Please don't wear sweatpants out of the house

Remember that old adage about not leaving home without wearing clean underwear? The fear was that if you got into a car crash and the paramedics, whose job apparently was to immediately pull down the pants of the wounded, were to notice you're tightie whities weren't so tidy you would then receive substandard emergency aid. Dirty underwear isn't something I've had to worry about for some time because . . . well I'll save it for Six More Weird Slash Interesting Things about Me . . . but I did recently commit a social faux pas that was equally if not far more heinous.

I was on the way to Subway and the grocery store to pick up some sandwiches and Reese's miniatures. I know this doesn't sound all that nurtritious but I'm on the Fatkins diet, what can I say? After locating the new 44-ounce bag (yes, just over two pounds) of chocolatey quasi-peanut buttery goodness, I headed to the registers to check out. Alas, at the register with the shortest line I spotted one of my wife's coworkers and her husband. She's more than a coworker really. We've had the pleasure of puppysitting their Beagle, Lucy. Under normal circumstances I would have no qualms about sharing a cashier with Lucy's parents and saying hello, but I wasn't dressed my best. Come to think of it, I wasn't dressed anywhere close to my best. I did have on a banded collared shirt complete with sweater vest and dress shoes, but moments before leaving the house my wife made me take off the dress slacks I had on so she could wash them. I replaced them with -- get out the smelling salts --- sweatpants.

For those who think it's just fine to wear sweatpants out of the house, let me take a moment to admonish you. You should feel ashamed just as I felt ashamed. Not even the finest cover model looks good in sweats. Face it, when you see someone publicly donning sweatpants, you want to look the other way. They really should be reserved for cleaning around the house and late-night tv parties spent on the couch with a pint of Haagen Dazs and no one else around.

There, now that that's out of the way, let's return to our regularly scheduled blog entry.

After opting not to make small talk with the librarian and her beau, I made my way to the next register where a woman was unloading her groceries onto the conveyor. Then I realized it wasn't just any woman in the checkout line, it was an exgirlfriend in the checkout line. And I don't mean someone with whom I parted ways after one night of cheap cinema, chain restaurant food and no kiss. I mean someone with whom I parted ways after almost four years of spit swapping, concert going, family function escorting, loving, caring, arguing, makeup loving and all the hooha that goes along with all of those things. This woman had seen me naked. Come to think of it, she had even seen me in sweatpants.

But not today, I thought.

So I wandered down to the last register and rang up my 44-ounces of future root canal via the self checkout. That really is where people in sweatpants should pay for their groceries anyway, don't you think? I promptly paid the Spanish-English bilingual cyber-cashier who reminded me to take my change and my receipt and then headed for the car, ashamed for having worn sweatpants out of the house and forlorn for not having said hello to an old flame.

As I was climbing into my car I remembered that through the years of dating said flame, my then mode of transportation and the condition in which I kept it was a constant source of frustration and debate for us. I drove an '83 beat up handed down Camaro which still bore the unslightly scars of an auto accident I managed to get myself into years earlier. People who knew me then would tell you that the ugliness of the outside of the car paled in comparison to the ugliness inside. The floorboards alone were littered with fast food bags, Diet Coke cans, empty fry containers, half-empty fry containers, cigarette packs and college papers from several quarters ago. I suffered from both an addiction to nicotine and an aversion to cleaning out my ashtray which as a result was piled high with old, stale extinguished cigarette butts. My brother once referred to it as cigarette art. My father warned that if I were ever pulled over, I would be cited for operating a fire hazard. And as for the old flame who I might add was the daughter of a General Motors employee and she always judged people not by the content of their character (except in my case of course) but by the make and model of their car, I don't know what bothered her more, the condition I kept my car in or the fact that it didn't bother me. I would promptly point out to her that on my side of the floorboard where I needed unhindered access to the gas and brake pedal there was no such garbage and what she did with her side of the car and the condition she kept it in was her own business. Can you imagine why she would have stayed with me as long as she did?

I can, but I'll save it for another Six Weird Slash Interesting Things about Me.

I now drive a late model eight-cylinder SUV that boasts luxury car status. Yes, I know it only gets forty miles to the tank and I have to take out a second mortgage just to get the oil changed on it, but it's a Mercedes. I wanted her to see me in it. Is that shallow? I decided to circle the Kroger one time and see if by chance and intelligent design I could accidentally on purpose bump into her in the parking lot.

Mission accomplished.

She was loading groceries into her trunk and had a little tyke watching from the seat of the grocery cart. Oddly enough, she parked two spaces down from Lucy's mom and dad. I pulled up beside the ex's car, rolled down my window and asked, "Excuse me, Ma'am, don't I know you?" Cheesy intro, I know, but she played along.

"Yeh, I think so. How've you been?" She had a great smile and by the looks of her she had lost a pound for every one I had gained. Her daugher, one of two I soon learned, had her mother's eyes and hair color. At four years of age, she was just the cutest kid and looking at her made me wish my yet-to-be-born daughter would hurry up and get to that stage. I complimented her daughter on her snazzy outfit. The kid, after spotting the bag of candy in the front seat, asked her mom if she could sit in my car which I thought was flattering. The ex and I chatted about people from our shared past, jobs, kids, birthing and making baby food. I asked her to check to make sure I put the car seat in correctly and she gave me the thumbs up.

It was somewhat strange, not that she had lost weight or even that she now had kids, but that somehow she seemed so . . . maternal. With her daughter she was nurturing and caring. I never would have pictured her that way when we were dating. And yet there was something oddly comforting in seeing that quality in her. In recent years she had reached one of the pinnacle of womanhood. Motherhood. It made me realize that soon I'm going to look at my own wife in that same way. And I relish that.

The next day my wife called me from work to say that when she explained to her coworker why I had seen her at Kroger but didn't say hello, her coworker asked if I was the creepy guy in the red SUV who pulled up next to that woman with her kid and asked if I knew them. Lucy's parents, who apparently didn't recognize the face of the man who welcomed their Beagle into his home, mistook me for some ne'er-do-well with evil intentions. They suspected I was a kidnapper, the kind of stranger who masquerades as the friend of a gullible kid's parents and then uses the promise of candy to lure the kid into the backseat! Can you believe that? Librarians are a strange breed, believe you me.

Anyhow, don't wear sweats out of the house. I'm just saying.