Senor P and the
Socks
by Julie Ann Shapiro
I say to the
pea pod, “Have you contemplated your day
drawing socks?” It looks at me like I’ve
gone bonkers. But you know I think it’s
the one Senor P who’s nuttier. Why it chose
to be an artistically charged pea instead of part
of my pot pie I wonder as I catch it making
Jackson Pollock style dots with my chicken soup
on the pie crust. And that’s not all. It
makes a Marc Chagall-esque drawing of a horse in
my window and now it’s fancying my socks. At
least the sock inspiration makes sense. I can
honestly say I played a foot in it.
You see…I
have arranged a whole stack of pair-less socks in
a pyramid on the center of my bed on Summer
Solstice like I do every year. It is in the hopes
that once and for all I will solve the mystery of
the missing socks. It’s a most noble quest,
one that’s been baffling humanity for some
time.
But on this
day the pea pod has chosen to draw. So I watch
while it makes a rendition of sheep’s wool
out of my sock pile and insists that this is the
answer to the sock dilemma. Why it seems
according to one Senor P that the socks are
protesting a certain demise of woolen socks,”
or booties as they call them. “Without
them,” the pea pod adds, “the toes
which are the socks closet friends are quite cold
and contemplating a revolt.”
“How can
they? They’re part of the foot?”
Senor P says,
“Yeah, and that’s what they say about
absoccus phenomenonus dispareasus or as the more
enlightened socks like to call it, “The sock-apora.”
So now I at
least know why there are missing socks, but that
still doesn’t explain how one Senor P became
the artiste.
“Oh,”
he says,” that’s easy. I transmuted
with Picasso on his last meal.”
“But
he’s been dead for at least twenty or so
years, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, but
he waited for the right pea pod to come along.
One who was sympathetic to the sock cause; the
very one Picasso mused about.”
“When?”
“During
his blue period; the perfect manifestation of
cold toes, don’t you think?”
“No,”
I scream at the pea pod, but he has spilt wearing
a miniature beret in purple and looking quite
dashing.
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