A Fateful Decision

I had to make a terrible, horrible decision the other day. It was about my laundry.
As a preface, I am something of a pack-rat. I save things. Lots of things. I have a 10-pound box of dead batteries because (and I am perfectly serious), they might one day be useful.

Don’t laugh. When aliens invade and their only weakness is a flail made out of dead D-Cells and a ski pole, I will be the one saving the super models.

NOTE: I also have a four-pound ball of tape, a collection of nuts and bolts from various pieces of machinery, my old BB gun that no longer fires, a variety of sports equipment from sports I never played, a saddle, a gross of ping-pong balls from the early ‘80s, a woman’s bowling ball, and an Atari 2600 and about 30-games.

What was I talking about? Oh yes . . .

My laundry.

As I was folding it, I realized that a large percentage of my socks, maybe as high as 40%, had serious holes in them. As in ‘if I’m not careful when I put them on, my foot will actually go through instead of in.’

A decision had to be made. I could save them. I could simply stuff them in the back of my (overflowing, go figure) chest of drawers and forget about them until such time as they were needed to repel the armada from Perseii Omicrom 8.
I could also simply throw them away.

This is not such an easy decision. Some of these socks have been with me since college. They gallantly cushioned my feet when I worked at various part-time jobs. They courageously kept my feet from sweating in the hot California sun and making me smell even worse. They nobly complimented my tennis shoes with their start whiteness. I could not simply discard them like so much trash.

In the end, I threw away some of them, those who were too badly wounded to keep going. I deposited them gently into the garbage can and hummed the bits of ‘taps’ that I could remember. I may have said something moving, something about ‘how their spirit lived on, even as their elastic failed.’ A single tear might have been shed.
The others, the ones that weren’t too far gone, went into a box in the spare room.

Just in case.

Cheers,
-Jason