Silver lining in tangled sweaters

This is about my first day of school, but first you have to wade through a bunch of stuff about active wearing apparel. Read on.

The neatly folded clothes on the top shelf of my closet have a way of rearranging themselves. I don't know how it happens, but somehow the clothes on that shelf work themselves into a wad of tangled wool, since most of the items there are sweaters.

I suppose if I were a sweater and had to endure a Missouri summer on a closet shelf, I'd get restless too.

Some of you are munching your Rice Krispies and thinking: He's just making up that part about the clothes getting messed up all by themselves.

I am not.

Maybe you have well-behaved folded clothes, but mine obviously toss and turn in the dark when the closet door is shut.

And it's not just my sweaters. I've also noticed that the top drawer of my chest of drawers, the drawer I open every day, is deficient in the neatness department.

This is the drawer that holds underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, an extra set of car keys, a plastic freezer bag full of change and old watches, receipts for purchases dating back to 1994 (except the one for the weed trimmer I'd like to return), belts for some slim fellow who apparently used to live in our house, a fancy case for a pen set I've long lost track of, assorted shirt buttons, several lapel pins for various and sundry organizations, six pieces of either wrapped hard candy or cough drops (date unknown), a tube of soothing lip balm, a small pocketknife and a classy jewelry box containing a pair of cuff links and matching set of studs (which explains that buttonless shirt hanging in the closet).

Ideally, these items would be arranged in such a way that the things I use every day (socks) would be well-separated from the things I use rarely (cuff links) or never (broken watches). The fact is, however, that the scenery changes each day inside that drawer, and I can't explain how that happens.

Can you?

But back to the closet shelf. (No, I haven't forgotten about the first day of school.)

Once or twice a year, I am moved to organize my life. In these moments of inspiration, I fold my underwear, group my socks by color, carefully fold sweaters and put all my slacks on one side of the closet and all my shirts on the other.

Last week, as I was making neat stacks out of the tangle of sweaters, I found two T-shirts that I've never worn. One was from the university. The other was from a reunion at the Shady Nook School, the one-room school in Greenwood Valley just over the hill from Killough Valley.

See. I told you this was about my first day of school.

One of the organizers of the reunion, which was a few years ago, had a good idea. She took a photograph of the school and had it printed on T-shirts as a momento of the occasion. If you recall, I reported that this reunion, nearly half a century after I started school there, was the first reunion ever at the school. I was corrected by other reunion attendees who reminded me there had been another reunion -- in the late 1940s. My mistake.

So here was this T-shirt with good old Shady Nook School on the front. Never worn. Maybe never will be.

I held the shirt in my hands for a while, looking at the familiar building, remembering a bit of my past, recalling the first word I learned to read ("Look"), tasting the cinnamon rolls and biscuit sandwiches I traded my Hydrox cookies and baloney-on-white-bread sandwiches for, trying to remember the rules for Red Rover and Annie Over, smiling at my never-ending campaign to convince two grown sons that I walked to school -- uphill both ways -- even though I confess I made up the part about the daily snowstorms.

You know what?

If I had ordinary, tame sweaters, I might never had found that special T-shirt.

I don't think this was an accident. Do you?

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.