Underwear is the human equivalent of trees’ rings.

My daughter wears slingshot kinda underpants—“thongs,” she calls them, a word which evokes in me visions of shower shoes—yet another sign of my age.  Lord, you could floss your teeth with my daughter’s underwear.  Her panties, neatly folded and lined up cheek to cheek in her drawer, look like a box of 64 Crayola Crayons:  all kinds of exotic colors like burnt umber, emerald green, bubble gum pink, and grape.

Now, I wear sensible underpants—all white, to make them amenable to bleaching.  And I have thirty-eight identical pairs of underwear in my drawer.  I know no one cares at my stage of life about my underwear.  Can’t imagine anyone new on the scene who will wait with panting anticipation for the exposure of anything dainty, delicate, lacy, and tantalizing on my prodigious ass.

When you’re middle aged, comfort is where it’s at.  At a certain age, you won’t tolerate so much as a pinching watch band.  You’d shave off your eyebrows if they seemed too tight.  Men at this age, sometimes find their wedding rings to be too tight . . . but, then, this is a story about women’s underwear.

Forty-three years ago, my husband used to call my dorm room from a pay phone at the Fort Dix commissary and beg for a description of the panties I was wearing.  He doesn’t do that now.  Probably worries that it would render him impotent in his tenuous middle years..  No, now he calls to ask what color grout I’d like between our new kitchen tiles.

I have a fantasy (give me that, at least) that I’ve attended a Tom Jones concert.  Naturally, I’ve tossed a pair of my practical drawers up on the stage.  Tommy selects mine from a pool of lacy panties, mops his brow with them, then stops mid-whine to admire them.  “Ah,” he says in his smoky Welsh voice, “I really dig a woman with a little meat on ‘er bones.

The fantasy is a considerable improvement over the real event, when I attended a Tom Jones concert last month at the Ryman Theater in Nashville.  I tossed my bloomers from my $70 seat in the balcony.  My aim was off, and the lustful pelting knocked the drummer’s stick right out of his left hand.

The younger generation, for all its harping about ecology and the environment, has no real commitment to recycling.  My daughter’s underwear has but one life; when it wears out, there’s nothing to do with it but throw it out.  My mother, God bless her, used to take her old underwear to foreign countries abroad; she wore her old underpants one day, then disposed it in five star hotels.  Such behavior may make Mom the poster child for “The Ugly American.”  Taking your old underwear across a vast ocean to discard is an extraordinary act of pride . . . or shame.

Now, my underwear is useful for years and years beyond the last wearing.  My underwear can be bunched up to faux paint the bathroom.  Or, it can do emergency service as a sling for an arm broken in a collision with a beech tree on a deserted back road.  It can also serve duty as a sturdy, disposable slip cover for the davenport in your summer cottage on Lake Michigan.

Pettipants

I’ve become acquainted with a lingerie archivist via the Internet.  He’s an erudite young man, from Cornell, I think.  He is gathering a collection of women’s undergarments to create a retrospective traveling exhibit.

He has amassed an impressive variety of underthings, including underpants embroidered with days of the week, petticoats, teddies, pettipants, panty girdles, thongs, bikinis, and briefs.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I have invited him to study the contents of my drawers.

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