The Columnist Manifesto

I went through my sock drawer this morning, and pulled out 17 single socks. I laid them out on my bed for a sock mixer. Quickly, two pair of socks found their mates, and left the party, no doubt with some corny line like "wanna roll up in a ball and hit the sock drawer?"

That left thirteen single socks. There they are, lying like bumps on a log. Is one of them even so much as trying to mingle?

The two black ones in the lower right look like they could be a match -- indeed, they have the same fabric and ribbed texture, but on closer inspection one is gray and the other charcoal. No dice. This just proves the old saying that you can get your socks to meet, but you can't force them to be compatible.

It's sad really. Each of these 13 socks is divorced or widowed. And what good are they now? Do you really expect me to walk around in mismatched socks?


What happened to their "partners," anyway? How in the world can thirteen socks simply disappear in the space of two years? You can joke all you want about the dryer "eating" single socks, but do you really believe that it's physically possible for a sock to one day up and dissolve into a bunch of lint? I really don't buy that.

I could live with the mystery back in the days of going to the laundromat -- I would just assume that the sock fell out of my laundry, wound up on the laundromat floor and was thrown away. But this explanation doesn't work when you have your own washer-dryer in the basement. They've got to be somewhere. But no: there are no piles of abandoned socks hiding out behind the dryer or under the stairs. The whereabouts of "the other sock" remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe.

Maybe I shouldn't care about wearing mismatched socks -- and therefore, free myself from the oppressive cultural norm that views these perfectly good single sock as useless rags. Why does our existence get so caught up in being part of a couple?