Pairing Down

Alex does something with his socks and I don't know what, but I intend to find out.

Questioning is useless. Whenever I look down in his crib and see one fleshy foot and only its partner clothed, I ask. He looks up and giggles. I fling the blankets aside, the pillow, the giant Beanie Baby Bully. Gone.

"What did you do with your other sock?!" I always ask. Like I said: giggles.

One clue is on the floor under Alex's sock drawer. Jill set up this drawer when Alex first came home. She doesn't trust sock drawers to me, whose dresser drawers are arranged in whatever order my stuff comes out of the laundry bag. Alex's socks are in the upper-right drawer of his dresser, and within easy grasp of an unoccupied 2-year-old. Used to be Alex - who's manic about opening and closing drawers - had to reach through the bars of the crib like a prisoner stretching out his tin cup, grab the handle and haul the drawer open. Now he just has to reach over the railing. Inside the drawer his hand finds the balls of socks. Moments later they're scattered on the floor. Individual socks go, too. Neither makes a noise when they hit.

"Alex why do you this to your socks?"

He has many pair: light blue, black, purple, dark blue (two pair), red, white, gray (again, two pair), yellow, and black and white with chicks. We keep these "active duty" in the front of the drawer. Some of the pairs have "Baby Gap" or "Old Navy" printed across the bottom in sticky letters. These socks seem to give him a firm foothold on our wooden floors. In one pair -- the same pair, luckily -- he wore a hole in the toe and the heel. "You're hard on things," my mother used to tell me. Soon I want to buy socks for Alex in sets of two pair, so when two of the socks get holes in them, we'll still have one good pair of matching socks! My mother taught me this.

When we get Alex's socks back from the laundry, they are balled up in the bottom of the underwear bag. For every balled pair, there are usually an equal number of orphans. I take these to his drawer and try to find their mates. Alex watches, if he has nothing else to do at that time.

"Leave these alone, Alex," I say.

Lately Alex is getting better with socks, as with clothes in general. Before bath time, for instance, he'll wiggle and squirm out of his T shirt if I get him started. He will lift one foot and then the other when I put his sweatpants on him. I still have to lay him on his back or sit him on my lap to put on the socks. "Socky, Alex," I'll say, and he'll lift his foot and, if he isn't busy, point his toes. I guess he is getting better at putting clothes on and taking them off, because a few minutes later I'll see him dart through the living room with one foot bare. I wish he wouldn't do this. There are a lot of crumbs and stuff on the floor, and twice he's broken a drinking glass. I figure a sock is better than no protection.

When Alex lived in a hospital for his first year, I'd slip a sock onto his foot and go down to the cafeteria and there the sock would be, still on his foot, when I came back. Of course Alex was still there, too, on his back in the hospital bed or, earlier, in the isolette. When he lived in an isolette, I don't think he realized anything was on his feet, or would ever need to be. We bought Alex socks just as soon after he was born as the doctors said he could wear them, though I don't remember when we first put socks on him. I do remember carting the little socks home every night and rinsing them out in the bathroom sink, wondering when he was coming home.

In Alex's drawer I found one of the socks he wore in the hospital. It is faded yellow and white, like a soft-boiled egg. My mother, who died before she could meet Alex, used to hold up socks like this and say, "Oh ain't that cunnin'!" This is a smaller sock than she ever held, a sock we had to find on the special preemie shelf of the baby section. This sock won't fit down my index finger now, and I doubt Alex could get his hand in it, let alone his foot. Just as well. We have long since lost its mate.