Underpinnings, Underwear Friday Round-Up

If you use a Porta-Potty at the dog park right after you see a former elected official waving hello who then uses the same Porta-Potty after you have a quick chat, should you feel weird? Actually, while I was using said PP, I worried that the former elected official and my husband, just a few yards away, could hear me, and then I thought, “Find more serious things to think about! What are you, 12 years old?! So, I acted like it was nothing, something I do every day. At least, he isn’t currently in office. That might’ve changed everything.

Two men brought our new refrigerator today and it took an hour for them to get the old one out and the new one in because our house is a 110-years-old and made for iceboxes just big enough to hold a twenty-pound block of ice. On the way out, one of the men tried to fix a doorknob. He also put pictures back where they had been leaning and straightened a table runner. I wanted him to stay longer. Be our friend.

My husband owns at least twenty bottles of hot sauce, including two that are ghost pepper sauces which nobody who isn’t drunk can consume. He keeps them lined up on a shelf in the refrigerator but ends up always using Tabasco. He could collect worse things – rusted license plates or stuffed birds of the north. Instead, it’s just these little bottles with their scary, death-threatening, labels.

Herc the cat disappeared in my office. I had to use the Apple Airtag to find him. I’d locked him up because the refrigerator men were here and then when I opened the door, he’d vanished. I thought maybe he’d leaped out the window in protest but, after using the Airtag’s Play Sound, I finally found him, nestled on top of my high school yearbook in the dark reaches of my bookcase. His look was one of disdain and disgust at having been imprisoned.

Meanwhile, while we are counting our hot sauces and looking for cats, the number of homeless people living outside in our city has doubled in the past few weeks. It is easy to get used to this – the ebb and flow of homelessness – watching the number go up and down, posting on social media, being righteous in our outrage. I bought ten pairs of underwear yesterday because the drawerful I had didn’t fit right. A woman will come to the door of the Street Angels outreach bus in a few days asking for a single pair of underwear so she can change out of what she’s worn for however long. When I think of homelessness, I don’t think about policy and affordable housing and drug treatment. I think of underwear. How it is to have a drawerful and how it is to want just a single clean pair.