The boy has three distinct sock types: some are ribbed and plain white, some have HANES stitched in green under the toes, some have HANES in blue. It's my reasoning that if what socks come out of the dryer don't match up, then what socks went in didn't match up. The boy seems mildly out of sorts to wear a blue HANES and a greens HANES together. I can also tell by a familiar, inherited Polish slouch he effects that while he receives "no one will notice" as a reasonable comfort, it costs something. Perhaps a diminishing appreciation for what parents can make right.
Searching through the kids' room, I find no more socks. I do find girlie underwear, stored under a wicker basket. It is a basket I use to keep oversize envelopes, orphaned AC adapters, a broken comb. My daughter, who doesn't care much for dolls, nonetheless sees wisdom in keeping a comb for one. The basket also holds a third stapler, one I think has character. There are vintage desk ornaments in this basket, too, the kind people who served in wartime at desks might think are funny. And there are bank deposit envelopes, and a strange plastic extension that accompanied a steam vacuum I acquired. It has NOZZLE CLEAN OUT TOOL molded onto the surface. Judging by its shape and resilience to bending, I'd say that's more opinion than fact. I have parsed these four words in several permutations of emphasis, none of them convincing.
I can only suppose in the mind of a 9-year old, fermenting all summer through heat waves, Xiaolin Showdown marathons and Beavis & Butt-Head: The Mike Judge Collection play-alls, pool chlorine, and a few crying jags after losing at Yahtzee or Life, that girlie underwear somehow extends or completes the logical sense of this basket's collective.
I have a glimmering of how that logic once worked for me, and a tenuous handle on that experience. I want to recall it, but having to wish being there defeats it. We can hold the glass that keeps water that suspends the wisping microorganism within it; that is all we can do. I leave the underwear plainly exposed from under the basket, because I want to know what happens next.
Two nights ago I had a strange dream. As a rule, my memorable dreams are troubling, and so I usually have little trouble getting up. But this one was strange, for me: my son, at about 14 or so, had filed with the courts for emancipation. I saw myself as I once saw my mother, shortly after her husband had died on the operating table: pupils dilated, her weight over the balls of her feet as if tipped by the slightest of breezes, her speech intelligible, her processing of sense like a sudden whirl of paper tickets. A classically-trained actress not given to cliches or false drama, standing there, wringing her hands in a bland hallway of Marin General. I have never been able to purge that image, and for that however-brief session of rapid-eye surrealization, I was that.
This morning I am sorting through the last of the boxes from my move. There's CD-format everything: music, pictures, software. An unwanted recording from a wanted-to-be lover, singing to her children, godawfully flat and lifeless.
I don't know where these objects are supposed to reside this morning, nor why they should.
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