Underwear pockets

Nice weather. YAY! Boston is glorious. The sun shines brightly and you can feel it warm up your soul or at the very least your back. The air is dry. The pollen count is low. I've spent a productive week in the lab. A productive weekend out in the sun. Yet for some reason today all I can think about is underwear pockets.

Two years ago, in my neverending attempt to evolve, I started to wear more skirts, replacing the khaki short that was my staple on warm summer days. Now, I wear flowing cotton skirts, khaki skirts, and on occasion a form fitting mini. The transition has been difficult, but I have stuck with it. Riding my bicycle is a little more challenging. When out, I remind myself that I always have to keep my legs closed. The most difficult part is that cute skirts almost never have pockets. Pockets to stuff your keys, wallet, and iPod. Pockets to store that good luck penny you just found.

But let us go back even further to a time before I was even born. My mother had just married my father and was meeting her mother-in-law for the first time. Crazy in my family is an inherited trait, and I think I inherited a lot of my crazy from my paternal grandmother. She had lived her whole in farm country and had little notion about the rapidly changing world. Like all the other women of her village, she wore traditional Korean countryside attire: a brown wool skirt, a white cropped tied cotton jacket, and long underwear made out of hemp. Now in her long underwear, my grandmother, also like many other women, had pockets for money and valuables.

In 1968, my mother was a stylish modern European inspired woman. She worked full time as a nurse, she was well educated fluent in German, English and Korean, she wore short skirts and little neck kerchiefs, and she carried around a purse and a wallet. She was the polar opposite of my grandmother.

On this short visit, my grandmother expected my mother to finish a list farm duties, a list of domestic duties, and to act subservient to my father and his relatives. And since it was such a short visit, my mother tried her best. Soon there would be the whole Pacific Ocean between my father's family and her. Unfortunately, even her best attempts were not good enough. My grandmother yelled at my mother's inabilities to be a good farmer's wife. While my mother to this day insists that she worked so hard and that my grandmother was just being ridiculous, I cannot help but wonder why my mother bothers insisting. She simply was not built for hard labor.

I don't know what transpired next. But this is how I imagined it. My grandmother lays into my mother for being lazy. My mother is exhausted and goes for a little nap. My grandmother starts to feel bad. She thinks about ways she can make it up to her new daughter-in-law. Okay maybe my crazy grandmother was not that nice, but since I don't remember her well that is how I'll picture it.

As the story goes, my mother walked into my grandmother's room. She was surprised. Why? Because my grandmother had taken all of my mother's panties out of my parents's luggage and she was sewing pockets into them. She told my mother it was difficult because she could not sew big pockets, but at least there would be a little place for my mother to carry her money. My mother cannot help but laugh when she recalls it. I think it is her fondest memory of my grandmother.

As I so often do, in 2007, I am daydreaming at my desk. The sun streams through our window and our Hidamari no Tami is bobbling his head. I am wearing a cotton pinstripe skirt with no pockets. I cannot help but be a little annoyed that everything is stuffed in my backpack front pocket. But then my mind keeps wandering to underwear pockets. And I think my backpack is superior to underwear pockets.