Them polyester pants...

There has been a running joke in our family for years now about a particular pair of red and white checked, double knit, polyester pants. While looking through our photo albums, in about every fourth photo you are bound to see one of the ten grandchildren wearing the pants. Boys, girls, doesn't matter, it's the same pair of pants, I know it! You can see how they must have been passed down from cousin to cousin as they make their way through birthdays, Easters and christmases.

I have brought the pants up to others around my age, throughout the years, and they swear that their entire family owned a similar pair of pants. No one remembers who they belonged to originally, and no one knows where they went. So, there is only one logical conclusion: it must be the same pair of pants. So far, no one has been able to prove otherwise: there have been no receipts presented from Woolworth's or Kresge's; no one still has a pair packed away in a trunk in the attic with their name printed on the inside of the waist.

Today, while sitting around my mom's table, flipping through christmas flyers, the pants decided to resurface in our conversation. My sister had been speaking of how polyester of any type chaffes when wet, like when you spend a recess outside in the rain and how your polyester pants would then rub and irritate you all during gym class. I took the scenario a wee bit further. I pointed out that polyester pants, especially the double knit kind that our family passed around, RETAINED heat when wet, and that what was worse than rain or snow was pee! "Yes, I cried, "remember when we were walking home from school one day when I was five and I couldn't hold it any longer, so I peed my pants?" The feeling of hot urine and man made fiber is one that has yet to leave me, even after 27 years. I am sure that having to walk home another two blocks in that matter, bawling and stinking as I was, had something to do with the lasting impression it made... but not much.

So to all who are 30+, remember your own childhood closets and the endless stories that can be pulled from the fashions your parents thought were cool. Remember how it wasn't considered embarrassing to have the same shirt your sister wore three years before, even though both of your grade five school pictures look exactly the same. Remember your own pair of double knit pants... they deserve it... they worked hard for your entire family.