Rubber Bands for Christmas?

The new box arrived about two weeks before Christmas and I was looking at the label which declared a pound of size 8 rubber bands were packed inside.  That equaled approximately 7,100 dime-sized “elastics” as our Boston daughter-in-law calls them.
There are many ways of marking time and not all of them have to do with a 12-month calendar. With the arrival of the little box, Art noted that he had begun using these instruments of order 20 years ago, and by cracky, here it was time to open a new box. Doesn’t time march on?
Well, yes, time does march or race on but Art began to think that 7,100 rubber bands might last another 20 years. Did he want to die with all those little fasteners unused? No. Did he want to pass on a “Chaos to Order” trick to the next generation of sons and grandsons? Of course he did.
Therefore I was asked to find festive little boxes to divide the 7,100 bands into family-size gifts. I found boxes which, after several tortuous tries at folding, ended up looking like a half-pint carton of milk, but in Christmas red. The rubber bands were more or less equally distributed and the boxes sealed and labeled, “With Love, Opa.”
At that point I mailed them to Lakeland, Fla.; Bossier City, La., and I packed one in our suitcase for delivery to Chicago where we were spending Christmas with our son, Benjamin, Soledad and their two boys. On Christmas morning, along with our usual greeting calls, there was Art’s explanation to the men who received the little boxes. It went something like this: “I got tired of losing my socks in the laundry and having mounds of one-of-a-kind. Not only that, since all my socks were either black or brown, and frequently the shades of each, they would be mismatched. Those more frequently washed would take on a purple hue and not look right with a newer model black. Mama (your writer sometimes known as Patricia) would spend long periods trying to match shades and length and texture but it was a chaotic mess.  That is when I got the motion to secure them with one of those number 8 rubber bands before putting them in the hamper.” (Bless his sweet, orderly German heart).
At this point I joined the phone conversation to say, “It’s the little things that make marriage better.” Those happily matched socks have been for years making their rounds from hamper to washer to dryer to drawer.  What could be easier? I suggest that it is more convenient if there is a small box in the sock drawer for new bands and another one for the spent bands when the socks are worn again.
Yes, time marches on and perhaps I will be ordering a new one-pound box of number 8 rubber bands, but in meantime, Art may have saved his sons from the agony of mismatched and lonely socks without a mate.  And no, that was not the only gift he gave to the boys but it may have been the most fun.  Included is a picture of the first banded pair of Steurnagel socks going into the washer.
Happy New Year to Cape May County.
Patricia Hall
From the Bible: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Proverbs 1:7, Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel