Pants

I wore khaki slacks, but before that I ironed khaki slacks. I’ll tell you about it sometime. How about now? It’s a good time for me, I’d be out somewhere, but I’ve just painted my front door and can’t close it until it’s dry. You’re stuck with me. So you might as well make yourself comfortable while I tell you about my pants and how I ironed them.

I don’t have an ironing board, so I did the work on a towel spread over the corner of my coffee table. When I finished ironing, I tried the pants on. They looked fine in the mirror, but the thought crossed my mind that they might need to have a crease ironed down the front of each pant leg. Do you do that with khakis, or only with more formal slacks? I couldn’t remember. I found some catalog photos online – pictures of smiling men enjoying their pants. Every pant leg had a neat and crisp crease down the front. So I set up the makeshift ironing board again, swapped the slacks for the jeans I’d been wearing earlier, and went back to work, carefully ironing a crease down the front of each leg.

When I finished I put the pants back on and checked out my handiwork in the mirror. The right leg was fine. The crease on the left leg veered off course from the front of my thigh, down toward the outside of the leg at the cuff. The left pants leg didn’t seem to be straight, it was trying to point out in front of me. The inseam twisted itself out about sixty degrees from the inside of my leg, so that at the cuff it was almost at the front of my leg. Someone had sold me a pair of irregular pants.

In the end, to compensate for the twisted leg, I ironed in a new crease that angled from the front of the pants leg down toward the inseam. The original seam didn’t iron out as completely as I’d hoped, so I ended up with a forked crease on my left leg. By the time I was out the door, the whole thing was a rumpled maze of wrinkles. They would impress nobody.

That’s the story of my pants.