I am a “morning person”, which means that I get up like a shot before dawn (and, I suppose, collapse as if shot at night). If you live in a house with sleeping kids, pre-sunrise activity carries its own difficulties. I remember what that’s like: since everyone else is in blessed repose, you feel the need to maintain absolute silence.
(My father, as I remember, disdained this common-sense rule when he got up like a shot in my childhood days. The radio went on, the coffee-pot burbled, the toilet flushed. It was like waking to a sound effects app. And no, they didn’t have apps back then; it would have been a phonograph record.)
At any rate, one’s behavior in the wee hours can be strange to behold. You walk like a snail, you open the closet door as if it were wired to detonate. Like the deliberate fiend in Poe’s “Telltale Heart”, you take an hour to turn a doorknob.
Nature usually conspires to foil us, of course. Some unheralded law of physics declares that hinges squeak loudest in the dark. I am almost certain that a corollary to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that, when the lights are out, the missing sneaker is right under your feet. Still, you get the idea.
I have all of this down to a science. Like a stealth rat, I crawl the morning maze from memory, using instinct instead of eyes. Down to a science, yes – but for one detail. The socks: they stop me every time.
Socks, you see, are like clones, all identical, and they seem to multiply in the drawer. A sock has only one claim to individuality: color. Alas, socks are mere ciphers in the dark. (Whoever said that Justice is Colorblind was undoubtedly looking for his socks by starlight.)
No quest teaches you the value of light and sight more than the search for socks. The other four of the Five Senses are no help at all. “Brown” just doesn’t smell (though socks do, of course, but all of mine smell alike, and that’s none of your business anyway). “Black” and “blue” socks tend to sound and feel about the same to me. Don’t ask about the remaining sense; I refuse to try it.
Of course, it isn’t exactly pitch-dark in the morning; I can see the socks “as through a glass darkly”, but as the Moody Blues said, the colors are washed from sight. My wife once proposed to solve the dilemma by sewing a letter on each sock to identify the color. “I could put a ‘B’ on it,” she offered. We didn’t think that one through.
Let me present a principle, a Supposition from the Sock Drawer: distinctions are impossible in the dark. Without illumination, a sock is a sock is a sock. I can go on guessing all morning, sniffing this one and squeezing that one, but only light will show me their true colors.
Do distinctions matter so much? Yes, do not be fooled. It is popular these days to say that all viewpoints are of equal worth. That is balderdash. In a constitutional society, all viewpoints are worth a fair hearing; but soon we must choose from among many contradictory causes, accepting some, rejecting others. (Some morning, tell yourself that socks are trivial, reach in and grab any two. Chances are you’ll want to hide your feet under the desk all day.)
Socks and society differ in degree. From my drawer I can only choose three or four colors; from my world, however, I am overwhelmed by options. As a democratic citizen, I applaud the variety. As a mere man, I fear the inevitable choices. As a Christian, I am thankful for the Light. For without God’s standards to measure by, all world-views seem much alike.
What should I wear today? Virtue? Irresponsibility? Integrity? Prejudice? Holiness? Cynicism? Honesty? Pragmatism? Discipline? Impulse? Somehow, they all feel the same on my feet, in the dark.