By Merlin Lessler —<\/p>\n
Did I do this before? I can\u2019t remember. Oh well. I witnessed an encounter between a mother and her teenage son in the grocery store the other day. It was a chance meeting; she came from home; he came from school. Her greeting brought me back to my own teenage days, \u201cWhy are you wearing that shirt? I just ironed it!\u201d<\/p>\n
His face turned red, and his buddy didn\u2019t help the situation when he said, \u201cOh Dude! Bad Boy!\u201d And, chuckled out the side of his mouth. My mother said the exact same thing to me, every time I tried to sneak out of the house wearing a freshly ironed shirt. <\/p>\n
Ironed clothes had to go through a waiting period (limbo) before they could be worn. I never knew how long the resting period was. It depended on my mother\u2019s memory. If she could remember ironing it, it had to go back on a hanger and into the closet. (If I got caught, that is.)<\/p>\n
The same principle applied to new clothes. \u201cYou take off that shirt this minute young man. I just bought it!\u201d<\/p>\n
All new things did time in limbo. When we got a new stove, the old one went into the basement. That\u2019s where the heavy cooking took place. Better to lug stuff up and down stairs than to \u201cwear out\u201d the new stove.<\/p>\n
It also applied to baked goods. \u201cGet your hand out of that cookie jar; I just baked those brownies!\u201d<\/p>\n
Okay, okay; I get it. When I got old enough, my mother taught me to iron and turned the chore over to me. It\u2019s a lot of work to iron things, but even when I did the ironing myself, she still made a stink if I slipped into something freshly ironed.<\/p>\n
I made a mistake a few years back and told my wife about how I had to let freshly ironed clothes rest when I was a kid. Today\u2019s dress code is pretty casual; we don\u2019t do a lot of ironing; we fold things. If she sees me put on something that was freshly folded (folded by her because I\u2019m folding challenged) she yells over to me, \u201cWhy are you wearing that shirt; I just folded it,\u201d and then cracks up laughing at how I cringe.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t help it; it\u2019s a guilt feeling that\u2019s ingrained in my subconscious. No matter how old you get, you still retain guilt from the past. <\/p>\n