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12/11/2005: "The Big Bag Full of Stinky Christmas Clothes"
Hello All,
I have not yet done my Christmas shopping this year, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. While I’m not one of those crazy Christmas Eve shoppers, the ones frantically careening about the mall at 9 pm on Dec. 24th, picking through very picked-over pickings trying to find something for their loved ones and ending up with, oh I don’t know, a soiled Tickle Me Elmo that had somehow been shoved under a toystore shelf for 4 years and perhaps some sort of canned good with the label torn off.
No, I’m not that bad. But I am admittedly pretty bad. I usually wait until I get to wherever I’m spending Christmas—this year, Calgary—before heading out and picking up what I need. If I shopped earlier I would avoid the crowds—and as I get older and more hermit-like, I don’t really dig crowds—but then again, as the old saying goes, if my aunt had a dick she’d be my uncle. Which is to say, less abstractly, that I am somewhat set in my ways.
Also I enjoy playing out the little yuletide minuet me and my mother have enacted for years, wherein I come back for Christmas with a duffel bag of stinky clothes I’ve been saving up, drop it in the front hall, and wait for my mom to become so repulsed by the smell of them, the very there-ness of them, that, in a fit of pique, she cleans them for me.
Every year we do this, and every year she says, “Just go ahead and leave them. You’ll need clean clothes sooner or later, then you’ll have to clean them yourself.” In this she underestimates my sadist-like willingness to wear my dad’s clothes—I would end up wearing my dad’s mothballed old Hawaiian beachwear before I cleaned those clothes—while simultaneously overestimating her own resolve in letting those clothes sit and mildew. She’ll walk by them a few times, oh sure, but then she’ll start getting a little bit antic, a little frantic, then soon it’s like she’s walking past a steaming pile of dog turds, then a corpse, then she buckles and cleans them and promises never to do it again. A classic case of washer’s remorse.
I wouldn’t make it so hard on her, except that she puts up this tough front, challenges me to a Mexican standoff of sorts, then always caves. It’s really too much fun leaving them there and watching her squirm. It’s like she’s this raging alcoholic and I’ve left a beer on the counter: she’s going, “You can leave that there as long as you want, buster, I’m not drinking it, nosirree Bob and you can take that to the BANK!”
Five minutes later the beer’s gone.
Okay, so it’s changed a bit over the years. Now I’m so happy to have a washer and dryer that I don't have to shovel quarters into that I do it myself. Also, my dad’s beachwear has lost its charm (amusing aside: my dad, charmed that I sometimes steal/wear his clothes, is now always trying to offload them on me. There’s this old Stroh’s baseball shirt I wore for like 3 weeks in high school and now, over ten years later, he still mentions it: “Hey, how’d you like that Stroh’s shirt, buddy? Pretty snazzy, uh? Uh?” I always tell him, “If I like an item of your clothing, you’ll know, because the next time you go to wear it, it’ll be gone.”). Anyway, now I clean my own clothes 75% of the time. I keep that 25% in escrow for old times’ sake.
---Craig.