We just got new flooring installed in our basement. We’ve been happy with our “engineered” wood-like floor in the bathroom. And, we’ve been pleased with the carpeting in the bedrooms and the family room.

So… why? — you might ask, did we replace the floor coverings? Two words: water damage. Maybe one word says it better: flooding. How that all happened is a story for another time.

Something that happened in connection with the clean-up, dry-out, and restoration is what’s on my mind right now. It goes back again to my issues with clothes and shoes and nostalgia. I know there are at least a few people in Sanpete who “kinda get” me on this — at least a little bit.

Not too many personal items were damaged by the flooding. But, what happened was that I had to move a lot of clothing and stuff from one place to another while the work was done to complete the project of replacing flooring and a cabinet.

Now, I’m faced with a question. The question is: Is now a good time to go through things and decide if I should “thin out my gigantic herd” of clothing and miscellaneous stuff? Many of you may be thinking, “Why is this even a question?”

This has caused me to think about being in a similar circumstance some time back. I believe I shared at least some of that episode with you readers back then.

That event started when I discovered a pair of pants in a closet (I have clothes in multiple closets). The pants were neatly folded and hanging on a standard, wire clothes hanger. Don’t ask me why I still have them. I mean it. I said “don’t!”

They say (whoever “they” is) that styles and fashions cycle around and around. The theory is that you can just save your clothing, because sooner or later it will be back in style. I think these particular pants could be saved until “Gabriel blows his horn” and they wouldn’t be back “in.”

I won’t even talk about the waist size issue. But, if pale yellow, cuffed, bell bottom pants are ever “in” again, for a guy of my vintage, I’d never fit into my pair. Back in the day, I loved those pants.

The pants were hanging on a wire hanger which had newspaper draped over the bottom wire so as to create a rounded surface from which the slacks could hang. I immediately remember where I had learned that trick.

In the ’60s, my Boy Scout leader took our troop on a field trip one night to B – L (read that: B Bar L), a clothing store in Richfield. Bill Toomer, the “B” of B – L gave the rough and tumble boys of Troop 601 a seminar on how to take care of our clothes.

You can imagine how excited we were about that. It ranked right up there with the table manners seminar and proper grammar seminar.

We were shown all sorts of things including shoetrees, clothes brushes, different types of fabric, and most importantly: pants hangers.

We were informed that wearing wrinkled pants was in the same league as being carriers of mumps, measles and diphtheria.

We learned that successful people don’t wear wrinkled pants. Wrinkled pants are the sign of a wrinkled intellect and eroded morals.

Chairman Mao and Premier Khrushchev wanted us to have wrinkled pants so that we’d look inferior to the Cold War Chinese and Russians. I’m not totally sure if that was what was said, but that was the message I absorbed.

The advice that saved me that night from a feeling of being thrust down to “pant wrinkle hell” was Bill’s tip about putting newspaper on wire hangers. “If you can’t afford special hangers, use this trick,” he said as he demonstrated.

That was great news. Most of us felt lucky to have what few pairs of pants we had, let alone the extravagance of special, wooden, hinged hangers. So, I joined the anti-wrinkled pants crusade that night. (Who says kids don’t listen?)

A few of you are wondering what newspapers I found on the hanger under the “historical bell-bottomed pants.” One section of the newspaper was part of the sports page from a May 1975 edition of The Contra Costa Times. The other was the “Sunday Scenes” section from the April 27, 1975, edition of The San Francisco Examiner.

Those were college days for me in the mid-’70s. I worked a summer job doing door-to-door sales in the “Bay Area.” I lived in Walnut Creek.

I leafed through the newspapers from the wire hanger. It was strange. As I turned the pages, I thought back to the times of learning to hang up pants and a summer in Northern California. I also decided to try the Mint Pull Taffy recipe from the pages of The Examiner.

A concept emerged in my mind. It’s not a new concept, but one that lingers under the surface for some of us. It’s that memories are often tied up in seemingly insignificant objects we accumulate. Some of these objects are with us purposely and some are collected by happenstance.

A clothes hanger, an old record album that used to belong to a friend (maybe now deceased), a seashell, a pebble, a ticket stub, a dried rose, a dog collar — the list could go on and on.

Look around yourself. See what is squirreled away in special places and in not so special places. There may be things that “speak” to you. If the “words spoken” are important enough, you may want to tell someone else about it. Or better yet, write something down about it (I did).

It may be that you’ll just want to keep the message close to you and reminisce in private. In either case, you’ll know yourself just a little bit better as a result. — Merrill

P.S. My wife comments sometimes when I’m wearing wrinkled clothes. “Get rid of some of your clothes and make some room in that closet so things aren’t so crowded,” she advises. My reply now, “But dear, those clothes speak to me.”