THE SOLO SOCK
By Garrison Keillor
Of life’s many troubles, I’ve known quite a few: Bad plumbing and earaches and troubles with you, but the saddest of all, when it’s all said
and done, is to look for your socks and find only one.
Here’s a series of single socks stacked in a row. Where in the world did their fellow socks go? About missing socks, we have very few facts. Some say cats steal them to use for backpacks, or desperate Norwegians willing to risk prison to steal socks to make lutefisk. But the robbery theories just don’t hold water: Why would they take one and not take the
odder?
Socks are independent, studies have shown, and most feel a need for some time alone. Some socks are bitter from contact with feet; some, seeking holiness, go on retreat; some need adventure and cannot stay put; some socks feel useless and just underfoot. But whatever the reason these socks lose control, each sock has feelings down deep in its sole.
If you wake in the night and hear creaking and scraping, it’s the sound of a sock, bent on escaping. The socks on the floor that you think the kids dropped? They’re socks that went halfway, got tired, and stopped.
It might help if, every day, as you don your socks, you take time to say: “Thank you, dear socks, for a job that is thankless. You comfort my feet from tiptoes to
ankless. Working in concert, a cotton duet, keeping them snug and absorbing the sweat. And yet you smell springlike, a regular balm, as in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. "And so I bless you with all of my heart and pray that the two of you never shall part. I love you, dear socks, you are socko to me, the most perfect pair that I ever did see.”
This may help, but you must accept that half of all socks
are too proud to be kept. And, as with children, their leaving is ritual. Half of all socks need to be individual.
