The heartbreak of orphan sock

After having devoted an entire column to my unfortunate experiences in the world of underwear, it seems only fitting to turn to what bedevils almost every man: what to do about orphan socks.

Socks have never been more important. With the decline in use of the tie in the business environment, socks have become a man’s way of making his personal statement. A pair of black executive length socks underneath that standard issue gray suit signals that the wearer is gunning for the top, whereas a pair of recreational length Jerry Garcia/Grateful Dead designer socks signifies the wearer marches to the beat of his own drum even in the most conservative environment.

But socks have a significant drawback: they get lost. You consign a pair of socks to the laundry, and back comes one freshly cleaned sock—its companion nowhere to be found. You may get lucky on occasion and find it in the dryer or wrinkled up in some bedsheet, but usually it will simply disappear. My wife takes the position that “The Borrowers”— miniature people living inside the walls of a house in Mary Norton’s 1952 children’s book —are real. I tend to the view that socks are creatures with consciousness and that every once in a while a sock screams to his mate “I can’t stand being on this guy’s feet another minute. You cover for me while I make a break for it.”

I have an impressive collection of orphan socks, which grows steadily. Why I bother to keep them, I don’t know. It’s not as though one day six months from now a stranger is going to knock at my door and proudly deliver a missing sock back to me as its rightful owner.

Which takes me to the crux of the matter. What is the right purchasing policy to adopt in order to minimize the heartbreak of orphan sock? Some argue in favour of the ‘uniform purchase’ approach, wherein you don’t just buy one pair at a time; you buy enough pairs to last you from washday to washday, as well as several extras to compensate for predictable sock disappearance; and, just as importantly, you buy socks that are identical. That way, proponents argue, if you lose one sock you are always sure to find a mate for the remaining one, and you will never have more than one orphan sock in your collection, because you will always have an even number of remaining socks every second disppareance.

Others, myself included, are prepared to adopt the less boring ‘high risk, high reward’ approach of buying interesting socks a few pairs at a time (after all, who can resist a package of thee pairs of Star Wars branded socks for $9.99). The risk is that you’ll create many more orphan socks; the reward is that you are recognized as someone who uses his socks to make a fashion statement, and who is prepared to undergo the high orphanage rate as part of the cost of being different.

But wait, you say: perhaps you can have both. Why not buy enough Star Wars socks to cover off the uniform purchase approach? Theoretically, that would work if you could find enough identical socks, but you would still be locked in to your singular fashion statement until your socks wore out, or you were prepared to restock your complete inventory when you grew tired of them.

There is one other alternative, which involves a big leap of faith. And that is the deliberate wearing of mismatched socks. For instance, the biologist and notorious atheist Richard Dawkins is pictured on his website proudly wearing one blue sock and one red sock. His conclusion is that the fallacy we are falling victim to is that socks must always be matched pairs. Here’s his war cry:

“My solution is to abandon the attempt to match socks altogether. Wear odd socks deliberately, the more different the better. Brazen it out. Wear one red and one blue sock, as I am today. Or one yellow and one green.”

There are other advocates of mismatching. The Washington Post reported on a company that markets mismatched socks especially for children, arguing that wearing mismatched socks teaches kids to embrace their differences and insisting that it is cool to stand out from others. Cool, especially if your parents are paying.

The acceptance of mismatched socks as a cure for the heartbreak of orphan sock would be a major change in social convention. After all, who would want to be caught dead wearing one garish Homer Simpson illustrated sock and one elegant polka dotted Ralph Lauren sock? Still, revolutions have begun over less. Maybe it’s time we jumped into mismatching with both feet—even if they’re in different socks

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca