Thursday, April 08, 2004
Dropping a Tab
Sometimes a small object can tell a whole story, if you happen to see it where it lies and you ask yourself how it came to be there....
A good example would be that little metal tab on the tile floor of the mens’ room. It was flat, with a small angled section and a few green-brown threads dangling from the trailing edge, as if it had been torn off of something to which it had once been sewn. I recognized it at once - not in particular, but in general: it was the tab that comes with nicer slacks, the kind with a secondary closure. These, any hi-klass haberdasher can tell you (and Sulka blood flows through my veins) give one’s trousers a tidy, tailored smoothness across the thundergut so there’s no pucker at the fly. You hook it in before nailing the main button and zipping up. Pretty basic stuff.
The thing is, sometimes I forget that the pants I’m wearing have this secondary closure. I pop the button, drop the fly, expect the slacks to tumble smoothly to my ankles - but that extra tab holds them to my slender hips anyway. Ha ha, joke’s on me.
Well, from that one scrap of metal on the bathroom floor, it looks like the joke was on someone else this time - someone who must have rushed into the facilities, wrestling with the girding of his loins, able to extricate himself from a button and a zipper and then ripping his pants open even before he’d undone that little secondary metal tab… He must have heard it rip, felt the threads give way, sensed that the fastner had gone flying, skittering across the sour tiles - but he had other things on his mind (if not elsewhere). The metal tab, the tidy tailored trousers - they were a lost cause, and most likely, profoundly irrelevant to his value structure at that specific moment. He must have been in quite a rush. The only evidence of that drama now was a metal tab lying mute on the floor, but it told a very poignant story indeed.
For some reason, even though I didn’t touch it, I still felt like I needed to wash my hands with particular thoroughness before returning to my desk. I feel a bit soiled right now just thinking on it.
