"Oh, I know exactly which pants you are talking about," said the Ann Taylor lady. The girl's heart soared.
"Those are the best pants in the world, and I can't for the life of me understand why we stopped making them."
[Forehead slap]
Yes, I'm the girl in the story, and after looking far and wide for similar pants I ended up having the zipper in the original pair fixed and the lining replaced. Yes, I could have bought a couple of pairs of pants with what I spent on the repairs, but they wouldn't have been the pants. I learned my lesson: if you find a pair of black pants that you really, really like, don't stop at one pair. Buy multiples - particularly if they are half-off.
Fast forward to this morning. I took my own advice awhile back and bought two pair of black pants, the hem of one of which has fallen out. Because I don't "do" hems (okay, okay - I'm lazy, but I have a full-time job, thank you very much, and time is money, and also the way I see it my laziness keeps a couple of different tailors in business - although, quite often, they will only charge me a dollar or two, or refuse to charge me at all, advising me that they can't in good conscience charge me for what is so simple a job - okay, I get it, I'm staffing out sewing projects that a trained monkey could do, probably with one hand tied behind its back), I added the pair with the pulled-out hem to a stack of clothes in my closet that, for various reasons, require a tailor's attention. That left the other pair of perfect pants on the hanger.
So, I'm getting ready for work, I pull the perfect pants off of the hanger - and they aren't just a little bit tight, they are alarmingly, "no way I can wear these" tight. I begin to freak out - surely, it must be the Mexican brunch on Saturday and the eggplant rollatini on Mother's Day catching up to me, but I have multiple (try seven!) Junior Woman's Club closing dinners to attend this week, and I need to look nice at all of them . . . but I will be expected to eat at all of them, too. MAJOR pity party commences: I need to lose weight, but how will I possibly find the time? I hastily throw together an outfit, and between work and my first JWC engagement of the week I head to the mall and manage to find a few items of clothing that fit, including a pair of black pants, but they aren't perfect pants - they are merely okay. The entire process of trying on clothing is maddening, because - notwithstanding the fact that I have clearly put on a ton of weight in a short time frame - I don't seem to have changed sizes. In fact, when I try on the next size up, the clothes just swim on me. This frustrates me to no end - either I'm bigger or I'm not.
[Wait for it . . . .]
I go home, and I'm trying on clothes, and I go into my closet (which is sort of a hot mess, thanks to my frenzied search for things that fit) in search of a particular black tank top. I start sorting through a pile of black clothing that didn't make it back on hangers, and I run across the too-tight pants . . . and then I run across them again. Wait, whaaaaa? I check the pile of "clothing to be mended," and there are the unhemmed pants, right where I left them. Something doesn't add up - figuratively and literally. So I take a closer look at the other pants - and realize that the ones on top are not my current favorite black pants, but rather they are a historical favorite, in a size that I haven't worn for awhile. A good, long while. I take a closer look at the other "other pants" . . . pull them on, and not only do they fit, but they are a little bit loose.
Yup, you guessed it - the reason that my current favorite black pants didn't fit this morning was that they weren't my current favorite black pants at all. I grabbed the wrong pair off of the hanger, and the pair that I grabbed haven't fit me for eons. In other words, I gave myself a flippin' heart attack, completely unnecessarily. I had to start laughing - it was either that or cry. And I had to share my amusement (and sense of relief) with someone, so I told my spouse, who shook his head, chuckled a little and started to say something, but I cut him off thusly:
"Yeah, yeah, I know. The blonde really does go all of the way down to the roots."
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