Immigrant Pants Are Safe in America

My wife sometimes talks to her clothes as if they were people.

"Well. You haven't been out in a while," she'll say in late spring, looking at a pair of open-toed shoes, cooing at them as she takes them from the floor of her closet.

This is not, by itself, evidence of a slipping grip on reality. My pickup truck is named "Evangeline." Plenty of people have involved conversations with their dogs.

And, a week or so ago, while my wife put together a casserole of pasta and ground turkey, I lent my strong arms to the household and dealt with some laundry she'd left in the dryer.

It was a comfortably married load of laundry — gray T-shirts advertising a boxing gym mixed in with pairs of her small, white running socks; thin, pale tank tops; and a baggy pair of men's khaki pants, battered and worn from yard work.

I folded it all. I'm a good folder, a skill I picked up working in a hotel laundry.

One of the last things I folded was a pair of flannel lounge pants my wife wears on cold evenings — drawstring pants.

The pants are a pale yellow in color and patterned with the heads of smiling 1950s-looking women, brunettes with flipped hair and a red lipstick smile. They're the kind of pants meant to bring the phrase, "Oh, how cute," out of a woman's mouth as she lifts them from a shelf in Kmart, checks the price tag and figures she has $10 for a pair of pants to wear at home on chilly nights.

I'm a dreamy, considering sort of man, if only because I don't like sports. I checked the label inside the waistband of the bright, happy-looking pants. They were made in Bangladesh. What I know about Bangladesh is that, in 1971, in New York City, there was a concert for Bangladesh, an effort to raise money for Bangladeshis who had suffered through a civil war. It was a nice concert and produced a bestselling album, as musical relief efforts often do.

If you think about it (and I don't like sports), my wife's pants live a pretty good life.

Her dresser drawer is organized but comfortable, smelling vaguely of good perfume, a nice place for clothes to cuddle companionably until called for duty. And, for the pants, duty is only being worn on cold nights, in a warm house. For the pants, tragedy is a spilled glass of red wine. Like teachers, the pants get summers off, drowsing away the hot months, sleeping in the perfumed drawer with others of their soft, comforting kind.

In Bangladesh, where summers are hot and winters are not as cold as they are in my part of Massachusetts, pants like my wife's are sewn together by people who are sometimes killed when their factory collapses and comes down on them like a door slamming shut.

And then, the Bangladeshi authorities screech to the scene, cart away the dead they can find, bandage the still living and begin digging through the jagged ruins for bodies. The last factory collapse killed better than 600, and they're still easing the busted-up dead out of the concrete wreckage.

My wife's pants were fortunate. They were not burned up in a factory fire, torn apart in a collapse, buried under the huge, blunt bones of a dead building.

But there is some woman who worked in that plant, some pretty-eyed, fast-fingered sewing machine operator whose slender neck broke when the ceiling fell, when the floor above smashed into the hum and clatter of her factory floor.

And her machine was crushed and broken apart, her last pair of pants halfway made, as her brain stopped dreaming.

Making it to America is a worldwide dream, people scuffling up the money for the trip, bidding goodbye to the old country for the chance to stand on a gray sidewalk in Chicago or Sacramento, Calif., or Lawrence, Mass., looking around for something better, some kind of money, some warm house.

My wife's pants made the trip safely. They are American pants now, with the right to comfort, to a nice dresser drawer. Presumably, they have the unquestioned right to own a gun.

But they left behind the broken girl whose fast, skilled hands pushed bright material through a sewing machine, making American pants, working until the ceiling fell in.

For America.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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