Socks being socks

March 8, 2007

Dear Patty,

Some blame static electricity. Some say they slip into a black hole between universes. They've been disappearing for centuries now. No one knows why or how.

Missing socks are one of life's unfathomable mysteries.

My day of reckoning with missing socks came when the usual morning search through my sock drawer turned up no matches. Well, almost none. Ever-present is the pair with the Santa Clauses on them, a gift from my mother-in-law. Those have to be saved for just the right occasion.

Among my obsessive compulsions is the inability to wear socks that don't exactly match. Just because they're both black isn't good enough. They have to be made for each other, likes husbands and wives. I'm not alone. One of my co-workers is so fixed on wearing the right socks that it determines the quality of her day. She has to have happy socks.

So that day I displayed all the matchless socks on the bed. The total was 17. Seventeen socks without mates. Kind of sad. Frustrating, too. Where did they go? That's the mystery.

Some of the socks have been missing for years, but I keep the perfectly good mate hoping the missing sock will miraculously show up.

The mystery deepens when you consider the socks that don't belong to me that have appeared in my socks drawer, thick and ugly socks I would never buy and refuse to wear. We don't go to a laundromat. Where do they come from? That's the kind of thing that starts you thinking about black holes and an alternate universe where everybody has only one foot.

I've tried to solve the mystery through detective work. Flashlight in hand, I've peered down the laundry chute from the second floor hoping to spy a nail or a splinter, anything that could be snagging my socks. No luck. Again with the flashlight I've searched the area around the laundry basket that catches the clothes that fly down the chute.

I've examined the trail from the laundry basket to the washing machine, only a matter of about 25 feet. I've followed the trail upstairs.

The most likely place for the socks to be hiding is in the spare bedroom that also serves as a staging area for clean laundry. Clothes DC hasn't worn in years are stored in laundry baskets arranged around the floor. More clothes are piled on the twin beds. A search through the baskets and the piles can turn up most any kind of clothing except my socks.

I even searched the Internet for my missing socks. Here's someone's explanation: "It has to do with one sock traveling along a longer space-time interval than the other as it travels around in the appliance. Time, therefore, passes at a different rate for each sock. That being the case, only one sock is permitted under General Relativity to return to the observer's frame of reference."

Missing socks are not a mystery to DC because she uses tiny clothespins to keep her dirty socks from separating during the washing and drying parts of their life cycle. This seems to work. Besides, she's daring enough to wear one striped sock with one polka-dot sock as long as the stripes and polka dots are the same color. Just don't let the mashed potatoes on her plate touch the peas.

Today when I reminded her that I am missing 17 socks she confessed that she sometimes throws out my socks if they seem too stretchy at the top. I gulped. "There," she said. "All's well with the world."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.