The Sock Drawer

The sock drawer is the highest drawer in the chest of drawers. There are two sock drawers, drawers one and two from the apex of the chest, and that devoted to black socks for formal wear, as well as socks of various colors for formal-casual, is the very topmost drawer. The one beneath - the downstairs drawer - is the drawer of the white socks, the work socks, the sports socks. I have a great many pairs of whites. I can say that they do not make them like they used to. I have often toyed with the notion of darning my whites, usually being saved from the extravagant economy by a timely sock sale - but I have an item all lined up for the darning egg if the need arises. I refuse to buy a new ceramic egg. I remember walking in darned socks as a child. It was a struggle. I think I may have further sabotaged them. I may have yanked them on by the cuff along the opening, hoping to rend them irretrievably. I hated darned socks. The next drawer down is underwear. Not much to say here. The other day, I was caught out of doors in a pair of tighty-whities that had lost their tightness. This is another situation I do not much like.(And I hasten to add that I was wearing a pair of thick corduroys over the whities. I was "caught" in an allegorical sense.)There is no immediate remedy, and no surreptitious fix - like checking the zipper on the sly - is available. That pair of tighty whities were so acutely loose, so indolent of their proper functions, and the results were so louche and satyric and Rabelaisian, that I thought everyone in my vicinity would notice. They did not. Back to the top drawer of socks, ebony and colored silk and cotton, and some wool. I have a small pile of handkerchiefs, usually segregated to the right rear, but sometimes freely strewn over the socks. I usually bundle the socks into those topological knots, resembling a Klein bottle, where you lay them out, one on top of the either, toes and tops together, then twist them into a Mobius strip - thereby establishing the one-dimensional nature of the socks, which is why we can pack so bloody many into a drawer - then pull the toes up to the tops - the "mouth" of the Klein bottle topology - insert and try to pull your fingers back before the time-space gate snaps down. Toss into drawer like so many muffled marbles. (Someone once gave me some Japanese tabi socks, but they didn't seem to be a true "sock", and I did not like the notion - so prevalent in the late 20th and early 21st century - of snobbery applied to socks; a "sockishness", like wine snobbery, or cigar snobbery. There was only so much one could be snobbish about. My brother was into cheese snobbery. It seemed all too exhausting to me. If I am to have my senses reeling from the shock of the new and exotic, it will no longer be caused by domestic articles like socks.

I gave the tabi away, possibly to the Goodwill.) The drawer is dark and unruly like the Hellespont in storm. If the white handkerchiefs are scattered, they look like white caps of waves, or bones in the teeth of impetuous boats braving the storm's furies against wiser councils. I impose no order. This is the realm of chaos envisaged by so many writers of middling sci-fi scripts. It is the domain of black quantum foam, where vaguely rounded figures of darkness bubble up into view - so early in their quantum lives that they exhibit a net deficit of color, excepting that thin gold thread sewn along the toe. If I am late in getting dressed, I stand there like some baffled ursine upon a rock within a roaring stream, bewildered by the innumerable shadowy and tenebrous socks swimming in pairs upstream to spawn. I launch a mighty roar, and swipe my exacting claws to grab a pair; their cotton weave gasps and they wriggle, trying to escape. I thrust them upon my entish feet. Whew. The drawer, being the highest and the easiest for me to reach, has become the filing cabinet of my lint, spare change, and gas receipts and all things of minor accountabilities. Business cards to old theater tickets, souvenirs of impositions or happy times, stored against that future time when I shall get around to writing things up in my Journal...which has become an Annual...and now transforms into a Dekas, or group of ten years. Everything goes right there, against everything the fire marshall has told us, until the drawer no longer closes, and I am forced to go through them and put them into a manila envelope. In my memory, there are festoons and rosettes carved upon the wood surfaces of this chest of drawers, as well as fluted pillars at the edges in bas relief, and ending in a scroll foot. It has the veneer of antiquity about it. When I approach it, I feel as if I were a chamberlain about to ceremonially open the legislative chambers of some august Senate. I think Ishmael was correct in having "Chips" make him a coffin early on during the voyage of the Pequod, for all infinite horizons have a shoreline; all large, vibrant life comes from the hollows of those tight-pack receptacles in those dark ships of the past, whose commerce was the basis of our modernity and wealth. Without the wooden capitols and columns of my furniture, without the items therein derived from the fibers of living plants, I am barely a man.