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The Sock Drawer

 Do you ever try to hide something in a place so unusual that nobody but you would ever think of looking there, only to discover that in a few days -no, even a few hours– you can’t remember where you put it? Come on, surely I can’t be the only one! Anyway the search sometimes finds other things you’d forgotten you’d lost.

I only mention this because just the other day I found treasure, while digging through a drawer containing unmatched socks. I mean, you have to put them somewhere, eh? When I was a teenager, I trusted sock drawers for things I wanted to keep secret: everything from phone numbers, to the notes I used to make to remind me of what to say on a date.

At any rate, the idea of a sock-drawer-safe followed me through the years, albeit in different formats and different furniture as addresses and income varied. Eventually, I settled on a large but warped and hard to open bottom drawer of an inconspicuous aging Ikea dresser, on the theory that no burglar would ever spend time trying to pry it open -especially if they also had to search through the rest of the room anyway. It’s just an odds-and-sods drawer now of course, but I figure the idea had passed its proof of concept and have dragged the Ikea with me wherever I’ve moved.

Even if you were to gain access to the contents of my coffer, you’d have to feel in every sock, unfold every crumpled bit of paper, and risk grievous bodily harm from the sundry pin-on badges scattered through its innards. And from time to time I also threw old tattered underpants in there as confounders until I could figure out what else to do with them; you’re not supposed to put them in the landfill and I don’t think they recycle that kind of stuff, do they? Anyway, I think the drawer is a sort of a win-lose game… or whatever.

One rainy morning, tantalized by memories, and a soupçon of boredom, I thought I’d explore the drawer again for old time’s sake. It’s what you’re sometimes forced to do when you retire. Okay, not forced; it’s often simply because I can’t justify having my lunch yet at 0930 in the morning, and rummaging is good exercise for the fingers I think; I figure it must be a bit like knitting…

Anyway, I had a vague memory of hiding something interesting inside an unmatched sock a long time ago knowing it was forever safe. I couldn’t think of what I’d hidden though, and as I patiently riffled through untidy piles of junk -unfamiliar souvenirs, forgotten keys, and torn scraps of paper- visions of carefully folded phone numbers I didn’t want to lose, names I didn’t want to forget, or photos unbecoming for an elderly man, danced through my head like sugar-plum faeries. But, after an hour of disappointment and checking the same oddly-patterned socks for the third time, I decided to dump the whole thing on the floor to check, once and for all, to see if I’d missed anything. At least by the time I cleaned it up I wouldn’t feel as guilty about having my lunch.

Eventually I did find a memory: a mottled and faded yellow and blue consolation ribbon for competing in a field-day race at the Riverview Elementary School in Winnipeg. In those days, everybody got a ribbon for trying -there were no medals yet in the primary grades. I’ve forgotten what all the colours meant, but I do remember you got a blue ribbon if you’d won and a yellow if you’d only showed up for the race. So, I’d crayoned my yellow ribbon a dark blue colour in hopes that in a few months, when the ignominy of finishing last was forgotten, I’d get some credit for a sterling performance from my friends. Sadly, they only laughed, and by then, so did I. Still, I suppose after all these years, any memory of the old days is worth retrieving, don’t you think?

But, as I was dumping everything back into the drawer, I felt something crumpled in a corner that I must have missed on the first go-round. It was a piece of paper with some writing on it. Curious, I opened it up, flattened it on the floor, and saw something that I vaguely recognized. I’d printed the title and underlined it in blue ink at the top: The Breadbox Chronicles, it read. The rest, only a paragraph in length, was written in my youthful cursive and was the continuation of a story I had been writing to impress a girl I’d met in the summer after we’d graduated from high school. Typewriters were around at the time, I suppose, but my gender excluded a secretarial course at school so cursive was the usual go-to for a budding male writer. It was long before word processors, lap top computers, or the internet of course, so everything was done laboriously by hand, much like medieval scrolls I imagine. I could see the difficulty I’d had with editing my storyline because things were crossed out and arrows snaked across the page.

The gist of the Chronicles escaped me after so many years, but from the entries on the page, I guessed it involved a character named ‘Crumbs’ who lived as an indentured labourer for the constantly changing loaves of bread that arrived unannounced in the Box. The current chapter seemed to involve the tension between Crumbs and a recently orphaned raisin that had fallen off some higher caste loaves that only ever made brief appearances in the Box. ‘Raisin’, I gathered, was trying to enlist Crumb to sabotage the more common Wonder Bread loaves that kept arriving. “My bosses want to take over the space in here,” Raisin explained.

Unfortunately I could only find the one piece of paper, so there was just the one paragraph to outline what I’d hoped would be a dynamic tension amongst the denizens of the Breadbox world; the fate of the protagonist and the villain was, alas, left to posterity to ponder… However, I could tell from what little I had written, that any talent for story telling was also left ponderable.

I rested my aching back against a wall as vague recollections surfaced about writing the Chronicles, but Time must have sepianized the memory, because reading its embarrassing plot now, so many years later, was even more painful than my back. The girl I had been trying to impress with my writing had been decidedly unimpressed as well, I remember. At the time, I couldn’t  understand why. It had been a real blow to my embryonic creative muse, I suppose.

But as my leaves continue to yellow and drop around me now, while I sit in the quiet retrospection of Age, I can see it quite differently. Could she have thought I was insulting her intelligence by dedicating it to her? Could she have wondered if I was commenting about what I thought she could manage? We were both young, so maybe neither of us were sophisticated enough to process it that way, but I do remember she eventually became a Professor of English Literature at the university we both attended. I, on the other hand, did not.

I do take pride in my ability to text meaningfully nowadays however; I’m also working on designing a useful new Emoji for when I lose another race…

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