The curious case of the missing pants

“I can’t find my…”

These four words begin about 40% of the sentences uttered in this household.

I am not the one doing the uttering.

Pythagoras has always been absentminded, but a recent announcement gave me pause.

“I can’t find my pants,” he declared. “My favorite pants.”

“Um, OK,” I said, trying not to be alarmed about where my husband might have left his pants and how he arrived home without them. “When did you have them last?”

He thought about that a minute. “Maybe when we went to Greece. Or maybe a month after that, I’m not sure.”

I frowned at the calendar. “We went to Greece in June. You’ve been hunting for your pants this whole time?”

Apparently so. He turned the closet upside down looking for them. I searched the guest rooms, thinking maybe he’d overlooked them. We called my parents, thinking perhaps he’d left them there on a visit. We searched his workplace, thinking…um, actually, I’m not sure what we were thinking.

But the pants were gone. My overactive imagination ran wild. Had aliens abducted them? Had a badger eaten them? Had I somehow failed to notice a day my husband came home from work wearing only his shirt and shoes? The possibilities were endless.

We spent an entire day at the mall searching for a replacement. None were adequate. “These aren’t like the old pants,” he insisted.

“You do have three or four identical pairs though, right?”

He shook his head sadly. “The other ones were the best shade of gray.”

Fearful the grief might prompt him to go pantsless to brunch the next morning, I grabbed one of the identical pairs from the closet and hopped on the computer to see if I could find an online vendor selling them.

I searched for an hour, finally locating what I thought might be the right color, cut, and style. “Pythagoras,” I yelled. “Come look at these online and tell me if I should place an order.”

He wandered into the bedroom, looked at the picture on the screen, then looked at the pants in my lap.

“Where did you find my pants?”

I stared at him. “These are your missing pants?”

He nodded. “Where were they?”

I closed my eyes, realizing – not for the first time – there are reasons the female praying mantis bites off the male’s head after mating. “They were in Greece,” I told him. “I flew there this morning to get them.”

So my husband has his pants back. And at least for now, I have the assurance he did not leave them in the front seat of an ice cream truck driven by a transvestite stripper.

Because really, that was my next guess.