Denim Uber Alles

When I was in grad school I briefly lived in a two-bedroom apartment with Kip & Dave. This "security" apartment building was on the very narrow border between the 'good' part of Long Beach and the beginning-to-get-really-sucky part of Long Beach. It might have been better had we lived in the bad part of town. The first night there, Dave's car stereo was liberated. Within a month we had discovered the secret to the men hanging out in the back alley carport -- there was a homeless prostitute doing business out of a storage space in the carport. I never saw her, but Dave did, and said "you know how there are high-class ho's, and low-class ho's? Well this was a no-class ho." The last straw for the three of us was the day that Kip was home alone (I was in New Orleans meeting my future husband, Dave was at school), and someone tried to break into the apartment. Through my bedroom window. We moved out within a month and I went on to live in the most wonderful but tiniest studio apartment, near the beach, near the bar, and safe.

Those were the bad things that happened. Of the kinda annoying things that also contributed to apartment hunting less than 2 months after we moved in there were the local Harley riders roaring down the alley under our bedroom windows at all hours, the neighbor who woke up Kip & Dave at 6 am every day with his version of Barry White songs in the shower, and the laundry room incident.

I had a pair of overalls I had bought in SF at some teenybopper shop, for $10, and I loved them. Really really really really loved them. And someone stole them out of the dryer in the locked laundry room in the "security" building. I know they went in the washer, I saw them go in the dryer, I went back after an hour, took my clean laundry upstairs, and ... they were gone.

Today, 13 years later, I am getting dressed and I can't find my maternity overalls. My mother ordered them from Old Navy when I was pregnant with Arabella, but they didn't fit. It wasn't my belly, it was my bottom that was too large. They led to me wonder aloud why maternity clothes didn't get roomy in the butt as well as the belly. Amazingly, they fit me this pregnancy. Apparently my behind has gotten smaller while the weight has all concentrated in the front. I thought they would be perfect for teaching ceramics, no hoisting my pants up every time I bend over a wheel (and I do alot of bending over wheels). But they are gone. I thought maybe M had them (by accident, of course. I can't even imagine what my manly man would look like in maternity overalls that fit a person nearly a foot shorter than him) -- he says no. Arabella wouldn't have run off with them ... would she? And the cat would just lay on them, not hide them. They're not in the laundry room, not in the drawer, not in the clean clothes mound eating my cedar chest.

What is the problem with me and overalls?