Hot Stuff Comin’ Through

I find it funny that with every year that I age, I worry a little less about my outward appearance. If you think about it, you will probably see that you are very much the same. I suppose the reason for this is that with each passing year, we become more set in our ways and realize that we don’t need to be impressive at every given moment.

Ever since my early teens, I have held some sort of job. Those jobs ranged from delivering fliers for a local pizza shop to working in a manufacturing facility doing shipping and receiving work. After a long day at work, I would come straight home and get cleaned up before I even thought about doing anything.

At eighteen years old, I wouldn’t take a ride to the home center to pick up a bag of potting soil without first getting cleaned up. If I were in the middle of a project and needed to go out a buy something to finish the job, I would get cleaned up first, only to come back home with the needed material and get dirty all over again.

A couple of years later that attitude was relaxed a little. I was less worried about what people thought of me as I stopped off for something after work, or if I needed something mid-project. Just a couple of months ago I made several trips to a local hardware store for plumbing supplies. Each time I walked through the door I was covered in more drain slime and dirty dish water.

My concerns of my outward appearance aren’t all lost just yet, there is still a well defined line in the sand. While I have little concern about how presentable I am while seeking out materials and Lowes or Home Depot, I don’t want to be un-presentable elsewhere.

Even though a line does exist, I found myself doing something just the other week that surprised me. After letting Syrus out for his morning pee, at roughly 4:45am, I began to make breakfast. After a few minutes I stuck my head out the door and saw that Syrus managed to get his leader tangled around our picnic table.

With an audible sigh, I realized that I was going to have to trudge through calf-high snow to get him out of his predicament. My first thought was to throw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt so that I could be presentable had a random neighbor been out for a morning jog, or some other early riser activity.

What I wound up doing was throwing caution to the wind. I cinched up my bath robe, kicked my slippers aside and threw on my waterproof, insulated, calf-high, camouflage hunting boots. I stuck my head out and peered around my porch to make sure no one was looking and strutted my bare-legged stuff out onto the snow covered lawn. Once Syrus was free, I took one quick look around before dashing back into the house.

I can’t help but think that in another thirty-years, I’ll be that silver-haired man strutting out to my mailbox to gather up the morning paper, wearing a pair of gray tube socks, slippers, and a bath robe while puffing on a cigar.