Tuesday Pants

I need to start off this blog entry with a disclaimer regarding the accompanying photo. I do not often take selfies of myself from the waist down. In fact, before today, I never have. I mean, how narcissistic would that be? The act of taking selfies is egomaniacal as it is, but taking selfies of random body parts brings it to a whole other level. I will admit I did once take a selfie of my hand, but that was only because I was bored and too lazy to turn my phone around toward my face. But I digress. Point is, I don’t want my audience to think I’m so self-absorbed that I’m standing around snapping pics of my limbs all day long. I only did it, because it directly pertains to the essay you are about to read, assuming you haven’t already given up on said essay. And I’d also like to apologize in advance if you find this photo too risqué—I tried to be as tasteful as possible. Now, onto my pants.

I do not, repeat, DO NOT, have a special pair of pants for every day of the week. On Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays I wear whatever pants I please. Well, that’s not entirely true, I suppose. If I wore shorts on a weekday, I’d likely have to have a visit with my HR manager. But the point is that Tuesdays is the only day of the week when I have a particular pair of pants that I always wear—my Tuesday pants.

My Tuesday pants are dark khakis. Some might describe the color as olive green or forest moss. The pants are comfortable and versatile—with the right ensemble, dare I say stylish. These are pants one might be proud to wear on any day of the week. But I wear these pants exclusively on Tuesdays.

There was a time, not too long ago—14 months ago, to be exact—when I wore any old pants on Tuesdays. Black slacks, grey suit pants, jeans of varying shades of blue, light khakis—you name it, and it was in my leg-wear arsenal.

But now on Tuesdays I exclusively wear my dark khakis. Why? What happened 14 months ago that changed my entire pants world? Something very simple…I became the Cubmaster of my son’s Cub Scout pack and pack meetings are on—you guessed it—Tuesdays. And at pack meetings you will always find me in uniform, which includes my dark khakis.

Of course, the Cub Scout leader uniform also includes a shirt, which is really the more important piece of clothing, because it has all the various badges that identify your role, trainings, and various achievements you may have earned. But I only put the shirt on right before I go to a Cub Scout activity, whereas the pants I wear all day long. (Not wearing pants all day long might also get me a visit with my HR manager.)

Now if you’re familiar with the Cub Scouts, you may know that pack meetings are only once per month, so you may wonder why I wear my dark khakis weekly. Well, in addition to pack meetings we also have committee meetings, which are on a different Tuesday every month. So that means twice per month, I need to wear the same pants. But, I also like to sometimes drop by the weekly den meetings to see how things are going, and if I do that, I like to be in uniform to set a good example for the boys. And, yup, the den meetings are also on Tuesdays.

There are Tuesdays, however, when we don’t have any Cub Scout activities. Indeed, we take a bit of a break during the summer months while folks are on vacation. And yet, every Tuesday, I still pull on my dark khakis—my Tuesday pants. Call it force of habit, or muscle memory, or OCD, but when I look in my closet on Tuesday mornings I reach for the same pants every time—if I were to attempt to put on a different pair, I’d feel incomplete.

Remember, a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. And with the right pair of pants, they can also be stylish.

Chandler, Arizona: Too Clean for Cub Scouts

About four months ago my eight-year-old son became a Cub Scout, which means that his calendar (and by extension, mine) has suddenly gotten much fuller. We’re putting together shell collections, building pinewood derby cars, and solving cryptograms. It’s a lot more than I ever remember doing when I was a Cub Scout. Really my only memories of my scouting days are eating cupcakes at the end of den meetings and being chosen to play “the mom” in a skit in which I had to don a wig and a green dress. (I think my son’s got it a little better than I did, because they still get treats at the end of pack meetings, but so far I haven’t seen any of the scouts forced to dress in drag.)

Last week my son had to go on a hike and pick up litter along the trail, so I took him and my younger son to Veterans Oasis Park in southeast Chandler. This park has 4.5 miles of hiking trails featuring desert landscape, so I figured it would give us lots of opportunity to both admire cactus and pick up discarded soda cans.

With a brand new 13-gallon drawstring garbage bag in hand we started our hike figuring by the end it would take all three of us to drag the sack back out. But apparently the good citizens of Chandler are cleaner than we banked on. Ten minutes into our hike looking both on the trail and off, we still hadn’t found any litter. On the one hand, I was glad that I live in a city with such cleanly folks, but on the other hand, I was hoping we’d have at least a few slobs to help out my kid’s project.

I had all but given up hope of finding any trash at all when my younger son shouted, “There!” and pointed to a spot about five feet to our left. The three of us slowly crept over to the spot as though we were stalking prey and then under a bush we saw it—a one-inch by one-inch clear piece of plastic that may or may not have been a food wrapper at one time in its life. While I wasn’t quite sure what it was, it was clear that it was not something that would occur naturally in the dessert and so could only be defined as litter. I had my older son put on his work gloves (the Cub Scout handbook explicitly states that for safety purposes one must always wear gloves when picking up litter) and put the miniscule piece of plastic into the trash bag. 

We all felt a great sense of accomplishment at having removed the offending trash—so much so, that we decided to reward ourselves by eating the granola bars we brought as snacks. Of course once we ate the bars we had to throw the wrappers into our 13-gallon garbage bag, giving us a great sense of accomplishment once again.

And so the morning went, with my eagle-eyed six-year-old spotting a piece of litter smaller than my thumb every ten minutes or so, my meticulous eight-year-old carefully putting on his gloves to throw it out, and all three of us generating more litter between us than we found in our entire two-hour hike.

By the end of our mission we were all exhausted. Two hours of hiking is a lot on the legs and the six times we had to bend down to pick up litter only compounded our bone-weariness. But at least my son got to check off “Requirement 7” in his Cub Scout handbook. Now if only there was a requirement in his handbook that would make him clean up his room.