Young Pup

Like most people, I’m of a particular age.

The particular one I’m of isn’t much worried about making an impression; more about getting tabs on the utility trailer, organizing the shop, and hitting sale days at the home centers.

Due to the impending arrival of a semi-scheduled puppy and a few other crashing yet decidedly prosaic deadlines, a lot of projects got shelved. Pantry steps, wrapping the kitchen bar, and our bedroom closet (no, we don’t have one quite yet after living here a mere 18 years) gave way to building a new gate and fence section to puppy-proof the back yard. Volunteer shifts at the tool library and mowing visits to our rental property have been few and far between and, despite having a little gym space carved out of the shop, I haven’t worked out in about three months.

No matter, any of it. I’m blissed about my puppy to an immoderate degree. Argos, named for a watchful giant, is a lovely little chap who takes his sentinel duties with grave seriousness but isn’t a jackass about it. He may host the occasional 4 a.m. velociraptor dance party, but hasn’t had an accident in the house since the second day he was here — and he’s just eleven weeks old.

Try that with your human baby. 

I’ve been pretty tired, though. Keep dreaming about dying of one random thing or another. Midway through not working out while digging post holes through rocks, wrangling lumber, and hauling off junk, my guts stopped moving for 1. no specific reason, and 2. about five days. The upside was quickly losing 20 lbs. The tough part was trying to get my systems back online before bailing out for Boise — and a new puppy! One E.R. visit, aggressive hydration, psyllium husks, and now every day starts with oatmeal and stewed fruit.

We have a gate. Still needs drop rods and a bit of finish work to look prettier, but it keeps our critters contained. The low, sagging cyclone gates, at least 50 years old, finally got recycled. Things are mostly in place, but sleep remains more an impromptu than a scheduled activity. Puppy toting to the front and back door a couple of times per night haven’t just obliterated my sleep, either. With Argos having gained 10 lbs in two weeks, my back has become so wobbly that I occasionally fall into things for no special reason.

Normally, I only lurch into things.

Couple of days ago, I drove my mother-in-law to an appointment across the lake. It looked like a long one, so I side-quested north to Bothell to buy myself a new pair of jeans. “Clothes shopping” is not a normal activity of mine. For decades, my pants have mostly come, for better or worse, from the bargain piles at Costco. 

To be honest, mostly for the worse.

They’ve been consistently thin, stretchy, and poor-wearing. There’s not much room for men in there, unless  they’re grotesquely oversized — and then they bunch up. Not a good look, pulling your pants out of yourself, or yourself out of your pants, every time you get behind the wheel. 

Cost of getting older, I figured. No way am I paying boutique prices for pants that I absolutely will destroy just as fast whether or not they cost one or two or three hundred bucks more. Hell, jeans these days wear out across the thigh just from crossing your legs when you read. Some of them cost extra for pre-shredded holes and machine-faded crinkles, and God help those poor benighted souls in NYC who paid 500 bucks a pair for raggedy-assed Montana cowboy jeans.

I wanted stouter, comfier, longer-wearing trousers — and I wanted them cheap.

Thus it was that I popped into David Morgan, a curious industrial park storefront, to look at some Prison Blues double-front work jeans, and picked me out a pair. They are less stylish than a Crown Vic with cop hub caps but they’re built the way Levis used to be built: solidly stitched together from unshrunk, unrinsed, unsanforized, unstretchy, unsexy, hard-ass denim. About sixty bucks a pair, which isn’t quite “cheap” but they don’t feel disposable like the tech-cloth Kleenex and slave-built jeggings that Costco blows out the door like a seed broadcast for field rot.

I upsized, because a fart isn’t the only thing you mistrust in your sixties; there are waistlines to consider. Since I’ve weighed 245-250 for the last few years, there’s little reason to believe I’ll maintain at two and a quarter. I live in a world pluralistically populated by doughnuts, cheese, and beef. My self-restraint is not sung of by the bards.

Soaked my new blues once in the tub and sun-dried ‘em before wearing for a couple of days. Wa-ay too big! So last night I washed them in industrial heat and dried them on the “solar flare desiccation” setting. Found out I can still drop them to the floor by accident, fully buttoned and zipped, if my belt’s not fastened.

Dang comfy, though. I would think they’d would bunch up, but I guess they’re built different. Room for everything I choose to carry or was attached by Mother Nature, and they flex smoothly at the knees and hips.

Whoops. Might’ve overdone the sizing.

It was time to break out the braces.

These funny-looking, high-rise dungarees come factory- (okay, prison factory-) equipped with suspender buttons. On a whim, I’d picked up a pair of Welch braces when I bought my cardboardy new jeans, so this morning I buttoned them in place and slipped them over an old workout shirt.

Felt a little funny about it, to be honest. My stepdad wears suspenders but he’s 90, and that’s well into the age of gluteus minimus. I couldn’t remember wearing suspenders since strapping on ALICE gear in the 1980s to road-march my little ammo pouches around the Republic of Korea. Standing there balding, wearing baggy jeans held up by straps across my withering shoulders, three days past a shave with bed head, glasses, and a hearing aid, a wave of antique regret slapped me like warm sewage: I’m just old.

Pretty Wife was immersed in her computer. As I adjusted the straps and shrugged into my “trouser retention system,” I found myself silently praying she wouldn’t turn around. 

She did, of course.  Damned swivel chairs.

LIke a dark cloud shadowing over the sun, a startled cringe traversed her face, then settled into side-eye. “That’s… a look.”

Busted.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “Kind of an old guy thing. Comfortable, though.”

And then she stunned me. “You look like you stepped out of a calendar of gay firemen. It’s not exactly my thing, but that setup makes your chest and arms pop.”

“Those are not old man suspenders,” she went on. “You may want to re-think how you’re signaling.”

My turn to cringe. And blush. Again, I’d not worked out since before my puppy was born.

Signaling? I blushed again, in case the universe was keeping tabs.

Stumbling through my sixties on the backslope of a stroke and more than a couple of mTBIs, I’m just not as sharp as I was. Every day, I have to pick and choose which concepts to retain. All I took away from this morning was that my sweetie called me — me! — a calendar boy. I’ll take it — and I’m hiding her glasses forever.

Plus I’m definitely working out today.