Dept: Sentimental. Where have they all gone?

Another post I have been thinking about for a long time because it confronts me every day.  

Let me say first off that I am not a pack rat.  I have seen pictures of the stacks rats pack and I can`t believe it. It makes me itchy on the skin because in fact I can`t stand messes.  I would love to have as bare a house as possible (besides for my music collection of course)  That would make me feel better.  

Pack rats are ....  eyow.  All that junk lying around.  

No, my problem is that I am a sentimentalist.  Everything means something to me. Some memory, some feeling is triggered by looking at anything of memento.  A vinyl record, a ticket stub, a child's game, a sock, all stir memories and events in my life.  My problem is my long term memory is lucid and very open to me.  I flow in and out of periods of my life pretty easily in my thinking.  These little pieces of tangible memory are like portals to a past which is readily relivable and retrievable in my daily life in the present.  

(On the other hand, I have a terrible short term memory.  My wife often gives me a verbal beating because I don't remember what she said to me yesterday about where we are going today or what food I should have bought today.   This is a problem too.  A big problem)

My first topic in the sentimental department is rather unoriginal and banal, well aren`t they all?  But everyone has a joke about this.  SOCKS.  The missing socks department.

Where have they all gone?  

The washing machine ate them.  The goblins of the night take certain socks away just to mess with you.  I have heard there is a special place in heaven where socks are and when you die all your missing socks are found and paired back up.  Actually, I just made that up.  In fact that only gets me depressed, that these socks will be alone and unpaired perhaps the remainder of my life and only paired back up in the after life.  See, I told you I was sentimental.   

When we moved from one apartment to another nearly two years ago from this writing, I put all the single socks in a bag and brought them to the new apartment.  The thing is, I am not sure if I have ever unpacked that bag and maybe I have the matches waiting in a pile for me to find that bag now and put them together.  My short term memory lost track after we moved if I really did this. Or not. 

Currently unmatched

The point is, I keep a little box of the single socks in the girls room. After each laundry we go through the box and see if the laundry produced any pairs that weren't pairs


before.  It is a kind of ritual.  In fact each laundry does produce some pairs, but of course the opposite occurs at the same rate.  So there is a continual in and out of single socks in the box waiting for their significant others.  

New batch of singles after laundry.  Peppa pig a loser this time

Some have had to wait a long time.  One year we left some at Grandmas cottage from summer vacation time.  We retrieved them a year later and matched them up when we got back to the home apartment.  Thankfully my Mother had kept them for us.  

There was an incredible find recently when I found a tiny baby Mickey Mouse sock which had been missing for two years.  Of course by the time I found it nobody fit those socks anymore.  But that was not the point. It was the principle of matching the missing socks which mattered.  Strangely though, we lost the same sock a couple weeks later and currently Mickey Mouse is a loner again.  

speak of the devil.  Found this match after writing this post

Yes, in fact, there are some socks which have been lost since baby hood.  I have them sitting in the box by themselves but I cant give up on them.  I wont throw them away because maybe they will be found, behind the washing machine, in the bag of single socks I brought from the other apartment or the bad goblins will have pity and return some of them.   

But I have to face the fact that many  will only be matched .... when and if I get to heaven.  Or they may have to wait even until after my daughters time.  Which means that when I am a Grand Father I ll wander into my daughters` room where my daughters wont be anymore, but the box of unmatched socks will still be there.  I ll look at the baby socks, the toddlers socks, the Hello Kitty sock, pink socks, white frilly socks, and the whole collection of socks which lost their mate each year and I will remember, the life and times of being a Father to my little girls who are grown big now and gone from the apartment.