Keeping Abreast of the Situation

Posted on July 2, 2013 under Storytelling with 5 comments

Most men I know don’t know a damn thing about bras.  Truthfully, we don’t understand much about women’s apparel.  No, let me rephrase that.  We don’t understand much about women.  Period.  Talking about bras is dicey but writing a story about them is fraught with danger.

What little I know about bras I probably learned from (here goes the first confession) looking at the four pages of lingerie in the Sears catalogue.  Come on.  Admit it men.  You’ve done that too.  I am occasionally permitted to do the laundry and when it comes to bras, I know the drill, intimately.  The first (and last) time that I put a bra in the dryer, it was as if I had crossed the demilitarized zone in some war ravaged country.  I did not make that mistake again.  I now hang them on the “bra tree”.

A few years ago, at a Canada Day party, we were playing some silly trivia game with the neighbors.  The men were asked to respond to several questions to see how perceptive they were about their spouses. “What is your wife’s cup size?”  You could have asked me the atomic number for tungsten (it’s 74, in case you didn’t know) and gotten a better response.   And then, there was the guy who was sent to a fancy lingerie shop to buy his wife a bra.  A surprise purchase, no doubt.  When asked about his wife’s size, he seemed a bit perplexed at first but then blurted out “6& 7/8”. “But sir, that is not a measurement for a bra!” exclaimed the equally confused salesperson. “Well, the other night when my wife was sleeping, I took my ball cap off and tossed it on her.  It fit perfectly”, he said.

Of course, we see bras blowing on the clothesline and it is not uncommon to see them affixed to trees, shrubs and flagpoles on someone’s property for a special birthday.  And lately, our home has become a refuge for a number of young mothers with newborns, so I am well aware of the role of nursing bras.  Back in the day I would send a coded message to my wife when I heard a knock on the door – “flaps up!”

We all know what it’s like when school ends.  Many families plan trips and the tires hit the pavement minutes after the kids get home with their report cards.  It can be (?) pandemonium trying to get everything together.  It takes most men about 3.5 minutes to pack.  Then we wait in the car for the family.  Our spouses are trying to do a thousand things at once.  It is a classic case of “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get”.

Do you know what a bra barrage is?  Men, if you are still reading this, for your information, many women wash all of their bras at once.  They store them up like, recycled beer cans and toss them all in the wash at once.  Don’t ask me to explain this phenomenon.  It’s like many other mysteries that are best left unsolved.  You know that you will get “the look” if you dare to inquire.

The other day I became aware of the desperate plight of a woman, who threw all of her bras in the wash at once in readiness for a family road trip at the end of the school year.  As fate would have it, not only was there a wardrobe malfunction but there was a mechanical one as well.  This cry for help popped up on Facebook: “The door is stuck on my washing machine and every bra I own is in there”.

I didn’t think that “wireless technology” belonged in the washing machine.

Within nanoseconds, (mamoseconds?) suggestions came pouring in, some of them practical and many of a more humorous nature.  I chose not to weigh in.  The words “me” and “fix” are rarely uttered in the same sentence.  Given the choice of solutions, I would have gone at the door with a crowbar or suggested attending a bra sale at Target.  I know that fire departments will go to great lengths to extricate a cat from a tree so why not bras from a washing machine.  Wouldn’t the fire truck chasers get a surprise when they arrived at the house?!

I never heard the final outcome.  I have a picture in my mind, though.  As her spouse waits in the car with his kit bag packed, the kids run in circles around Mom as she gazes through the glass porthole at the colourful tangle of satin and lace – so close, yet so far away.

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