The Sock Fairy

I have these gray socks. They’re sort of dress socks, but I wear them with my jeans and Columbia hikers sometimes for a dress-up jeans occasion. You know, when you don’t want to put on scratchy old dress pants, but you want to look nice and be comfortable at the same time, so you wear almost new jeans like Levi’s 502’s, not the ones that look like you just crawled out from under your car doing a grease job, though no one really does grease jobs anymore since they’re all sealed fittings, but you already knew that. It’s just a simile, not something heavy like an actual metaphor. Had this been a real metaphor, you would have been instructed where to look in your textbook to find the definition and perhaps some examples.

So, back to the socks. They’re gray, I think I mentioned. Usually I wear white socks with my jeans because I usually wear white walking shoes (read: Nikes) and they sort of go together. Lately, in the winter months, I’ll have my Columbia hikers on, the low cut ones—don’t get excited—I’m not talking toe cleavage, but rather ankle display. One day I broke out of that particular box by trying the gray socks I had bought some years ago and never worn. Because again, I’m wearing either black or brown dress socks, depending upon the shoes I’m using on a certain day. My entire dress shoe collection consists of one pair black, one pair brown and since I don’t get dressed in the dark, I’ve never gone out with a mixed set--“I bet you have another pair like those at home” sort of joke.

At a conference back in November I tried out my new outfit. Socks-wise that is. Either no one noticed or they were too stunned by my fashion statement that they couldn’t wait to run out and procure their own gray socks. Some people get dressed up on that particular day of the conference, but I knew I was getting on a plane in a few hours so I figured I should be comfortable. In any case, I was pleased with my get-up and decided to replicate it last week when the boss declared Friday to be Jeans Day.

It doesn’t happen that often—Jeans Day, that is. Usually he’ll do it when he knows he won’t be in the office. I don’t know why he’s anti-demin, perhaps he was attacked by a jeans salesman at one point in his childhood and the experience warped his perception of that comfy cloth. So I’m getting ready for Jeans Day, and of course I want to make the right statement with my socks, but I can’t find them. They’ve gone missing.

After frantically searching the likely drawers in my dresser and admittedly I’m a lousy looker, as my mother would attest, were she not presently in heaven, I completely emptied said drawers to no avail.

Then I mentioned to my son, “Gee, I can’t find my gray socks. I can’t imagine where they went.”

The next morning, they had appeared on the top of my dresser, innocently folded, as if they had been there all along and I was the crazy one, not them.

See what I mean—it was the sock fairy all along.