Bill King: We have come full circle … and then some

Now to honest with you, I can’t say that I fully understand soccer, but that was not the only thing I saw at his game Saturday that I didn’t understand.

I saw a lady there who wore a pair of pants with both knees torn out. Her knee caps were shining through the holes. That style strikes me as strange, but it also takes me back to my childhood. I wore jeans like that when I was growing up. I’m quite certain there was a slight difference between her reason and mine.

The knees of mine were worn out. That was because when I was a kid, I didn’t play games while sitting on my seat, in front of a computer. I played games kneeling on my knees, on the dirt, out in my yard. I had an entire fleet of dump trucks, road graders, front-end loaders, and other such Tonka Toys.

They didn’t run on gasoline, or diesel fuel, they ran on knee-and-elbow power…my knees and elbows! I must have pushed those things enough miles to have gone to Hong Kong and back, without ever leaving my front yard. It takes a long time, even with all that hard playing, to wear the knees right out of a pair of jeans.

I was perfectly content to wear my air-conditioned jeans, but Mama wasn’t. It would have been okay with me to have gotten some new ones, but Mama didn’t believe in that. She was really hung up on something about money not growing on trees. I already knew that, but she wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. She reminded me each time I tore up another pair of jeans, or whatever else I might have torn up.

Mama’s solution was to patch the knees in my jeans. Sometimes she sewed a piece from another pair of jeans (not from the knee area, of course) behind the hole. When I ran or bent my knees, that patch rubbed my knees. I still have bald spots around my knee caps to this day!

Then, Mama found these iron-on patches. She ironed those ugly things on my jeans, right over the knee holes, and on the outside. She never made me wear those that had been patched from the inside to school, but she said those iron-on patches looked good enough to wear to school. I asked, “What school?”

Most likely, the lady at Drew’s game had not worn her knees out playing trucks in the dirt. Believe it or not, she bought them like that. She paid good money for them. She was proud to wear them and be in vogue. I muttered to myself, “If my Mama was still alive, she could fix those for her!”

Isn’t it funny how some things that one generation wants to fix, or even throw away, another generation embraces and even pays good money to have them? If I had kept a pair of those old worn-out jeans, I could proudly wear them today, that is if I could still squeeze into them without bursting out more than the knees!