Synchronicity of Underpants

At least once every summer, I take a day off and head to Taughannock Park for some sunning, swimming and reading. I try to go in the middle of the week because the park gets INSANE on weekends in the summer.

Today, I was the only one on the bus as we set off for the park. I had snacks, Oliver Sacks' newest book, and a blankie to loll on. I was the only person on the bus on the way there. 

Near the front, I saw what I thought was the bus driver's lunchbox. It looked like it had the word "whisky" embroidered on the front, which I thought was odd, or perhaps inappropriately honest for a lunchbox. (On closer inspection, it said "Husky" and didn't belong to the bus driver at all; a camp kid had left it behind earlier that morning.)

I like to go to the north point of the park- most people don't bother going all the way over to that side, so it's usually pretty quiet and private. Except there were a ton of ducks there today. I counted a mama with eight ducklings and at least two other such groupings. They, like me, were obviously avoiding the public beach, too.

I moved around the shoreline with the sun- winding up on the other side of the park, surrounded by geese, oddly. They left me alone, for which I was grateful. But then the funniest thing happened- one made a funny little squawk and they all lined up and stood at attention. Another squawk and every single one of them went into the water and began swimming away. 

 The bus ride back to Ithaca was uneventful, until…

…two entire camp-fuls of kids got on the bus at Cass Park. Now, granted, this is only two miles away from downtown, where my stop was. (One time a few years back I got stuck on the bus at the park with several dozen campers. It had rained throughout the day and everyone was soaked from either swimming or the run from the picnic shelter to the bus. The little boy sitting next to me looked at me and my wet hair with such joy on his face and declared loudly, "Everyone on this bus has wet bottoms!") But today, those two miles were about 10 minutes of pure, excruciating hell, made worse by the fact that I had a headache from straining my eyes reading in the sun.

This pretty much captures what it was like.

There was barely enough room on the bus for all the campers. The kid sitting next to me kept bouncing up and down on the seat. The ones who had to stand were swinging from the straps like monkeys on PCP. They almost all to a one smelled like dead worms somehow, and one very large child was PISSED that there was another camp on the bus who took all the "good" seats at the back of the bus. He proceeded to shout at the bus driver about how much he hated him and how this was all his fault, while his skinny, ineffectual, high-pitched whisper-voiced scraggly-goateed camp counselor tried to talk some rationality into him. The bus driver just sailed back and in a big cheery voice told him next time he could ride on the bike rack mounted on the front of the bus. The kid laughed and was fine; apparently this is a conversation that has been had before.

There was a little girl with a rainbow striped shirt, long hair and a long-suffering expression on her face sitting in the seat perpendicular to me. The boys in the seat next to her kept shoving her into me and she kept apologizing to me. I just smiled back at her sympathetically.

And then I overheard this conversation:

Counselor: Ian, uh… Ian? Where are your underpants?

Ian: *shrugs* I dunno. 

Counselor: What do you mean you don't know?

Ian: I guess I lost 'em.

Counselor: How could that happen… Ian, please stop that. Ian! You're being very inappropriate right now! Please- just close the hole up, will you? You're being very inappropriate. Can you cover it up? Well, then, just… oh man. Please stop. Just stop. Can't you, uh, cover it somehow? Oh no. Okay, never mind that. Where's your towel? Where is your towel? *Looks toward back of bus in desperation* Caleb! Caleb, do you have your brother's towel? Can you toss it up here? Thanks. Ian, keep this on your lap till we get to our stop.

The little girl perpendicular to me rolled her eyes and looked beleaguered- Ian was sitting right next to her. Again, she said, "Sorry." I said, "No, I'm sorry," glancing at her seat mate with his grungy, wet towel draped across his lap. You'll probably end up going to prom with him with your luck, I wanted to say, but didn't. She was in enough misery as it was.

A few minutes later, another counselor, who was sitting on the other side of the bus, female this time, had to ask Ian, very sweetly, very politely, to please keep his knees together.

I noticed Ian was the last one off the bus, still perched there in his seat, a towel on his lap like a surgical drape. I wondered how he was getting home- was someone going to pick him and his brother up at the library where they had gotten off the bus? God, I hoped they didn't ride their bikes here, I thought, shuddering. I wondered how he would explain his towel-drape to whatever parents were waiting for him.

I should note that nearly every time I go on one of my little adventures, I manage to come across some

discarded underpants. It doesn't matter if I'm hiking in the woods or exploring a new city- inevitably, I will find underpants. I've always wondered how someone loses their underpants in locations like these. They never appear to have just fallen out of a bag packed with other clothes. They are always alone, unaccompanied by any explanation as to why they were abandoned. It's like they just spontaneously fell off their owner and onto the hiking trail, shrubs, sidewalk, street side planter, once even a cliffside. Who just loses their underpants in a public place?  What happens when they realize they are now sans drawers? Do they ever go back and look for them?

After years of coming across abandoned underwear, today I finally encountered an underpants-loser.  Thank you, Ian, for providing a synchronicity of underpants. I hope your folks were understanding.

U is for ...

U is for... underpants.

Yes, I received many wonderful suggestions for U words to use as a subject (really surprised that "uvula" was so damn popular) but underpants, as they often do, won out.

For reasons good and bad, underpants seem to play an invasive role in my life.

Admittedly, when my siblings and I were little, we loved nothing better than running around in our underpants. I believe we have some old family movies of us tearing about the house in winter wearing sweaters and heavy socks... and underpants. There's absolutely beautiful footage of my brother at about 3 or 4 years old chasing after butterflies with a net in our backyard in Endicott, wearing a white shirt, pale blue underpants, knee socks and saddle shoes, happy as can be. (The irony of my brother chasing after someone with a butterfly net, that silent film symbol of gleeful craziness, was not lost on any of us.)

