The men in my family lose things. My father lost sunglasses constantly. One of my brothers cannot hang on to his fingernail clippers. He clips his nails constantly, so it’s a problem when his tools go missing. My father’s solution to his sunglasses issue was to simply buy more. And my brother, he owns many, many clipping devices. I’ve seen a few of them: one is so dainty and delicate I’m kind of surprised my very butch brother will use it, and a couple are so bulky that my guess is they were designed for toenails.
I strive to be as unlike the male members of my family as possible, so the sunglasses and nail trimmer situation is a point of great pride. I found my sunglasses – my one and only pair – buried beneath sand and crushed beer cans at the beach at least a decade ago. And my nail clippers sit on the eye-level shelf in my kitchen cabinet, right in front of the cereal bowls. They’re always there for me, faithfully. When it comes to nail maintenance and retina protection, I’m bucking the genetics, and I feel good about that.
What I do not feel so good about is my inability to keep a pair of gloves for more than one winter. I lose them. And since I do not want to become an accessory hoarder, I buy only one pair at a time. Last month I found a perfect solution: a pair of gloves at a yard sale. They were gray with blue piping and fit perfectly. The price was hard to beat: 50 Cts, marked in thick black ink on a lime-green sticker about the size of a quarter. At the sale, a few blocks from my house, I browsed through the books and CDs strewn across a folding metal table. Then I found a quarter, a dime and three nickels in my pocket and bought the gloves. I can afford $5.99 for a pair of gloves at Target or Fred Meyer, but I was very pleased to buy them used instead. If just 33 percent of the male population in Portland loses gloves the way I do, there are plenty of barely worn pairs to go around. With statistics like that, why buy new?
But someone always has to be a jackass and mess it up for everyone. I’d offered to help someone move over the weekend, which was turning out to be cold and wet. So I took the gloves from the drawer where I’d put them, pealed the tag off and went on my way. As I was carrying part of a bed frame from the storage shed to the moving van, I noticed a fleck on my right glove. It was small, and tan, and once the bed part was crammed in place I took the glove off my left hand and, with my index finger, scraped at the fleck to remove it. And that’s when I discovered that it wasn’t a fleck at all but my skin, visible through a tiny hole that I would have noticed immediately had it not been covered by the price tag.
It’s not a big deal. I kind of like sewing projects, and mending the hole together wouldn’t have taken more than five minutes, and it’s not like I’ve lost lots of money, but the callousness of that sort of crap infuriates me. So on Sunday evening, right after it got dark and started raining in earnest, I wrote “Nice Try!” on a pale yellow Post-It note and added a smiley face. I put the gloves and my communiqué in a plastic bag from Safeway and set off into the evening. I was going to just toss the bag into the front yard of the house where the sale was, but instead I wedged it in among the shrubbery that runs along the side yard until I was satisfied that it wouldn’t blow away in a gust of wind and end up on someone else’s sale table next year.
I strive to be as unlike the male members of my family as possible, so the sunglasses and nail trimmer situation is a point of great pride. I found my sunglasses – my one and only pair – buried beneath sand and crushed beer cans at the beach at least a decade ago. And my nail clippers sit on the eye-level shelf in my kitchen cabinet, right in front of the cereal bowls. They’re always there for me, faithfully. When it comes to nail maintenance and retina protection, I’m bucking the genetics, and I feel good about that.
What I do not feel so good about is my inability to keep a pair of gloves for more than one winter. I lose them. And since I do not want to become an accessory hoarder, I buy only one pair at a time. Last month I found a perfect solution: a pair of gloves at a yard sale. They were gray with blue piping and fit perfectly. The price was hard to beat: 50 Cts, marked in thick black ink on a lime-green sticker about the size of a quarter. At the sale, a few blocks from my house, I browsed through the books and CDs strewn across a folding metal table. Then I found a quarter, a dime and three nickels in my pocket and bought the gloves. I can afford $5.99 for a pair of gloves at Target or Fred Meyer, but I was very pleased to buy them used instead. If just 33 percent of the male population in Portland loses gloves the way I do, there are plenty of barely worn pairs to go around. With statistics like that, why buy new?
But someone always has to be a jackass and mess it up for everyone. I’d offered to help someone move over the weekend, which was turning out to be cold and wet. So I took the gloves from the drawer where I’d put them, pealed the tag off and went on my way. As I was carrying part of a bed frame from the storage shed to the moving van, I noticed a fleck on my right glove. It was small, and tan, and once the bed part was crammed in place I took the glove off my left hand and, with my index finger, scraped at the fleck to remove it. And that’s when I discovered that it wasn’t a fleck at all but my skin, visible through a tiny hole that I would have noticed immediately had it not been covered by the price tag.
It’s not a big deal. I kind of like sewing projects, and mending the hole together wouldn’t have taken more than five minutes, and it’s not like I’ve lost lots of money, but the callousness of that sort of crap infuriates me. So on Sunday evening, right after it got dark and started raining in earnest, I wrote “Nice Try!” on a pale yellow Post-It note and added a smiley face. I put the gloves and my communiqué in a plastic bag from Safeway and set off into the evening. I was going to just toss the bag into the front yard of the house where the sale was, but instead I wedged it in among the shrubbery that runs along the side yard until I was satisfied that it wouldn’t blow away in a gust of wind and end up on someone else’s sale table next year.
