Three Socks

I am incapable of dressing myself. Strike that. I am, I should say, incapable of properly dressing myself. Yes, I can easily pull on a pair of plaid slacks and then climb directly into a canary yellow shirt. But when I am finished I look, as my friend likes to say, ungood.

For nearly thirty years, my wife dressed me. She—a fashion-wise seamstress by vocation—soon assembled a Mitch-proof wardrobe with a compatible mix of shirt and pants in somewhat muted colors and design that could not be mismatched. I could grab any two things and wear them without alarm to anyone’s sartorial sensibilities. Furthermore, she made certain that all sizes were in proper accord. From time to time I still struggled with mixing blue and black socks. No system is foolproof.

Since my sweet wife’s passing, not even two full months in time, I have degraded stridently in my appearance. Not the obviously aged and inherently, as my friend might say, unhandsome thing I naturally struggle with. I cannot do anything about that. What I mean is, my dress has corrupted again. I am presently swimming in ill-fitting shirts. My sweats attempt to ankle themselves at nearly every step. I have acquired a few new shirts with wrong patterns. My colors often scream at passersby. I cannot help myself. I am doomed by some faulty design in fashion sense from the get-go. Back in the day, I continued on with paisley patterns, nearly ten years after they fell from grace. Just yesterday, thanks to my forgetting to purchase cling-free dryer sheets for several weeks, a sock fell to the floor from inside my jacket when I reached for something at work. Only by dumb luck, the third sock matched the two I was wearing.

--Mitchell Hegman