A comment made by David Bellamy to a recent post made me remember the following funny but true story about clotheslines. When I was growing up, we had a washer (at least some of the time) but nobody ever heard of a dryer. So clothes had to be dried on a clothesline. 

Once, my mother left laundry outside to dry on a clothesline during the day. We lived in a big apartment building and everybody who lived there used these several rows of clothesline to dry their clothes. In the evening, my mother asked my father – who is your typical absent-minded professor times ten – to bring in the laundry.

My father came back with a hamper that was overflowing with laundry. On the very top of the humongous pile, we saw a pair of huge salmon-pink pantaloons.

“What is this?” my mother asked in horror, seeing that her small pile of laundry had grown tenfold and was now enriched with a pair of huge pantaloons.

“Aren’t these yours?” my father asked my mother innocently, pointing at the pantaloons.

At that very moment, we heard desperate wails coming from our elderly neighbor Baba Motia. “My laundry has been stolen!” she vociferated. “Somebody just took it from the clothesline and left with it. Oh, what shall I do? My favorite pantaloons were there. This is a disaster!”

Of course, what happened was that my father had taken the request to bring in the laundry literally. He had simply removed every article of clothing he saw on the clothesline without considering whether it was ours. He was too ashamed to confess that he had stolen the neighbors’ laundry in a fit of absent-mindedness, so we waited for the nightfall, crept out, and hung it back on the clothesline.

The next morning, we were awakened by Baba Motia’s new series of wails. “Oh, my laundry is back! What kind of creep had it with him overnight? What did he do with it? I can’t believe somebody kept my pantaloons overnight!” We were the only people in the neighborhood who knew the secret of the disappearing pantaloons but we kept it to ourselves.

My mother was very upset for a while by the idea that my father could have thought the humongous piece of underwear was hers.