Three moments, featuring 2 people and 1 cat

Kirk Ericson | Jun 09, 20220

“Socks!”

I couldn’t remember the woman’s name who was walking toward me last week in the hall of the gym I go to. She worked in a drive-through coffee shop I frequented before the plague started. The shop closed, and I’ve seen her just once since then.

As she approached, I couldn’t remember her name, so I settled on trying to get her attention by saying the word “socks” when she was a step or two past me. She kept on.

She and I had deal going before the plague. Instead of me giving her a dollar tip for each cup of coffee I bought, she would keep a tally of each tip so she could redeem those script tips for a pair of Darn Tough Socks when the total reached around $20.

She was in her mid-20s, and I had convinced her that with these socks and with the socks’ lifetime warranty, she’d save a fortune on socks over her lifetime. It would be a fantastic return on investment, as a sound financial mind might say.

I’d order the socks she selected from the company’s website, and then I’d deliver them to her through the drive-through window. She ended up with about five pairs before the COVID curtain dropped, but before that, we had plenty of conversations about Darn Tough Socks.

When she was about five steps past me at the gym last week, I turned back, put myself next to her and said “socks!” with my arms outstretched like a magician who had just finished a trick.

“Oh. Ohhhhh,” she said. I could see she was fumbling to retrieve my name. “It’s you. How are you?”

We had a two-minute chat about socks and how she had to return a pair — “They were the running socks you thought I’d like but I got a hole in them”— and that she was able to use her boyfriend’s label maker to address the package.

It’s odd to have a connection with someone based solely on socks.

■ ■ ■

I helped some relatives move into their new house last weekend. They rented a big moving van, and in the back, after we removed all the furniture, kids’ toys and boxes, I saw a big Kodiak-brand safe tucked into the corner.

I asked my relative what was in the safe. He told me.

“What’s the combination?” I asked.

He told me that too.

“Great,” I fake-complained. “Now I’ll have to do something that demonstrates how much I trust you.”

It reminded me of a time when a woman I sat next to in a newsroom wouldn’t lend me her password to sign into the graphics computer — my password wasn’t working on that computer. She said no and got up to enter her password herself. I told her I’ll need her password when she wasn’t there. Then I told her my password to prove I trusted her with my information.

I’d known this person for 15 years, and I sat 2 feet away from her for five years. We trusted each other with many facts about our lives, but she didn’t trust me with her password. Like a password was more important than having knowledge about someone’s life.

Things were never the same between the two of us after that.

I told Mrs. Ericson about the safe combination story on the way home from our relative’s new home. She immediately asked, “Are you sure he told you the right combination?” I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. I’d already forgotten the combination, real or not.

■ ■ ■

I was walking through the neighborhood last week in the midafternoon with my oldest son when I spotted a cat lolling about on the front porch of a house. A ray of sunshine had skirted the tree limbs and it was shining on the porch, like a spotlight. The cat seemed to be enjoying itself inside the spotlight.

The cat was lying on its haunches, with one of its legs straight up while it licked its cat parts. I whistled at the cat.

The cat turned its head toward us, startled, then quickly rose and assumed a position that can best be described as a pose. It sat on its bottom, its chest out and its chin held at a dignified, almost arrogant, angle. It appeared to be a Persian cat, and its pose made it look as regal, as dignified and as emotionally distant as a matron in an English period piece.

I stared at the cat, but the cat kept his gaze angled away from mine as though it would be undignified to meet my gaze.

It left us with an intriguing question: Can a cat be vain?