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Cosmic Adjustment, Romance & Socks

   Written by on June 8, 2017 at 9:37 am
The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

Normally, I mean usually, (nothing is ever quite normal here) I don’t believe in getting even with folks who complicate or interrupt my life. My theory is that my guardian angel, Cosmos, will take care of it sooner or later and it isn’t my concern. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching the cosmic adjustment as they get theirs.

The girl child is now happily married.  Prior to her wedding it was my duty and responsibility to interfere with her romance.  Now that she is married I get to interrupt purely for the joy of interrupting and to make up for the hundreds of times she has interrupted us.

From the moment she was born her primary goal was to prevent us from having any opportunity to produce a younger sibling for her.  As a baby, she could sense romance in the air and would demand to be fed or changed. As a toddler, she would break something. When she got older we would give her a coloring book and tell her to color a picture. She promptly learned speed coloring and her brother would push the pages under our door.  Imagine if you will, a giant FAX machine steadily spitting out pages. To further complicate things the fax machine had to be thanked and complimented on each page.

She then discovered the telephone. We would hear her answering it through the thin walls of our first Hovel Sweet Hovel.  “Yes, Mommy is here but you can’t talk to her. Daddy is here too. They are in their room having personal time and I’m not allowed to interrupt unless the house is on fire or someone is bleeding or broken.”

My bride Management somehow embarrassed the newlyweds.  I don’t really understand all of this but here is what happened.  They arrived at our house (and of course interrupted us) with a load of laundry.  They washed everything but one load of clothes.  Management decided it would be nice to give them another present so she tucked a book in the load of dirty laundry.

She must have thought they needed help washing clothes because the book was titled “The Joy of Sox” or something like that.  As you know, losing socks while washing clothes is the biggest hazard in laundry with the exception of mixing darks and whites.

My personal theory is that each pair of socks is comprised of one male and one female. The wash cycle is the marriage ceremony; the dryer the delivery room.  In the dryer, the Mom sock disintegrates into spores, which grow into dust bunnies. The bunnies that escape the lint trap crawl around the house and hide under beds and furniture. They then build cocoons that appear to be spider webs.  Finally, they hatch into wire coat hangers, which incidentally have no morals. The coat hangers end up in a tangled pile and produce unmatched socks.

I once attempted to apply for an $82 million government grant to document this phenomenon but lost out to a study on the sex life of the last pair of yellow-bellied, purple-spotted tree toads on earth. The study determined that the reason the toads, Fred and Ralph, were not reproducing was that they were both males.  They did manage to spend the entire 82 million before determining that.

But back to the book. Being newlyweds with better things to do than wash clothes, they dropped off that last load of clothes at one of those “wash and fold” places.  They must not spend much time training folks in those places because upon returning to pick up the clothes, the son-in law found the entire staff reading the book with obvious interest and enjoyment.

Management is horrified, humbled and humiliated. Apparently, she is afraid the clerks will think she was accusing them of not knowing how to wash clothes. We don’t know how the newlyweds are taking it.  Their phone seems to be broken. I’ve been calling every ten minutes or so and they aren’t answering their phone anymore.

Editor’s Note: Before publication, we sent this to the Girl Child for her approval. She responded, “He calls it ‘Cosmic Adjustment,’ I think he merely misinterpreted my intentions as a child. Although, the part about the book in the laundry basket was true. The girls at Timberlake Laundry thought it was quite interesting. I think it’s… shocking. At least my husband has a sense of humor.”

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