I had to bite my tongue, tell myself it’s not the sort of thing he’d be interested in hearing any more than my own children would – about how my first “original style” jeans lain at the bottom of my father's swimming pool one summer back in 1974, looking eerily like the bottom half of a dead body – and of how my father would swim obliviously above them twice a day, early morning and again at dusk. I was waiting for the chlorine to fade and soften them – and I’d jump in the pool weekly, take them out to inspect, wash, dry, and see if time had done the job of speeding up time. If they still had that cardboard feel, could still stand up like a paper doll, then back into the pool they’d go. By August, they had the "right" kind of look to them, and I was ready for my first year of college. I wanted to tell this young man that my mother was in dismay as to why anyone would do that to new jeans, she having been raised on a farm, etc. etc. But -- I had no interest in her stories at the time, so why would this young man want to hear my story as he ran my credit card through without even looking at me?
But then I came home with my new jeans and went straight up to the attic to haul out one box of saved, sentimental clothing where that first pair of 501s still stayed – only a remnant of what they’d once been, having been hacked off to make short-shorts sometime after college – and isn’t it funny, I thought, that here is my second pair of 501’s – the pair that took me 10 busy years to soften up and fade the way I like them – the pair that went through the births and nurturance of three babies – always this pair of familiar jeans I’d put my feet into before stepping onto the wooden floor for a full day and evening of child caring and house caring – that denim, so faded and soft now, like a swatch of baby blanket worn through to its very threads. I saw two clearly worn spots on the backside, thin as fine linen, just where the sit bones would have hit when that odd moment came to sit down – goodness knows, I didn’t sit much in those jeans except to nurse babies, I thought – maybe it was the deep knee bends that somehow strained the bottomside too, the stooping down and bending over to pick up toys or towels or crying babies . . . maybe games were played while sitting on the floor or scuttling across a rug. And the color, I thought – I’m sure they were a dark hue when I bought them, just like the first pair I bought before college – because I don’t think "pre-washed" or worn-in jeans existed before my children were born.
So goes the attic reverie . . . of how indigo blue can be scraped away to reveal pale-eyed blue – and of milky white threads that bare themselves on cloth just like thinning grey hairs on a head or as weakened blood vessels show through a woman’s skin after all the family is raised and all the work is done and there’s finally time to sit down for a reason other than to nurse babies or read the children their books . . .
I show up for writing today, wearing a new pair of Levi’s 501 jeans – my third – and for once they are pre-washed and pre-softened (what is now proudly labeled, "distressed") because who has 10 years to soften up a pair of jeans anymore? . . . And so I'll sit at this kitchen table with notebook and pencil to do the job of writing today about a young man with swirling tattoos of deep indigo pierced upon fair young forearms that never lifted a baby much less a lifeless body from the bottom of a turquoise pool – such distress, she writes . . . that can’t even look up as it hands over the bag of jeans . . . .
nicely done
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