Getting Jeggy With It

My favorite jeans are about to bite the dust.

They’re irreplaceable, because of the process it took to get them that way. I wore them to chemo 15 times, and then wore them as I sweated that stuff out of my body. Acid wash?  Stone wash?  Try taxol wash. The fabric is now almost tissue-thin and as soft as my great-aunt’s linen sheets which I still remember from that time we visited her in Wellesley, Massachusetts 27 years ago, along with her recipe for iced tea which was to brew it over mint and then stir in a small can of frozen lemonade concentrate.

I can’t replace my jeans, and I surely don’t want to, but I’m wondering which of my current indigo-dyed trousers is going to rise to the top of the heap and become my new favorites. I live in jeans, because I am a creature of comfort.

My more fashionable friend, upon hearing that chemo jeans are about to disintegrate, suggested that I try out jeggings.

I don’t get jeggings. I mean I do, in theory: they are leggings that look like jeans. Aside from the word, I’m not so keen on the idea. The idea of the jegging violates my natural fabrics rule …  guideline … philosophy of life, and it stands in start contrast to my desire that objets de vie demonstrate integrity, that they should be what they appear. Jeggings are faux.

Word on the street is that jeggings are more comfortable than jeans. Well, of course they are, if you wear your jeans like the heart of the Grinch. There’s an easier solution, and I believe the excellent author of Eat, Pray, Love summed it up exactly: to buy bigger jeans. Easy for me to say.

Therein lies the heart of my perplexity, of my inability to get my head around the concept of jeggings.

It’s not such a big thing to go from a size small to a size less small, but still small, especially since the effort it is going to take me to get back into the smaller of the small size jeans isn’t onerous — I say now, heading into what Chris calls the Season of Fat. I should knock wood.

I have a lot of problems, but weight isn’t one of them. A good friend of mine, someone who is older, wiser, and measurably more successful than I am yelled at me once. “You skinny people just don’t get it.”  She is right. I don’t.  Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t take it for granted, either. I can imagine, I can accept, and not judge, but no, I don’t get it. Some things have to be experienced to be understood, and I imagine that being fat, like being bald, or like having one breast but not two, is one of them.

I have plenty of leggings including some new python-printed ones that fall so far out of my natural fabrics philosophy that they come round back at it from the other side: they look natural.

I’ve never been a follower of fads.

Why, then, do I find myself thinking about jeggings? I think it’s the neologism, the linguistic zeugma. It makes me laugh. I laugh because it’s exactly the kind of thing I would have laughed about before I got sick.