Real Men Wash Their Jeans

Hey, my little novella Super Daisy! just got a fun review:

“If you’ve ever had an unrequited love, a mean girl who terrorized you, a family business that’s struggling, a dead end job, and strong-as-diamonds-fingernails then you’ll totally relate to this delightful tale. Give it a read.”

Nice, right? Granted, it was from my sister. But she does have a PhD, and so she’s really smart, and that should count for something in a review. Smart people like silly escapist fiction too! Oh, and I just realized that Amazon Prime members, you chosen folk, can read it for free. That’s nice, right? Free is nice.

Anyway, enough of that. Instead I have a serious topic to discuss today: men’s jeans.

It all started about six months ago, when my husband brought in the daily mail. In it, with my husband’s name on the mailing label (so it wasn’t a mistake on the part of the postal worker, which sometimes we have been recipients of, as noted here), was a magazine I know I wouldn’t have subscribed to. Moreover, I KNOW he wouldn’t have subscribed to. It was called Details. One glance at this GQ -type rag told me this  had to be a prank. It reminded me of when our apartment of girls accidentally ended up on the mailing list of the men’s clothing catalog “International Male,” — more ivory colored linen suits than a real man could wear in a lifetime.  I flipped through the Details pages, and started to laugh and immediately called my brother.

“Funny joke, Bill. Good one.”

“What?” He was in denial–and continued to deny until I finally believed he hadn’t ordered it for Gary. Then I phoned up all the other usual suspects and got the same treatment. Either someone is a good liar, or I have a funny friend I don’t even know about. Whoever you are… good one! Ya got him.

So, this magazine continues to come to our house, and I usually just chuck it. Last month, though, I happened to flip through the pages because there was a teaser on the cover about this columnist accidentally getting to try on a suit made for Prince William in a tailor’s shop in London (which was a kind of good story, but it did have some potty mouth language, so I’m not going to recommend it to you.) Anyway, in looking for this Bonny Prince William story, my eyes fall on a headline about jeans–how to keep them from fading.

This is something I need to know. Because I happen to be in the market for jeans sometime in the next couple of months. It’s been a year since I bought any, (as readers of this blog might remember when I was suckered at The Gap) and those are now faded, and I’d like to keep the next pair longer and such.

But…as I read the article’s content, it’s wrong. It’s just WRONG. Why? Because the writer of the article suggests that men should not wash their jeans for the first three months.

Excuse me, but THREE MONTHS? That’s just…ew.

The explanation goes on that like dress pants or suit pants, jeans just don’t need to be washed. They’ll hold their color longer if not washed (duh), and even then, they should be washed inside out in cold water and line dried.

Um. Do men wash things in cold inside out and line dry them? Come on.

I mention this to Gary–because he’d just bought some jeans. Granted, these are the first jeans he’s bought in our marriage. He’s been a strictly “blue dress shirt, tie, and khakis” guy for as long as I’ve known him (even mows the lawn in this uniform) with the only exception being that he had a pair of old 501s–you know, the shrink to fits?, The kind you have to WASH to get to be the right size?–that he regularly wore to work on his orchard farm (a.k.a. Goathead Island.)

And his response is, “I thought you had to wash jeans to shrink them to get them to fit.”

Well, duh.

I mull this for a few days. Meanwhile, we go a couple of places. We have a little family get-together, like a watermelon bust or something, and Gary wears his jeans, and everyone says, “Wow. That’s weird. I’ve never seen you wearing jeans.” Because truth is, they probably haven’t.

And then, a few days later, he’s been at Goathead Island in the new jeans, and they have purple stains on them from the special glue for PVC pipe for the drip system he’s putting in on the land to water the pecan trees, and they are caked in a layer of mud and these stupid little foxtail grass burrs– you know, the kind that stick in your socks so badly you have to simply throw the socks away– and then there’s a layer of some kind of gas-oil mixture from the weedeater, and atop it all is a fine layer of cut grass, almost like green fur, coating the whole pant leg (both) from the hem all the way up to where his blue dress shirt was untucked and guarding the jeans like a blue dress shirt apron.

And I look at all this and tell him, “Um, it hasn’t been three months. I don’t think I should wash those yet.”

Geez, folks. Real men wash their jeans.