My friend told me a pair of her underpants went AWOL yesterday morning. She’d laid them out with her day’s outfit, only to discover them missing soon after.
The mystery was solved hours later when they turned up in her child’s stroller. Her son had obviously decided they deserved a relaxing trip to the park, which I think is rather sweet.
But it reminded me of a moment from my teenage years – one of those mortifying, supposedly ‘character building’ moments that just makes your toes curl at the memory.
As an avid tennis player, I used to play competitions on weekends. On one such day, there was a small crowd watching and I was bounding about the court happily, until I felt something flapping against my ankle. Glancing down, I saw with horror that my MOTHER’S UNDERPANTS were escaping from my tracksuit pants leg.
“Well,” I remembered thinking. “Isn’t that marvelous.”
I quickly deduced that our clothes drier must have made the fleecy-lined tracksuit static, the underpants got stuck inside, and I hadn’t noticed the sneaky stowaways until now.
In fact, it was hard not to notice them now. To anyone watching, they were clearly underpants. Large floral underpants.
And didn’t they pick a doozy of a time to make their escape!
What better moment for your parent’s undies to emerge dramatically from your pant leg but in front of a nearby, captive, tennis-watching audience?
Game, set and match, universe. Well played!
Thank you. Just as I convinced my PARENTS to conduct their inaugural visit to this interwebbyblogozone, they get to read an item about re their daughter’s underpants going AWOL. Good. Happily, being a no-longer-17-year-old-by-any-stretch-of-the-imagination, they just ASSUMED it was something to do with Junior’s desire to “help”, even when it means secreting mummy’s underpants in the undercarriage thingy of his stroller for no good reason, not that the underpants were found by a friend in the glovebox of another friend’s Datsun a few weeks later or anything so unseemly. Not that such a thing ever happened. I’m just saying.
Your mum is probably just relieved that it wasn’t HER undies that were on public display at the local tennis club. I imagine everything else would pale by comparison.