Humor Blog Highlights

My Hole-y Man

I had a religious experience today. No, I did not have a vision appear unto me. Nor did some unexplained miracle take place under my roof. I did not even speak in tongues (although that has been known to happen on particularly bad PMS days). Yet my encounter was one of the most “hole”y to be chronicled by man, since the garden of Eden and Adam’s choice of a caterpillar chewed leaf: I did a load of my husband’s laundry and realized that his Holiness, the Pope does not wear clothing even half as blessed as his “Hole-y” ness, my husband.

Blessed because it is a miracle how his underwear stays up. I will never understand this about men in general, and my husband, in particular. To the outside world, he is the most GQ looking, put together, spit and polish man. But beneath that facade of Armani ties, Italian suits and shiny shoes, lies a wasteland of overstretched elastic, toes peeking through socks and barely enough molecules left to actually call them underwear. It is a phenomenon I am helpless to explain. I know you are thinking to yourself, “Well, if he can wear an Italian suit, surely he can afford some American Fruit of the Looms”, right? Right. The problem is, like most men, he is a “keeper”.

Not that the underwear or socks have some special significance, but many of his hole-y items do. He has a pair of ragged, faded, almost see through sweatpants that he will never part with. They are special because he wore them in the delivery room when each of our daughters was born. Yes, yes, yes, that is really sweet, but personally I have happily parted with every stitch of clothing I wore back when I was nine months pregnant!! You will never catch me waxing rhapsodic over an old pair of maternity underwear. “Ahhhhh honey, remember how the elastic held my stomach up and cut into my butt making me look like the Michelin tire man from behind? Those were the days.” Ha! I cleansed those puppies with fire, thankyouverymuch!

He is also the proud and stubborn owner of several t-shirts, whose screen printing can barely be deciphered. One hails his alma mater, “Wash—- U—-“, and considering the stainage on this poor shirt, it should read “Wash—- Me—-“! Another proclaims something about a “foo–all” game in Hawaii. Foo All? I’m sure it used to read ‘football’, but now it looks more like something on the menu at a luau. And the strangest one he refuses to part with? It is simply a grey t-shirt, no picture, no words, holes here and there, fraying around the neck. He bought it for $3 at a grocery store, and he considers that his great bargain. I will give him this much. After being washed 3,447 times, you can’t find a softer item to sleep in (or to buff my patent leather pumps, but don’t tell him that).

I suppose he is not as bad as some men when it comes to keeping things. Take my father for instance. Having been in the airline/airport industry for almost thirty years, he has seen the coming and going of airlines, the evolution of logos, and the changes in accouterments served in flight. I kid you not, in the storage space my parents rent, there are boxes of cocktail napkins, plastic coffee stirrers, and sundry bags of peanuts and the higher brow macadamia nuts served on flights to Hawaii. They are emblazoned with names like Braniff, Allegheny, Pan Am, and to quote him, “They’ll be worth money someday.” Yes, I can imagine the day Sotheby’s puts them on the auction block. “And now Lot 23, a case of Braniff cocktail napkins, with matching stir sticks. Notice the individual tiny airplanes at the end of each stirrer. Breathtaking. We will start the bidding at $2.00.” I just hope my siblings and I do not fight over the estate. (I imagine we will fight over who has to clean out the storage facility).

But back to my husband and his laundry. He can afford new underclothing, and yes, I suppose I could darn the socks (I would much prefer, however, to damn the things). But, as I was putting his “religious vestments” back in his drawers, I noticed that the new underwear his mother had sent him at Christmas, was stillunopened in the package! That’s it. I knew it was time again for me to take things into my own hands. Grabbing my rosary beads, I said a prayer to the patron saint of 50/50 blends and threw three pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks into the trash can. May they rest in pieces.

About Linda Sharp (18 Posts from 2002 - 2003)
Warm, witty and just a wee bit warped, Linda Sharp is the internationally recognized author of Stretchmarks On My Sanity and Femail: A Comic Collision In Cyberspace.