The myth of clean underwear
My mother always told me to wear clean underwear in case I was in an accident. It didn’t occur to me until years later that there were plenty of other good reasons to wear clean underwear. Why didn’t my mother ever say: “You should always wear clean underwear because dirty underwear is disgusting”?
Why did she bring accidents into the conversation, especially with a little kid? What was she trying to do? Scare me? Wreck my childhood? Turn me into a psychological basket case for the rest of my life over underwear?
People are in accidents all the time, and I have yet to read about the state of their underwear in any of the reports. How often have you ever seen this in the newspaper:
“Marvin Kittle was injured in single-car rollover on Route 8 early this morning after swerving to avoid a deer. He suffered multiple contusions and a sprained wrist. He was held overnight at County Hospital for observation. Police say he was wearing clean underwear at the time of the accident.”
“Prisilla Pushface of Cantorville fell off a ladder while cleaning her rain gutters late Tuesday afternoon. The EMS crew transported her to Bliptown Medical Center where her underwear was cut off and tested for cleanliness. A full recovery is expected.”
No, newspapers won’t write about the state of your underwear when you are in an accident, but what they will do is run the most hideous, dorkiest, geekiest, grainiest picture of you ever taken. Say you die in a car accident. You’re 54, but the paper will somehow find a high school yearbook photo of you that wasn’t even good back then and slap it next to the tale of your untimely demise. They will find a photo of you that’s so bad the DMV wouldn’t even use it for your driver’s license because it was “too scary.” They will find a photo of you given to them by an ex-spouse who won’t be happy until he’s wrecked your afterlife, too.
Your friends and neighbors will look at it and say, “I wonder if that’s the same Nellie Flatbuzz that we knew? It doesn’t look anything like her.
The reason papers run these horrible pictures is simple. Say you’re in a gruesome SUV/train-crossing accident at four in the afternoon. The story’s going to be in tomorrow morning’s paper. They’ve got eight hours to find out who you are where you live, and get a picture of you for the front page.
So at five after six, the phone rings where you used to live and it’s some jerk from the city desk wanting to know if there’s a picture of the deceased they can use in the newspaper. Your family, unlike mine, would probably be too grief-stricken to deal with it. Going through pictures of you will just upset them. So the paper calls a neighbor, a friend or a relative. Finally, they find someone willing to part with a group shot of you at the company picnic in 1992. You are the third one from the left in the bottom row. If they blow the photo up, say 40 or 50 times, they can use that one.
You haven’t combed your hair that way since 1995, you are wearing a shirt that was embarrassingly out of date even then. Which is why mothers should just stop with the clean underwear thing and start telling their children to carry a current, high-quality, 8-by-10 glossy headshot with themselves at all times. That’s the thing you’ll really wish you had on you if you are ever in an accident. Not clean underwear.
Jim Mullen is the author of “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at [email protected].