth from a decade-old partial lower dental plate and required a new, complete, lower dental plate. Replacement cost $900. I took a home equity loan extension. Then the central air conditioning I provided to the upstairs residents broke. In addition to more than $1,000 due for real estate taxes, I owed the central air repair guy more than $1,000. I was morally compelled to reduce the rent for July to compensate the renters for going without coolness in half their residence. The new pants from Penney’s would have to wait.
I had to have pants I could wear in public, say downtown during lunch hour, without risking being detained by local gendarmes and deposited in a holding cell on suspicion of vagrancy. After most of a year neglecting them, I turned my attention to a corner of a closet where I recovered two pair of dress slacks, DRY CLEANER type. To the corner dry cleaner I went, a step in the right direction. I had also noticed a pair of blue dress pants still on a hangar, protected by a light, clear plastic bag with another dry cleaner’s logo on it. Like the pants I had taken to the cleaners, this pair had belonged to Dad. Somehow, they had moved with me to the home where I live now, about a year after he died in December 1994. Five days ago, I took off the plastic bag, unpinned the dry cleaner’s tracking labels and tried them on. They fit just fine. I’m wearing them now. I just took a picture of them.
Dad died after bringing the recently recommissioned blue pants back from the cleaners. That could have been in 1993 but more likely 1994.
It amazes me how so much of my life still touches things I obtained from my parents’ dying and earlier good will: my desk at home, a cookie jar I had known as a five-year old, a winter coat, two pair of shoes (no holes in soles) my dishes and most kitchen utensils, forks, spoons, knives, bedroom chest of drawers and a few other things I’m sure. I still owe them for all this. I’m sure they never IMAGINED that in 2016 I would be keeping clothes and things in the chest of drawers I had used as a teenager in the 1960s when we were living on Whittier Avenue as a family! After they were divorced in 1968, mom continued living at the house until selling it and moving to Florida in 1979. That’s when I brought many items over to my then-apartment.
I have three pair of WEARABLE pants for the first time in almost two years, thanks to kind FATE and a father who picked up some blue pants from the dry cleaners in 1994.
I WILL BUY some wash-and-wear pants — and soon, I hope.
All in good time, friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . all in good time.
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Live long. . . . . and proper
Honey & Quinine 