LIFE WITH PANTS

Nobody ever says much about pants, which would be like talking about air. Most pants are just fashionable or fundamental covering, but the right pants for the job are just as valuable as the right tool for the job, as I'm now rediscovering. (Another priceless benefit of aging is the almost daily discovery of another thing I used to know.)

What brought pants to mind was that I just got some new carpenter's pants, with lots of pockets and tool-carrying arrangements from Gempler's (5 days shipping!) that are just what I need for gardening, firewooding and general rousting about among rocks, trees, dirt, axes, chainsaws, weedwhackers, other heavy-duty tools and all the things that go to make up the daily home life of an eclectic character who lives on the side of a mountain in Japan, with all that that entails.

I will make good use of those reinforced knees, those reinforced pocket openings, handy cargo pockets and other little pockets, and those right-there loops and tags for the tools and the myriad things I take with me when I leave the house, so that whenever I'm ready to tackle a task and don't have the right tool on me I don't have to walk back from wherever I am, take off my boots, galump back inside and get the damn tape measure or whatever it might be, which happens all the time with the lesser pants (there are hierarchies of pants) I've been wearing for some years that were designed for skateboarders, their movements and catastrophic tumbles, with crucial reinforcements against sudden impact and extended abrasion, plus key grommeting, gusseting and what not - great pants for wild action and rapid deceleration, but not great for broad-spectrum utility. Moreover they are now worn out and have holed pockets; also, they were built for the Japanbody, and like the shoes here never fit me quite right, but they were cheap at the local youngster store because there are no skateboarders out here in the countryside where kids have actual physical things to do, so the pants languished on the rack until I came along and got them for a mere price. I wish them well wherever departed pants go.

Out in the garden the new pants can carry everything I need, with me in the middle.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PANTS

Until his mid-forties, pants had always played a passive role in his longstanding and uneventful wearer/garment relationships, for example his various pants over the decades slipping on, buttoning, zipping and belting like a breeze though summer air, with a minimum of effort and no concentration, leaving him free to think about what stylish shirt, what fancy tie, with no unsettling stomach muscle contraction, no semipermanent exhalation, no extended dancing on one leg and then the other, no forcing last year's pantslegs up slowly over thighs like filling a sausage skin with another sausage (it wasn't all new muscle) until one day the sausage complex threatened to split in the advent of ubersausage and he had to get new pants.

He was who he'd always been; how could there be this much more of him and who else was he kidding? It was all some kind of temporary quirk; in the cellulite of his mind's eye he kept ordering the same size pants he'd ordered the previous time, but they kept getting smaller and smaller until let's face it he couldn't stay dressed unless he didn't breathe. So he didn't stay dressed. Gave it up. T-shirts. No need to sacrifice himself upon the pyre of fashion, at least in a permanent pants kind of way. He needed another way, a temporary sacrifice, on the prominent altar of himself.

So at last he did what any man in his situation would do: he thought about running. Not away, not from, but toward: toward a future more like his distant past, toward the slim trim him he once was and would be again, the him that awaited still, somewhere inside that belly ahead on the jogging path; no need to buy all new sizes, he was the same dimensions as before underneath there somewhere and that's where he was going: beyond, to within; back into the lightness of being, of being containable by a waistline that wouldn't have to run anymore, he'd think about it after dinner.

This is not autobiographical.