bathrobe.

I had a recent brief experience that I must document. Primarily it is for posterity. My siblings and I often tell stories about our father, and they are usually just absurd enough that people who have heard a few, figure our dad is some sort of weirdo. What's funny is that he is no weirdo at all, but the evidence we give seems to convince otherwise.

This story is no different. But please do not be confused.

In the morning as I am getting ready for the day I wear a bright light pink bathrobe with white polka dots. It's fuzzy and covers me up pretty well and does the job it was purchased for. The sleeves, however, are wrist length and get in the way, so I usually fold them up once or twice.

Last week I was getting ready and running late and my sleeves kept unrolling and I got quite bothered by it and for a split second, in my exasperation, thought......"Aghhhhh! I should just cut these sleeves off!"

In the moments that followed that thought, I had a memory. Now my siblings may have to help me date this memory as it is fuzzy....but I remembered a morning in my parent's home, before school where I was sitting at the breakfast table and my dad came out for breakfast wearing his navy blue terrycloth bathrobe. He had done this on a regular basis, just as any man comes out for breakfast, but this morning was different because instead of an intact bathrobe, my dad was wearing one that looked as though the sleeves had been forcibly removed by either a dull butter-knife, a hungry pack of wolves, or his own teeth. In place of the sleeves there were instead crazy jagged edges of unraveling terrycloth.

We looked at him, we looked at his bathrobe, and we didn't know what to think. We asked him "What happened to your bathrobe?" and he replied "Oh the sleeves were getting in my way. So I got rid of them."

or maybe he said "I get too hot in this bathrobe so I took off the sleeves." Either way....in my dad's typical style he provided his children with an explanation that clearly made perfect sense to him and then acted confused when we responded by giving him weirdo looks.

In that moment when I got fed up with my own sleeves and had thoughts to rip them off, I recognized that I felt completely justified in my reaction to my sleeves, just as my father did. Difference being that I decided to save the task for my sewing machine instead of using my toenail clippers.