Open Writing

It is not that I was stuck for words when Gay asked me about the socks that I was donning to make ready for church. She knew they were for church, because I do not wear sock anywhere else, no matter what the occasion.

It has to do with my treacherous distal plantar phalanges that are subject to a condition only found in princes of royal blood, psoriatic arthritis, and my irrationally growing toe nails, that is also ascribable to Psoriatic Arthritis.

Socks impinge on nails and joints and in very short time render them unbearable. I have considered amputation but am assured that leaving my socks off is cheaper and less messy than going under the butcher's knife.

Gay, who is kindness personified, has been and gone and bought me some loosely knitted diabetic socks for those with tender tootsies and legs. I qualify, and so my sock drawer teems with these most comfortable of socks, ready for when the Englishman hath need of them.

In the USA Englishmen are considered amusing, witty, and wildly eccentric, and I am afraid I have been unable to shake the jaundiced view that Uncle Sam’s boys and girls have, for some extraordinary reason, developed of the English. Besides which, I have several unique idiosyncrasies not found in others of the Bulldog Breed that inhabits parts of the Americas in their hundreds of thousands.

These peculiarities include, but are not limited to, not wearing socks except for Sunday worship services, not going anywhere if I have to walk, wearing a battered old straw cowboy hat with several partridge, wild turkey, and eagle feathers stuck nolens volens in the hat band.

Another one is that I insist on speaking to dogs in perfect Oxbridge English, but confound the human population by speaking at them in a form of Icelandic-Norwegian peculiar to Yorkshire. I also suffer from an incurable chronic condition called myo-fibrositis lethargica. It is this last that makes me take the piece of cake off the plate that is directly opposite me, even if there are larger pieces at other places on the plate’s rim.

It explains also why I walk round things on the floor thinking, "Someone ought to pick that up before someone falls over it!" It is a distressing condition that often leads me to leave undone those things I ought to have done, and to do those things that I would not do. Paul blamed his own personal errors on what he believed to be a substantive entity that dwelt, whether he would or no, within him, that was not under the control of his will. This interior being he called Sin.

I am not as fancy as Paul, and I do not accept his theology of sin, but I do know what it is to have something inside that imperiously dictates what one should or should not do without reference to reason, common sense, or the betterment of mankind, for which end we continually strive.

And thus it was that as I pulled the socks over my cramped toes this morning, Gay said she would get me some diabetic socks. To my saying that I had a drawerful of them, and that I loved them, she asked, "Then why are you wearing those?"

It was at that point that she got a better understanding of the ravages to which sufferers from myo-fibrositis lethargica are subject without respite. Gently I explained to her that I was putting on tight fancy dress socks because, "When I opened the drawer, they were at the front!"

For some inexplicable reason she was attacked by a severe headache and is now lying down in a darkened room until whatever it is that has so adversely affected her has subsided. Bless her.

Copyright © 2008 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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