View from the North 40: It's a hot pink invitation to disaster

I cheated death one day this week. Not in a dramatic or heroic fashion, naturally, but in that way in which you do something sketchy that the Universe normally tries to capitalize on.

You walk out of the house wearing a pair of underwear of the likes your mother warned you about and you’re just asking to get into a car wreck. Or maybe that’s just me.

Not that the unders in question were dirty, or ratty, or otherwise unsavory or even illicit, it’s just that, OK, they were hot pink with, y’know, lace. Don’t judge me. It was an emergency purchase.

I was on a trip, about 15 years ago, and the return flight got delayed overnight so I had to buy what the hotel gift shop had to offer. And obviously, they catered to a much fancier crowd than the likes of me.

I pretty much wear cotton from head to toe, and cotton-wearing people don’t cotton to wearing synthetic lacy anything. I was not impressed with its comfort quotient. I just have to assume that anyone purchasing this underwear in a hotel gift shop only intended to wear it for a few minutes. You’re an adult, fill in the blanks there. Don’t make me wink.

I was faced with an unreasonable choice that night: 1) Wear dirty underwear the next morning. 2) Wash a pair with that perfume-y hotel soap and have to wear damp unders for the early bird flight the next morning, because the humidity in Dallas was about 99.99 percent that weekend. 3) Go commando. Or 4) Wear the ugly scratchy hotel gift shop number.

And my choice could affect not just the next day’s trip home but all of history.

I had to figure the odds of which choice was least like to cause A) some kind of gynecological health problem and B) the airplane to fall straight out of the sky in a totally non-fiery crash just so the Universe could humiliate me by letting me be caught dead in those unders (or no unders in the case of choice No. 3).

Untenable choices.

It was late at night, I did the best I could. Of course, at that point I didn’t know lace was so scratchy, but I made it home alive and well, with no one the wiser about my under clothing so I considered the choice a win.

If you’re asking yourself why, when I hate them so much, I’ve kept a pair of underwear that I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in, you’ve touched on a fair question. I am frugal.

Yes, I am that frugal. They were expensive, like, that one pair cost as much as a five-pack of cotton ones. I think the hotel was price gouging people caught in a delicate but serious predicament.

That said, can I afford to just throw them away — throw that money away in the garbage? I absolutely could afford that — in my pocketbook, but in my soul I could not be that wasteful. I am saving my soul with those underwear, people.

In exchange, they also serve a purpose.

So there they sit in my drawer, at the bottom of a pile of cottony softness and when their hot pinkness glows through or my hand brushes against their scratchy lace, it acts like a low-gas warning light flashing on the dash, and I think “Ohmigawd! I have to get a load of whites washed today or I’m going to have wear the reserve unders!”

Do you suppose that when the designer came up with the idea to use that hot pink lacy fabric he or she imagined future wearers slipping them on and thinking about getting lucky in a traditional, romantic sense. Whilst I put them on hoping to get lucky in the sense that I make it through my day without getting into an accident that would require rescue or medical people to see what I’m wearing under my serviceable cotton outerwear?

You know the Universe would orchestrate some elaborate tragedy that involved me getting hauled to the hospital and somewhere along the way my jeans would have to get cut off me in the process of saving my life. At this point half the people in line of sight of that comic crisis would recoil in horror and the other half would be overcome with laughter. Either way, there would be an understandable, yet fated, lapse in the timeliness of my medical care.

And you just know, don’t you, that one of the wiseacres I call loved ones would write in my obituary that I died of natural causes: “Naturally she died of mortification when everyone got a look at those hot pink lacy knickers.”

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