October 15, 2014 Article

The Old Coot waits it out.

By Merlin Lessler

I witnessed an encounter between a mother and her teenage son in the grocery store the other day. It was a chance meeting; she came from home; he came from school. Her greeting brought me back to my own teenage days, “Why are you wearing that shirt? I just ironed it!” His face turned red and his buddy didn’t help the situation when he said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and chuckled out the side of his mouth. My mother said the exact same thing to me every time I tried to sneak out of the house wearing a freshly ironed shirt.

Ironed clothes had to go into a waiting period (limbo) before they could be worn. I never knew how long the resting period was. It depended on my mother’s memory. If she could remember ironing it, it had to go back on a hanger and into the closet. (If I got caught, that is.)

The same principle applied to new clothes. “You take off that shirt this minute young man. I just bought it!” Good pants and play pants were another issue, “Change your pants before you get them all grass stained. They’re your good pants.” We had good pants, play pants and best of all, Sunday Pants. It was an era when people dressed up to go to church or to someone’s house for a Sunday visit.

It went deeper than new clothes; all new things did time in limbo. When we got a new stove, the old one went into the basement. That’s where the heavy cooking took place. Better to lug stuff up and down stairs than to “wear out” the new stove. It also applied to baked goods. “Get your hand out of that cookie jar; I just baked those brownies!”

Ok, Ok; I get it. When I got old enough, my mother taught me to iron and turned the chore over to me. It’s a lot of work to iron things, but even when I did the ironing myself, she still made a stink if I slipped into something freshly ironed. I made a mistake a few years back, and told my wife about how I had to let freshly ironed clothes rest when I was a kid. Today’s dress code is pretty causal so we don’t do a lot of ironing; we fold things. If she sees me put on something that was freshly folded (folded by her because I’m folding challenged) she yells over to me, “Why are you wearing that shirt; I just folded it,” and then cracks up laughing at how I cringe. I can’t help it; it’s a guilt feeling that’s ingrained in my subconscious. But, I recently discovered she’s got the same defect. She bought a new car, and keeps asking me to drive my 15 year-old Miata everywhere we go, because her car is “too new” to drive. Apparently, the condition is contagious.