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Senor P and the Socks
by Julie Ann Shapiro

I say to the pea pod, “Have you contemplated your day drawing socks?” It looks at me like I’ve gone bonkers.  But you know I think it’s the one Senor P who’s nuttier. Why it chose to be an artistically charged pea instead of part of my pot pie I wonder as I catch it making Jackson Pollock style dots with my chicken soup on the pie crust. And that’s not all. It makes a Marc Chagall-esque drawing of a horse in my window and now it’s fancying my socks. At least the sock inspiration makes sense. I can honestly say I played a foot in it.

You see…I have arranged a whole stack of pair-less socks in a pyramid on the center of my bed on Summer Solstice like I do every year. It is in the hopes that once and for all I will solve the mystery of the missing socks. It’s a most noble quest, one that’s been baffling humanity for some time.

But on this day the pea pod has chosen to draw. So I watch while it makes a rendition of sheep’s wool out of my sock pile and insists that this is the answer to the sock dilemma. Why it seems according to one Senor P that the socks are protesting a certain demise of woolen socks,” or booties as they call them.  “Without them,” the pea pod adds, “the toes which are the socks closet friends are quite cold and contemplating a revolt.”

“How can they? They’re part of the foot?”

Senor P says, “Yeah, and that’s what they say about absoccus phenomenonus dispareasus or as the more enlightened socks like to call it, “The sock-apora.”

So now I at least know why there are missing socks, but that still doesn’t explain how one Senor P became the artiste.

“Oh,” he says,” that’s easy. I transmuted with Picasso on his last meal.”

“But he’s been dead for at least twenty or so years, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, but he waited for the right pea pod to come along. One who was sympathetic to the sock cause; the very one Picasso mused about.”

“When?”

“During his blue period; the perfect manifestation of cold toes, don’t you think?”

“No,” I scream at the pea pod, but he has spilt wearing a miniature beret in purple and looking quite dashing.