PANTS! Yeah, that's what's important.If you can't get the basics right, how can you expect to accomplish anything? Well, if nobody else is going to do it - I guess it's up to me.
Pants
By Victor Epp
Pants are cool! In fact, pants are so cool that there's nothing in the world to compare with them. Oh I know what's going through your mind. Maybe the old guy has finally gone off the handle. Well now, not so fast, leastwise not before you think about what I'm saying. It's one of those things that kind of sneaks up on you when you're not looking, but by gum, the truth is, pants are cool.
This whole business came to mind one day not too long ago when we were joking about a humiliating incident involving pants that happened to me more than seventy years ago and you know, just the thought of it brought gales of laughter to everybody's mouth but mine. I could have sworn that I was still humiliated. Well, that's not really true either. I was laughing with everybody else, but I swear the consternation was as vivid in my memory as the day it happened. Since then I haven't been able to get pants off my mind.
Well I might as well tell you what happened, since you're going to find out anyway. Maybe after you get over your first round of guffaws, you'll think about just how cool pants are, especially you mothers out there. Maybe then a guy might be able to get the respect he deserves for the thought and planning that needs to be put into pants.
For a while, I thought my mother understood about these things, but no, not really. I guess women's brains just aren't put together that way. She started out like any other mother, putting me in short sissy pants in the summer and those awful breeches in the winter - you know the ones that are tight from the knee down with laces so they can be tucked into your moccasins and keep the snow out. Whoever thought that dumb idea up sure under estimated a boy's ability to get snow down just about every crack that was ever invented. Then from the knee up, they were loose and baggy, something like wearing a kite. The final insult was the suspenders that got clipped onto them. I would have settled for the bib overalls my dad used to wear around the farm, but they didn't make them in my size. Besides, in order to be authentic, they had to have the front pockets on the chest, you know, the one for pencil and writing pad and another for pouch tobacco, and most important was the one in between just made for bullet hurricane lighters. Oh yeah, I almost forgot the one on the hip that held your two-dollar Big Ben pocket watch. Well if it wasn't the real McCoy, I didn't want any part of it.
But my mom topped everything I could have ever wished for. She made me a pair of long pants - I mean real long pants! Not only were they real grown up type long pants, but also they were made from an old army coat or some such thing that was the proper weight. Can you imagine such a thing? It was almost sacred! She zipped them up on her Singer sewing machine like a professional tailor. Well, you did that on the farm in those days. It was still the dirty thirties and if you wanted something bad enough, you made it yourself.
Another thing you did those days was to butcher your own meat - chickens, pigs, whatever. Now you city slickers might snicker at your country kinfolk for their backward ways, but I can tell you there was no shortage of visitors from the city after such events. No one ever left the table hungry either. In fact, as I recall, at least one city slicker built his business around just such affairs. Old Charlie Oberton was an insurance salesman from town. He was the self appointed shooter any time there was butchering to be done. What he'd do on pig killing day was to get dad's old twenty-two Savage single shot rifle and pop off the selected pig from his perch on top of the pen. After it had been drawn and quartered, he'd get down to the real reason he was out there - selling more insurance of course. I tell you this so you'll know that these events were a real production, given the times.
The very first time I got to wear my new long pants was on pig killing day at our house. You'd have thought it was my coronation, that's how excited I was. It wasn't just that I got to wear them, but I got to show them off too. How I managed to contain myself from five o'clock in the morning until about eight a.m. I'll never know. I kept going out to the back shed lean-to of the house to peer out the window for signs of my uncles and aunts coming up in their big box sleigh. That in itself was a big thing for me. I was almost as crazy about horses as I was about my new pants.
All the chores and preparations going on around me were just so much jumble. Dad was out in the barn. Mother was hauling water in to the house and pouring it into boilers and tubs, stoking up the fire in the kitchen stove and generally getting ready for a long tiring day. She probably told me to keep an eye out for the people just to get me out from under foot.
Finally, finally there was a faint crunch, crunch, crunch in the snow. They were coming! At last they were coming! My time had arrived! I peeked out of the frosty window to see the sleigh turning into the barnyard, puffs of steam blowing out of the horses nostrils as they crunched ever closer in the cold. The women and children who weren't at school piled out from under their blankets and headed for the house with pots and utensils. They were here!
