Some of the new lockers in Dillon gymnasium
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions I am a bit of a
trimmer. While I recognize the logic and
perhaps even the inevitability of making a mental connection between the desire
for personal reformation and the rebooting of the calendar, I grow wary. The problem is that I have an exalted
understanding of a resolution. In my mind a resolution is the secular
analogue of a religious vow. A good deal of my academic work has
concerned medieval monks and nuns for whom vows were inflexible moral contracts
imposing awesome responsibilities that ordinarily could not be abrogated
without invoking a terrible social opprobrium in addition, of course, to the mortal
sin.
Linguistic
manipulation frequently offers an excellent salve to the conscience. You have undoubtedly run into the remark of
the historian Tacitus concerning the Roman mode of military pacification. “They create a desert and call it
peace.” So I do not speak of New Year’s
resolutions. My term of art is intentions. We all have intentions. Some we achieve, others we fail to
achieve. Such failure may be
disappointing or discouraging, but it carries no necessary moral
indictment. I won’t list all my current
intentions, but they include remembering that garbage pickup day is Friday,
hanging no more than three garments from the back of any one chair, flossing
under my dental bridges, and reading Don Quijote in Spanish. My intention most like to succeed is to
continue regular physical exercise at an early hour in the Dillon Gymnasium
swimming pool.
The gym is
never open on New Year’s Day, but I have noticed over the years that on the
second of January, the number of people who show up as the door opens is
considerably larger than at any other time of the year. This augmentation in pre-dawn athleticism
generally lasts about ten days to two weeks: the average time a New Year’s
resolution takes to fall by the wayside.
Well, yesterday morning I supercharged my intention by deciding that I
would be the very first person to enter the men’s locker room in Athletic Year 2018. So I set off especially early into the frigid
blackness intending to be at the very front of the line. There is a walk of two or three hundred yards
from car to gym door. The campus was
very dark, very cold, and very empty. I
saw not a soul, and I was at first simple enough to believe that I had indeed
achieved my intention.
What had actually happened was that
the guy who monitors the door had opened it some minutes early, doubtless as an
act of charity, as the temperature was, I believe, seven degrees
Fahrenheit. As I entered the locker room
I could hear door-clanks from several quarters, and my friend Gary,
already in his workout gear, greeted me with a hearty “Happy New Year!” I was big enough to admit to him that the
irrefutable evidence that I was approximately the eighth person to enter the locker room in AY 2018—evidence of which
his mere presence was a crushing part—had already made it less happy than it
might have been. This confession
elicited friendly guffaws from other, unseen sooners behind various locker
banks. The locker room is fairly small,
and has annoyingly good acoustics.
But there was further unintended mirth ahead. I had not been swimming since before Christmas. I was in Montreal for a week, and the gym was shut over the long New Year’s weekend. I had taken the opportunity to put my favorite swimming trunks—actual a pair of green Champion athletic shorts inscribed with fading letters that read COLGATE ATHLETICS—through the washing machine. I do this on general principles a couple of times a year whether they need it or not. Naturally they went through the tumbler dryer as well—a material fact relevant to this narrative in a Chekovian sort of way.
For as I stood in the buff
preparing to put them on, surrounded by the overachievers who had already and
quite without malicious intent blasted my own New Year intention, a funny thing
happened to me. The swimming suit, which
I had carried to the gym rolled up in a towel, seemed slightly heavy to
me. I was puzzled. I shook it a little with both hands. From one of its legs a kind of neutral
colored satiny something slithered to the floor. It was unmistakably a pair of women’s
panties.
You have doubtless yourself
experienced the odd effects of static electricity on the well-spun contents of
a clothes dryer. Ours is a somewhat
unusual locker room. Here “locker room
talk” sometimes includes disquisitions on Kant or the Kuiper Belt. One of the gawking sooners was actually an
electrical engineer, and could have made of it a teachable moment; but no
matter. The whole room went momentarily silent. For of course we are absolutely culturally au courant around here. Among the improvements made to the Dillon
Gymnasium during its long rehab was the installation of a “gender inclusive
bathroom”. I nonetheless gathered up the
fallen garment as quickly as possible.
When later I related the anecdote to my wife, she was mildly
amused. “But what I am really missing,”
she said, “is one of my black stretch socks.”
I intend to keep my eye peeled.
