April 30, 2007

• 23.5 pairs of identical dirty socks

  One night on the phone Greyfox asked me if I could use some white socks.  He had found a bunch of socks in the dumpster after some neighbors moved out.   Figuring that my son Doug and/or I could always use a “new” pair of socks, I said, “sure, save them and I’ll pick them up with the rest of the stuff when I come to town.”

  I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going into my car late on the evening of my last trip to town.  After shopping, I just wanted to get the car loaded –I don’t get loaded any more–and hit the road up the Valley.  When I unloaded them, they turned out to be in two shopping bags, both stuffed full of socks.  Because I am lacking a sense of smell (except on rare occasions), it wasn’t until I sat down to sort them that I discovered that I’d brought home close to a hundred dirty white socks.  A few of them had started out with gray toes and heels, but a substantial majority of them had been totally white before they became soiled.

  There were about ten or a dozen socks there that had no mates.  I threw them away, unwashed.  Some were so crusty and gross that I picked them out gingerly and tossed them in the trash with a shudder.  Most of that category were in a larger size, apparently a man’s socks.  Out of the remainder that went to the laundromat, Doug ended up getting seven new pairs of socks.

  Most of the socks in those two bags were my size, and very few of them were exceptionally dirty.  They all looked as if they had never been washed before, only worn once and discarded.  They came in several styles and designs, but all were simple white cotton socks.  My mother would have called them “anklets”, but they have been socks to me all my life.  There were two or three pairs each of several different styles, and one style that outnumbered all the rest.

  Of that one style of ribbed elasticized-top socks, I counted 47 individual dirty socks, and one lone, pristine, clean, never-been-worn white cotton sock.  Four dozen identical socks — twenty three pairs of them now in my sock stash, and one pair snug inside the Nikeboks on my feet.  How one of those socks came to be left pristinely clean while all of its fellows became soiled is a mystery.  Perhaps when the woman in question was down to her last clean pair of socks, it hid away under a thong or a bra in her drawer and she went digging in the dirty sock pile for her cleanest dirty sock to wear with its mate.

  That is just speculation.  Why all those socks had been worn once and discarded, not laundered and reused, is somewhat less of a mystery.  It must be noted that these socks came from the dumpster at Felony Flats, a collection of cabins without running water.  Not one of those cabins has a washer, and some don’t even have refrigerators.  Most of the residents are transients, and none of them is particularly prosperous.  Those facts provide a few clues to the mystery of the unwashed socks.

  There were more clues in some of the other things that turned up in the possessions left behind by that couple.  There were some relatively expensive t-shirts and pants, lightly soiled and evidently never washed, and a few things never worn, still with the store tags attached.  Something that might have eluded another person’s notice, but immediately caught my attention, was that none of the shirts or pants were bulky.  The quality of those items was also relatively high but not the highest, not what one might pick up at Wal-Mart, but not what one would find at Nordstrom’s either.  What do Wal-Mart and Nordstrom’s have in common?  Come on now, that’s a clue.

  Both of those chains have relatively tight security, that’s what they have in common.  My guess is that one or both of that pair of temporary denizens of Felony Flats had been a booster.  When you are stealing your clothing, it is cheaper to wear it once and discard it than to take it to the laundromat.  The Flats is a place where people end up when they have nowhere else to go.  Mike, the landlord, doesn’t check references, doesn’t charge a security deposit, nor ask for the first and last months’ rent in advance.  He often rents by the week to those who can’t afford a whole month up front.  His tenants are often unemployed or unemployable, just out of jail, recently divorced, recently arrived or on their way to someplace else.  That couple might not have had enough money for the laundromat, but if they were looking for work they’d have needed clean clothes.  No mystery there.

   

  I had some extra time before my clinic appointment last Thursday, so I drove to the bluff overlooking the town of Talkeetna, the frozen Susitna River (the broad white expanse near the lower left of the picture), and the Alaska Range.  I captured five shots and have already turned one of them into the background for my new Xanga Theme.  In the image above, the tall mountain on the right is the planet’s tallest monolith, base-to-peak (but not the highest peak, of course – that one’s in the Himalayas, where it stands on the shoulders of lesser giants).  This one is known as Denali, The Great One, Old Weathermaker, AKA Mount McKinley.

  • 3:05 pm
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