I just couldn't take my eyes off those beautiful horses. As the women reached the door I backed up to tell my mother they had arrived. My heel hit something and suddenly I lost my balance. Head over heel, I fell backwards into the galvanized steel bathtub that my mom had been busy filling with all that water she'd been hauling. There I was at the moment of glory, lying in a bathtub full of cold water with my brand new tailor made, never before worn long pants! Terror struck as my relatives all gathered around, standing over my wounded pride like vultures over a dying monarch. Then they - well they - they laughed.
It was at that very moment that my chest opened and Satan struck at my very heart. It was either him or that ghost from the Indian burial mound down the road. Anger, humiliation, embarrassment and a whole lot of other emotions that I still haven't found a name for cut through me like lightning bolts. I rose like an apparition out of my watery grave and streaked through the kitchen, the dining and living room into my parents' bedroom and dove under the dresser without ever once touching the floor. Well, I did have to come out to change in to some dry sissy short pants, but other than that, there was nobody big enough to get me out from under that dresser. Not even those big beautiful horses outside could have done it that day. Nobody was going to see me like that - not even me!
To be fair though, they all did try to contain their laughter as best they could. But let's face it; from their viewpoint I had lightened up what would otherwise have been a very hard day. Well, la dee dah - that didn't soothe my wounded pride any! As far as I was concerned, this hopeless bunch of people just couldn't grasp the gravity of the tragedy I had just suffered.
Well, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since that fateful day and I've come to accept the shortcomings of women in general and mothers in particular when it comes to the importance of pants in a man's life, no matter what age he is. I've reached the conclusion that they just don't have what it takes to fully understand the situation.
The situation didn't get any easier as life went on either. When we got to be teenagers for instance, the pants fashion in the city anyway, changed to what we called 'strides' which was a fitting name for what we were all about. The moms still didn't get it. They called them abominations. Nonetheless, our pants made a statement of our individuality. What they really were was pants with a wide knee and a very narrow cuff - sort of bell-bottoms in reverse. It seemed that with every criticism the designs got just a little more outrageous. It got so you had to have seams sewn on the outside of the legs. Still not good enough, you needed flaps on the back pockets. They were known as gun flaps and kind of looked like a cloth holster with buttons.
Finally, some of the women started to get the idea, even if only a little bit. In truth, I think they were more concerned with what they called 'the new look' that involved long skirts with crinolines underneath and peasant blouses - or something unimportant like that. Some of us actually bought into that by modifying our designs to less radical creations, but deep down, we knew nothing had been learned. Are you starting to get the picture about the passionate attachment men have to their pants? Do you begin to see that some things in life are worth standing up for? Heck, I even started wearing my belt with the buckle to the side, just as a personalized accessory. Come to think of it, I still do.
Well, it's not just me either. When my kids were much younger, the wife and I had a very special anniversary celebration. Of course, she dressed everyone up in proper fashion according to her tastes. Well that turned out to be a big mistake too. Twenty-five years later I'm still getting grief from one of my boys over that stupid sissy pants denim suit he had to wear. I'm just grateful that he had enough tact not to go flying under somebody's dresser at the time.
Nowadays they're wearing a new kind of pants, with pockets running down both legs. There are zippers in different places so you can take off or add on leg lengths to suit your activity. Not that I understand the logic behind these new designs or I'd ever wear anything like that, but at least I respect a man's choice in design.
Can you believe that the wife still makes me stand up on a chair while she pins up my casual grubbing around pants? I can't get it through her head that you don't hem up pants like that. You roll them up is what you do. You only hem up dress pants, for heaven's sake. These days I'd be happy with a pair of those old bib overalls except that they don't make 'Old Chum' tobacco anymore and the weird stuff they suck on these days in the 'Zig Zag' cigarette papers is no decent smoke. Besides, where would you ever find one of them old 'Hurricane' bullet lighters anyway? A man shouldn't wear stuff like that without the proper accessories.
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