Sock balls and Underwear

When our four boys were little boys, Vicki creatively interviewed them each Father's Day weekend and then gave me the videotape as a gift. Each of my sons was individually asked a series of questions about me, and they answered the questions while the other brothers heckled them from off camera.

This past Father's Day, we watched those tapes. One year Vicki asked, "What's the craziest thing your daddy has done this year?" The older three answered, "He wore underwear on his head."

It was clean underwear.

The underwear story unfolded on a hot June afternoon. I had taken off from work and decided to spend all day with my boys. We watched television, played outside, and cooked lunch together. I made them sit through an episode of Bonanza - I still think every boy should be a Bonanza fan whether they want to be or not.

An afternoon thunderstorm forced us to get creative inside the house. We positioned an empty, round laundry basket on one end of the large family room. The basket was several feet from a sofa that faced it. Then, we rolled up socks, making sock balls. From behind the sofa, we had a contest - the one tossing the most sock balls into the basket was the winner. (Winner of nothing but bragging rights, but still the winner). That led to competitive variations, specifically how many sock balls could be thrown in the basket during 60 seconds. Blind-folded shooting was another variation.

That's when William, my Willie-Bell, opened the laundry room door and went inside. He then shouted, "I can make a basket from all the way in here."

"There's no way," I said. "In fact, if you make that shot, I'll go to Kroger supermarket and walk around with underwear on my head."

It was game on.

William walked in the laundry room with an all too familiar, wickedly fun grin on his face. He rolled that sock ball around in his hands, and then launched it.

Cheers erupted - not so much for the sock ball that landed perfectly and miraculously in the center of the laundry basket, but for the delight in seeing me with underwear on my head.

With the storm rolled away and the steamy South Carolina sunshine returned, I drove four little boys - Matthew was a baby - to Kroger supermarket. I then pushed a buggy up and down the aisles with a clean pair of Hanes tighty-whities stretched over my noggin. We bought ice cream by the half-gallon, went back home and ate every bit of it, and then returned to our sock ball competition.

As I recall it, we were all wearing underwear on our heads when Vicki came home from work.

www.scottdvaughan.com


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