It was a dusty box filled with yellowing socks that we passed by each morning to fish out a pair that didn’t look too worn or holed out.  My brother and Ramses and I would argue as to which pair we would wear for the day, and the spats were worse when we each of us picked a sock from the same pair. There were knee socks, ankle socks with balls at the heel, yellow striped socks, you name it, it was in that box buried beneath all the other plain white ones. 

None of them were new. We had to wear them with rubber bands to keep them up, and even then it was a task of picking the right rubber band which wasn’t too loose (like the big office rubber bands that came in boxes) or too tight (the yellow ones with red and green stripes on them, the ones you use to make stars or Chinese garters with) to bite on our skin.  Most of the time, however, we’d end the day with rubber bands on our legs and socks which had been swallowed whole by the shoes we were wearing. And if we were unlucky enough, our father would notice that we had rubber bands on, and reprimand us on the dangers of gangrene. 

I remember pulling up my socks as a major part of  walking while I was growing up. If I was in PE class it would be worse, as “calesthenics” (an exercise craze in the 80s) would warrant the pulling up of socks each time I reached for my toes. For my seventh birthday I got my prized Mighty Kid sneakers with the zippers on the sides for easy access, and I faintly recall my sadness at not having good socks to wear them with.

Tough life? Not really. I had three other siblings, and socks, like crayons,  were in surplus.  Aside from the policy of “No new crayons or colored pencils”  (all these coloring materials were in an empty Pringles can, and it was impossible to draw anything in a single color because they had all chipped and stuck to each other), was the policy of “No new socks.”  There  was a whole box filled with socks anyway, and we could not justify why we had to get new pairs unless we threw them all out. And of course we couldn’t, because we wouldn’t have any socks to use until the new ones were purchased. These would come like manna from heaven, a pair at a time from the sale racks of SM, and like the hungry we would fight as to who got to wear it first. Usually, by the time I got to wear it, they’d be loose already, and fall off again from having been stretched by my siblings’ bigger feet.

When I think about it now, I guess my parents just didn’t realize how pathetic we had become with our yellowing and hardening socks falling down on our ankles. There were quite a number of days when I’d go to school with socks that didn’t match, and I had to fold one because it was longer than the other, which was good since then I could hide a rubber band underneath it. 

And then, there was a miracle. After much pestering, my mother finally agreed to buy me the Marks & Spencer socks that everyone in St. Scho was wearing. I was a junior, and after agreeing to wear with shame the socks that her officemate crocheted (which didn’t fall off, but had a top garter that left my shins sore and my feet numb and the rest of the sock looking like a sack) for three years, she finally took me to pick out the St. Michael’s socks I wanted. 
They were a hundred pesos a pair, a lot of money at that time, and after rebutting her every argument on my socks getting lost in the wash (I had to promise to wash them myself every night and watch out for them by counting that all were present at all times), she finally bought me three pairs! I was ecstatic, and I wore them proudly with my boyish shoes and Snoopy bow-biters. 

Every night I would take them off and wash them carefully with bath soap. And through the months they got darker and darker but I couldn’t make the maids wash and bleach them, so I just made the most out of them, sewing up their holes after a while; even if by the time I got them everyone else was wearing another style already – knee socks now, and they were 200 pesos a pair so I didn’t even dream of it!

What I learned from all of this was how to make socks fit. The over-the-toes maneuver was good and more comfortable than folding it underneath, but you couldn’t do that with girly shoes or Spartan sneakers (Keds white sneaker lookalikes, but of course we’d die before we’d get the real thing!) because the socks would bulge on your toes and you’d look like you had a case of elephantiasis. I also learned that newly washed socks usually don’t fall off if you don’t stretch them too much when you put them on. And that it was okay to wear the ones which didn’t have heels, if you were wearing your high-cut rubber shoes or boots. Doubling socks also reduced the socks-at-ankles incidence. And the best rubber bands were the thick and flat ones, but they also hurt the most.

Looking back at it now, I’m glad we didn’t have too much of everything. We were not poor and what we got was a far cry from what our parents had, growing up during the war. My father always told us the story of being given one pencil at the start of each school year, and if he broke it or lost it, he wouldn’t get another one until the next year.  We had so many socks! Not very useable ones, but at least they were there. Sure, we got teased a lot by our classmates, but it took us no sooner to realize that all of that was superficial, and that we were much smarter than all of them combined. I believe this was the lesson our parents had wanted us to learn.

Decades later, when we were all earning, we each bought ourselves the biggest sets of Crayolas and Coleen colored pencils. Ate Aya even went as far as buying every available color of Keds sneakers!  I still buy my socks at the SM sale rack at 3 pairs for a hundred, and fortunately they make socks better now and they no longer fall off. For me there is nothing that compares to the smell and feel of new white socks, and I don’t think you can have too many good pairs. 

The only problem is, I wear only one pair from the three and wear it out before using the other two. So I can smell the rest, and know that in my box there will always be a perfect pair I can use at any given time. :o)