Due to a teenage stint as a worker in a hotel laundry, I am a highly skilled folder. My wife discovered this soon after we married, when I offered to fold some clean laundry she’d just taken out of the dryer.
“You’re really good at that,” she said, looking at the pile of neatly folded towels, washcloths, sheets and pillowcases I’d just produced.
I told her about the hotel laundry. After that, I became our home’s designated folder.
Once I got that job, I started folding things we’d never folded in that laundry, but I learned that the fundamentals of folding can be applied to almost anything, including women’s underwear. The principles are to try and fold along the seams and to fold things as small as you can, but not so small that they become bulky or likely to unfold in protest.
The loads of underwear and socks that we wash have some of her clothes and some of mine, but I never had any trouble telling our clothes apart.
Pink underwear? Hers. Black socks? Mine. Anything with a picture of a cat on it was hers. Anything plaid was mine.
But the hipster world reached out to me, and I started buying colored socks. I started with a subtle maroon and brown argyle, but I soon owned a pair of polka dot socks, yellow with navy blue dots. My wife bought me a pair of navy blue socks decorated with green palm trees. I bought a pair of purple paisley socks. I found a company that made socks in a mill in the Carolinas. Unlike those cheap Chinese sock makers, these guys could produce plaid socks. I bought a pair in red and yellow.
The laundry basket got a little harder to figure out. I had polka dot socks. So did she. I had striped socks. So did she. The only way I could tell our socks apart was to look at the size. Mine are the larger socks, thank God.
Then, I noticed that some of my socks were the same pattern as some of her underwear. I went to Catholic school, too, so there’s no excuse for that kind of gender confusion. We wore a uniform, and the socks were dark blue. The pants were dark blue. The tie was dark blue. The shirt was light blue, as close to colorful as we were allowed. The nuns were black and white; the schoolyard asphalt was black; the blackboard was black; and if you didn’t tell everything in confession, your soul was black. Only hell was colorful, filled with red devils and orange flames.
At work, I’ve become known for my colorful socks. I’ve always liked to dress up for work: dress shirt, tie, cufflinks, two-tone shoes, gray flannel slacks, tweed jackets, fedoras. The idea of the stylish, slightly wiseguy-looking reporter died sometime in the 60s, but I’m pounding on its chest, trying to get it’s heart going.
The longer Donald Trump stays in office, the more fashion-forward I become. I may look like a 1934 pimp, but I don’t look like the kind of terrified, secretly bigoted suburbanite who went out and voted his misbeliefs. I look like I stay out after midnight, and I look like I’m not afraid to go downtown by myself.
Proudly, defiantly and with no excuses, I want the world to know that I’m in a same socks marriage, and I’m not going away.
Marc Dion, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a reporter and columnist for The Herald News, the daily newspaper of his hometown, Fall River, Mass. For more on Dion, go to go to www.creators.com.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.