The case of the missing socks and other unsolved mysteries

Missing socks are like other mysteries, where everyone has an opinion, some more unique than others

  Carol Forsloff---More than half dozen individual socks were put aside after finding each one had no mate, and like many other people who launder, the frustrations make us wonder whatever happened to the missing socks and how that relates to other mysteries that make folks wonder.

 

Missing socks aren't just a male issue. Women lose socks, just like men. Children lose socks. Sometimes they turn up in some other person's pile, but most often the lost socks never turn up at all, just like other things that perplex and fascinate and offer opportunities to reflect on the element of mystery involved.

 

Those of you who wonder where socks go when they can't be found in the laundry can find some simple answers at Answer.com. The practical answer is that the socks can get caught around the drum in the washer or become attached to the vent area of the drier. One writer offers this practical solution: “I have started using undergarment nets when i wash anything like socks, bra's, etc. I have found many times where they get stuck like in sleeves of shirts and pants legs. But the nets work fantastic. They are mesh bags that you zip up and the soapy water can go through the bag and still wash the items.” But that's the easy answer, of course. There has to be some mystery to the missing socks, otherwise they would not go missing and have so many people involved in the search. 

 

But then there are the conspiracies. Just call me A.J.tells us his version of the missing socks as this: "They run off with pen lids and morph into traffic cones..."

 

And Reef says, giving us his solution to the mystery of the socks, as they are “gone to the island of lost socks.”

 

Everyone loves a mystery, and the socks offer a host of assumptions about what happens to them. It is a mystery without a solution, it seems; as folks have tried those tried and true methods of pinning socks together, putting them in mesh bags, cleaning the washing machine rim and any crevice where a sock might hide; and somehow one of them gets away, never to return to either feet or drawer.

 

It is true with many things in life. We get hints about what happens, like the drum in the washing machine and how that might impact socks. Still the problem keeps coming back, and as we get older, it only gets worse. With faltering memories, who wants to help an old man or woman find missing socks when most folks would simply think they were lost due to memory inefficiency. But again, that does not solve the mystery either. It just offers another story to resolve what people can't conceive might happen, that socks get lost everywhere and could be anywhere.

 

The mysteries of life are much the same as those socks. We wonder why we cannot die, then come back and speak of our experience, so the stories of life after death, however briefly the accounts might be of near death experiences, fascinate us. We believe in ghosts, talk to our dead fathers by a graveside or even while playing a favorite board game and asking what move to make. We want to believe there is something extra, mysterious, unknown for some, that somehow we are able to understand because we solve the mystery. We know that life is eternal because we hear of near death experiences, and the mystery of life and death is solved.

 

So it is with many things in life that appear a mystery. We can hear or read reasonable explanations for what seems to be impossible, but sometimes the conspiracy theory, or the mystery, is what we cling to after all, for it satisfies that part of us that wants to be the one who knows the secret, the mystery of why things happen as they do. We can then share our solutions with our friends, and they too will join with us in the amazement of the stories and ideas that an event might bring.

 

It is a mystery that John F. Kennedy was shot one day in Dalles by a single gunman, so it could not be just that. It must be a grassy knoll figure, who, in league with some dastardly group --Russian communists, left-wing radicals, right-wing anarchists, or some other shadowy organization-- that offers just the right ingredients for a conspiracy theory to sound plausible. Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide, we may think, because why would someone so beautiful suddenly kill herself unless there was a man who had spurned her and the grief so overwhelming that she had to die, of course. Or better yet, the lover, in order to quiet a very public woman like Marilyn, not wanting his political career sullied, finds a way to get her killed before she has a chance to make a private affair so public that the public rejects the lover, even one who seeks to be President of the United States.

 

A plane, like Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, is lost over the deepest ocean, and the nations of the world offer solace with their planes, their ships, and their speculations. It was the pilot, some will say, bent on political vengeance. Or someone on the plane had a vendetta with the government of Malaysia or another passenger. Better yet, one of those extra-terrestrial creatures that come in unidentified flying ships and are seen in streaks at night over cornfields in Iowa and the English farmlands has taken the plane and all its passengers to that planet in the sky where others claim to have gone and returned.   But will these passengers return?  Potentially, the theory might say they decided to stay, and why then becomes a mystery too. 

 

Missing socks are mysteries, and everyone loves a mystery. So if yours are missing, tune in to television or the Internet for speculations abound on everything from missing planes to Marilyn; and there has to be another opinion just in case the others aren't enough.