My relationship with time is becoming increasingly weird. I don’t know how to measure its passage anymore. I have middle-aged children and young-adult grandchildren, but I’m pretty sure I just turned forty a few weeks ago and Y2K was yesterday.
This morning Jack wandered out of the shower and mumbled something while staring into his dresser drawer.
“What’s that?” I said. (Although he’s the one with the hearing problem.)
“This is my last pair of underwear.”
“Not possible. I just did the wash 3 days ago.”
A few minutes later, staring into my own top drawer, I faced the same emptiness.
An hour later, draping damp knickers over the drying rack, I count, as I always do. Eight. It isn’t possible that eight days have passed since I last did this! I always say that, too. But here it is: the indisputable, objective measure of time. Nothing else is as predictable. One pair a day, as our moms said. Seven days a week. It’s as close as I get to real time.
Before writing this, I turned to Our Friend Google. It is amazing what you can learn by asking how often people change their underwear. Every site I visited—yes, there are many—agreed with our moms, but some revealed surveys suggesting that some people (shock!) don’t follow her rule. Mostly men (also, shock!). A frightening 13% of the 2,000 Americans polled (I didn’t find any Canadian surveys) acknowledge having worn the same underwear for a week at least once—though I’m thinking they were probably storm-bound on a canoe trip or kidnapped by terrorists.
It’s almost as surprising to learn that there are those who carry a pack of clean undies around with them so as to be fresh all day long. Which, when you think about it, means they must also carry a wad of dirty undies around with them.
I don’t want any of those outliers in my life–or contributing to my laundry hamper. It’s hard enough to keep track of time without having the knicker-count go rogue.
A NOTE TO MY FOLLOWERS! If you’ve been receiving this blog by email, you may have been under the impression that you could respond to it by responding the email. I just recently realized that has not been true. If you’ve tried doing that, your message has disappeared somewhere in cyberspace, never to be seen or read by a real human being. I THINK this is now fixed. If you get this by email and send me a reply message, I’ll let you know if it arrives.
A note about this note: Seems it’s still not working. If you haven’t tried, don’t bother. Wait for further update.
I’ll never quite look at underwear the same way again. 🙂
Love this post, and the pic. Fun.
Since I’ve graduated to “utends” knicker time no longer works.I have to rely
on packs of twenty to warn me that two thirds of a month has passed!
I too am surprised by the number of “knickers” on my clothesline … eight when I am certain there should be only three for example and never the other way around