They were an unassuming pair of socks. Pale grey, factory knitted in the 1970s from thick Vermont wool, they did not receive frequent wearings, remaining folded at the back of the sock drawer until the depths of winter. Annually, however, during one toe-chilling day or another, they would get their chance – until, that is, I noticed a pattern. Invariable, within a day or two of wearing the socks, I would get sick.
Alas, despite their link to my undergraduate days, the socks had to go.
Common sense might have dictated a course other than wooly destruction. The apparent relationship between sock use and sickness was no doubt silly; the notion that wardrobe can influence wellbeing would be considered by most people irrational, unscientific. Besides, the darned things were still in good shape.
But one year, two decades or so ago, I felt pushed to the limit. Three days of fever, chills, and myalgias finally effaced any bemused fondness I may have harbored for the quixotic relationship between textile and physical state.
A friend posited that responsibility for illness rested with me, not the wool. His logic held that because – once – I had coincidentally become sick after wearing the socks, I had expected to become, and hence indeed did become, sick with each subsequent donning. “It’s not the socks’ fault,” he winked, “it’s you. You’re the one making yourself sick.”
My wife spun a slightly different, and decidedly more supportive, explanation. “Maybe you self-consciously know when you’re about to get sick,” she suggested, “and you wear the socks right before the symptoms set in. To help you get ready.”
Socks as innocent bystanders versus socks as illness signalers: a pair of theories very consistent with western medicine and intellectual tradition. Both offered with the best of intents. Both rejected by my younger self.
“Look,” I argued, “I already recognize the cues from my subconscious about impending illness. When my mood turns negative, I know something physically yucky isn’t far behind. So I respect rather than recriminate those mental signals, and I rest, drink more fluids, even try to replace negative thoughts with positive ones.”
That is what I said. What I wondered was different: they were probably right. So I wore the socks one fine January day when it wasn’t cold and when my outlook was positively sunny. I laughed at my ludicrous indictment of a lifeless textile. I pulled the socks on and went about my day.
Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t laughing. The problem, it seemed, was not in my head. It was in the socks.
There were last minute pleas for soft sentencing. “Maybe the socks are involved,” a colleague whispered, “but it’s not their fault. They may be holding some sort of bad energy but you were the one that gave that energy to them, the first time you got sick. Look, socks are inorganic. They aren’t doing this on purpose. They can’t.” The perspective was shared with an imploring tone. Save the socks.
I considered some possible avenues to footwear redemption: donation, frequent wearing in the spring and summer, even some sort of ceremonial cleaning. In the end, however, I just needed space. I severed the sock-sickness cycle via the county landfill.
The inanimate world can surprise us. We hear stories of hard-to-explain interactions between people and inorganic objects. Crystals and jewelry are often cited. But there are other, equally mysterious experiences with other things and structures, large and small. Many of these interactions are positive. None of them make so-called “sense”, at least not in the way we explain sense scientifically. Still, they are there. We can feel them.
Last week, while straightening up a drawer in my clothes closet, I found a small plastic bag I had placed there multiple months ago, a ziplock container with a few of my father’s personal things. There were tie clips, cuff links, and an old watch. The watch had stopped; it hadn’t been worn since his death. Responding to some sort of instinct, I stretched the flexible band over my left hand, settling the watch face on my wrist. It fit. Next I sorted through the cuff links and tie clips, smiling at my father’s penchant later in life for sartorial style. By chance I glanced back at the watch.
It was running again.
After my heart paused, I realized that the watch must have an automatic winding feature; movement caused it to restart, not some familial force reaching through the space-time continuum. Nonetheless, something important had happened in that continuum when I slipped the watch onto my wrist, something akin to a mini-cosmic reboot of some non-linear measurement based on the transfer of wearership from father to son. There is more to this watch than modern time.
I wear it now, intermittently, not because I need to know the time of day; there are so many other ways of knowing that from the technology surrounding me. I haven’t even bothered to reset the hour and minute. No, I wear the watch because of another sense that it brings me, one that is far more basic, more foundational. It regulates me somehow, physiologically. It also grounds me someotherhow, lifealogically.
Unlike those socks, the watch just feels right.