When I was in elementary school, there was a line of children's undergarments called Underoos, that advertised themselves as "underwear that's fun to wear." Mostly designed to look like superhero costumes, the Wonder Woman version was the one to have for the girls in my class. You always made sure to wear your Underoos on the days that we had swim lessons so you could run around the locker room in your underwear and leap off the concrete benches (yes, onto the slippery tile floor) and pretend you were Wonder Woman.

In high school, there was of course that famous scene from Sixteen Candles that touched upon teenage girls' worst, deep-seeded fear- having your underpants on display. (Or for the more exhibitionist among us, maybe a fond fantasy?)

In the late 90s, a local newspaper began printing hysterical write-ups for their police log. I collected these with fervor until the never-identified writer left the job and the police reports went back to Jack Webb-Dragnet-just the facts ma'am boringness. One of my favorite recurring reports involved someone reporting that their car had been vandalized. Key scratches? Nope. Broken windows? Nope. Slashed tires? Of course not. These criminals had covered the car with 'soiled underpants.' On a separate Tuesday, also in Corning, "someone spread ground beef on the driver's side door of her car." They produce creative criminals in Corning. I've always thought that if I write a memoir, Ground Beef and Underpants would be the title.

And now, underpants continuously pop up in my life. I have a beagle-Jack Russell terrier named Minchy with copious amounts of energy. When I can, I try to take him for long, exhausting walks, usually taking advantage of the numerous gorgeous state parks in my area. For whatever reason, on a regular basis, we encounter discarded underpants on our adventures. One day when I was hiking along Six Mile Creek, I came across three pairs. They never seem to be a harbinger of a crime scene; there's never any kind of bad feelings associated with these lost garments. They instead seem to give off more of a joyful vibe, a symbol of a good time that was had.  Living in a neighborhood with a lot of college kids means we frequently encounter abandoned underpants on our side streets as well. About 90% of the time they're men's underpants. I don't know what this fact says about the underpants' egress. I'm assuming that because women's underclothes tend to be more expensive than men's we take better care of our underpants and are less likely to just leave 'em somewhere.

But beyond my own experiences, underpants are everywhere. South Park had their brilliant "underpants gnomes" episode. Underpants play a pivotal role in many iconic movie scenes such as in Lost in Translation, Risky Business, and Weird Science. Pee Wee's Playhouse regularly brought out a pair of giant underpants (best used as a comfy swing or nun's habit!). There's Dav Pilkey's so-twisted-I-wish-I-would've-thought-to-write-it Captain Underpants series, and Archie McPhee, the darling of novelties aficiandos, has a plethora of underpants-themed products such as Handerpants, Vinderpants, the Emergency Underpants dispenser, and of course, Squirrel Underpants (althought I doubt they make them in a size large enough for our enormous squirrel, Michael Collins).

And yes, although it may sound old-fashioned or childish, I prefer the term 'underpants.' They lend the garments a gravitas that 'panties' or 'briefs' just don't convey.

With the possibility of perhaps sharing a bit too much personal information, I prefer to write in underpants. Granted, this usually happens because I prefer to change into an oversized tshirt or sweatshirt when I get home from work, although in colder weather, I'll add sweatpants. It was good to recently learn that I'm in good company, however:


In a 1978 Newsweek essay, John Cheever wrote, “To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.”

Of ticks, name changes, and police blotters ...

A few things:

1. I went for a glorious hike yesterday and took a million pictures of all the cool cliffs I climbed up, the creek I walked along and the things I found along the way. On the icky side, I found a tick on me. Still creeped out. Don't wanna talk about it.

2. Seeing as discarded underpants seem to find their way into my path NEARLY EVERY WHERE I GO, I've been contemplating changing the name of this blog to Discarded Underpants. I'm still kinda disillusioned about the "Hamchuck" thing since I found out about it's origins. 

3. When some friends were over awhile ago, we trotted out my Corning Leader Police Blotter collection.  I'd forgotten how funny they were, so I'm going to feature some of them here.

A little background- back in 1998/1999, the local newspaper in Corning, NY, The Leader, was being criticized for not alerting its citizens to criminal activity in the area. (My parents used to subscribe to The Leader because our local paper is only an afternoon edition, and by that time of day, they didn't care any more.)

The Leader apparently responded by directing some hapless staffer to print nearly every item of the Corning police log every day. I've personally seen the police blotter (more on that in a bit) and the items are written very tersely, very "just the facts, ma'am." This Leader staffer, who has remained unidentified, took it upon him/herself to "jazz" the items up a bit. The result? Hilarity. I started collecting them after my mom pointed out this first gem to me:

Friday
5:21 a.m.
A person at Dunkin Donuts said a man who thought he was the devil wouldn't leave.
The alleged demon had left by the time police arrived.

I eagerly scanned each day's edition of The Leader for gems like this and I wasn't disappointed. I started clipping them and collecting them in a little book, with the idea that it would make an amazingly funny novelty book. I contacted The Leader about permission to reprint and was swiftly and irreversibly rebuffed. Those items were the property of The Leader and they would not give me permission to reprint. I could, however, reprint the original police reports they were written from, as they were public information.  That's when I went to the Corning Police Department and saw that the real gold was in that lowly underling's genius as he/she crafted those complaints into comedy gold. 

So, in lieu of my original intent, I'm going to be mining my little scrapbook for these police reports and print them here. Narny, narny, narny, Corning Leader.