Writing Feat

I'm amazed at how a small, simple object can bring you into another world, another time. At a department store I saw a young man sitting by the dressing room, one leg crossing the other, his ankle atop his knee. Something about the picture made me look again. He wore thick cotton tube socks, each with a blue stripe at the top. They had lost their stretch and fell in fat rolls, gray with soil that wouldn't wash. Boy socks. I hadn't seen socks like that in years. My brother wore those socks, circa 1975. They would slop around his feet in our half-carpeted apartment. With the socks came a memory stream of little boy messiness and goofy inventions and Marvel Comics. Write about socks. Choose one from your drawer or someone else's, an attic or a Goodwill bin. What do you know, and what can you imagine about the person who wore this sock?