I must have agreed that the blue pants were fine when my mother picked them out in the store.  I’m sure I just wanted to get out of there at that point, I was never a big one for clothes shopping.  If the clothes are comfortable, that’s 90% of the game for me.  I must have tried the blue pants on, and they fit, and I was urging my mother to get us on the road, I didn’t want to look at shirts.

I had never worn the blue pants.   The color was a bit on the hideous side, a sort of sickly greyed out light blue, and the material too was suspect, sort of a fine burlap. They sat in a drawer while I wore the jeans I preferred, the other pants I had.    

It was springtime, I must have been ten or eleven, and my father was in the hospital in Manhattan, getting treatment for his psoriasis which had flared up.  When this happened the skin all over his body cracked and bled.  It was torture and, even with his high threshold for pain, it was impossible for him to move around while bleeding from a thousand cracks.   The enforced rest was good for him, it took the pressure off.  I don’t recall all the treatments they gave him, cortisone, sun treatments, tar baths and wrapping him in plastic were all involved, but after a few days he’d come home feeling much better.

We were going to visit him and when I came down in my worn pants my mother asked if I’d change into my blue pants.  Presumably my father would like them better than the ones I was wearing.  It would please him, for some reason, to see me in the nice blue pants.  I probably argued a bit, went and changed into the blue pants and was immediately horrified.  The waist fit, the length was OK, but these pants could not have been fashioned on a human body.  The model for these pants must have been a thin- waisted, long-legged rhinoceros.

I’d never seen anything more ridiculous, as I turned side to side in the long mirror on the bathroom door.  It was like I was wearing a bag of some kind.  The ass of the pants stuck out like a whoopie cushion.  There was a baggy section around the fly that made the pants protrude oddly in the front.  The pant legs, which were enormous at the top, tapered ridiculously as they went toward the shoes.  I simply could not bear it.  I changed back into my other pants.

“What happened to the blue pants?” my mother wanted to know when I got back downstairs.  I told her impatiently that they were unwearable and she got angry.  It was just another brutal proof of how far I’d go to show how little I loved my father.  She embellished on this theme for a while, getting more and more overwrought.  I truly don’t remember in the end which pants I wore to the hospital, but I know there was a huge fight about the blue pants.  

When we got to my father’s hospital room, on an upper floor with a magnificent view of the East River and Queens, with Brooklyn in the distance, it was as if news of my truculent stand on the blue pants had reached my father before we did.  Here was another proof, as if one more was needed, of how little the son cared for his father’s feelings.   It showed, once again, the lengths to which the boy was willing to go to demonstrate to his father how little he loved him.  

Truthfully, outside of the view, and my father’s sad reaction to my latest act of treachery,  I recall very little about the visit to that room in NYU hospital.  The incident with the blue pants would be brought up many times over the years, become a rallying cry as memorable as “Remember the Alamo” or “Lumumba Died for Freedom”.  It always stirred the patriotic feelings  of the partisans around the dinner table.  

“It’s like the blue pants,” my father would say to my mother, resting his case.

In an ironic twist, some time later my sister began to display a rare talent for tapering pants.  I don’t know where she came by this skill, it must have come from our grandmother who was an expert tailor and worked without plans of any kind.   My sister had me put on the blue pants one day, made some markings, or pinned them, and a short time later handed them back, completely wearable.  I wore them many times after that, though the damage I had done in the original battle over those pants could not, of course, ever be undone.