The Levi’s Outlet store is just a little more than halfway between Kensington and Sacramento, convenient for the grandparents who were babysitting the night while the parents were off to see Elton John in Las Vegas. We had time. I hadn’t bought any jeans in a number of years, and sadly to say, I’ve retained the same shape of my body since I last stepped into a fitting room. It was our lucky day! Buy one, get one at half price. I’ve tried to find blue jeans at Target et al, but my size (34-29) is often not stocked. Oh, there are plenty of 34” waists around, but few 29” lengths. I found two pairs, carried them out and waited while the kind cashier rang the bill. “That’ll be $112. 45,” she said, “on your card?”
I blanched. I hadn’t bought blue jeans in perhaps ten or more years, and this was a financial gut punch. Nevertheless, I took them home. You need at least one pair of new jeans. You never know when you’ll have to go to a funeral.
Jadyne washed the jeans. She laid them out on the bed. “Something’s wrong with the dye,” she said. “There are little white stripes on both the front and the back.”
She washed them again, thinking that the stripes would come out. They didn’t. We decided to return them. I didn’t want another new pair, thinking that the store must have bought a whole lot of streaked jeans, and Vacaville is a long drive from Kensington. When I showed them to the sales clerk she said, “That’s whiskering.” “Whiskering?” I asked. “Yes, that’s intentional. All the 505s in that stack have them. Here, let me show you.:” By gum, she was right. When I bought them I only looked at the label (34-29), and never opened them or tried them on, “How long has this been on jeans?” I asked, dumbfounded. “I’ve worked here for seven years,” she said, “and they were doing that when I started.”
The night before we went out to dinner with friends. They wanted to watch a DVD. The sales clerk responded, “DVD? You watch DVDs"!?”
I am a fully-fledged senior citizen. And proud of it, too. I don’t know anything.