I was surprised to hear from an elementary school friend who I have not seen, or thought of, in over 30 years.   Claude found me through the miracle of the Internet and an even greater miracle was his memory of me.  Although we had not spoken over the phone, the  wonders of email allowed us to piece together all of our adventures from  kindergarten through second grade.   One of the topics of discussion was a fringe friend and classmate of ours named Jimmy.   Both of us knew him as Jimmy Two Pants.

Jimmy Two Pants always wore two pairs of pants each day.  It is not the case where he wore one pair in the morning and the other pair in the afternoon.   He wore both pairs of pants at  the same time.

He was a skinny little kid who did not seem unusual in any way except for his attire.   We would tease him until we got tired of teasing, but Jimmy never changed.  In those days we used to wear dungarees, not blue jeans.  Imagine how difficult it would be to slip on a pair  of blue jeans over another pair of blue jeans.  I don’t know if it was the  fashion of the time or necessity, but all of our pants were always too long and we would all have four-inch cuffs.  Jimmy always tried to put on the longer pair of pants on the inside so that the double cuff was not so obvious.  He once proudly proclaimed that he had many more pockets than we had.  Neither Claude nor I remember being jealous of his boast.   For as long as we knew Jimmy, he always wore two pairs of pants.  Claude remembered that when we went to the swim club Jimmy also wore two bathing suits.

Both my family and Claude’s family moved away from the area in the summer after second grade.   We were curious as to the reason why Jimmy wore two pants and we decided to look for him to ask him the question and maybe subconsciously we wanted to tease him some more.

Together Claude and I put together a list of all of the Jimmy Thorensons that we could find within a two hundred mile radius of Chicago.  We compiled the list from internet phone books and the people search options that were available.  If he had moved away from the area,  we would have to ask him our question in the next life.

We split the phone list in half and we began to call all the Jimmys.  We found old Jimmys, young Jimmys, and Claude found one dead Jimmy.   Unfortunately for us, the dead Jimmy was the one we were looking for.  Claude talked to his wife, Margie, for quite a long time because she was very pleasant and personable.  She thought that we were great friends with the late Jimmy so she encouraged Claude to talk about him.  He did not have the  heart to talk about Jimmy’s strange dressing habit because he wanted to leave the fond memory of our dead classmate intact.  Jimmy had died only about two years ago from some kind of kidney disease but he left his wife and two children in pretty good financial shape.   Margie invited us both over to look at her pictures of Jimmy, and we accepted the invitation out of the spirit of curiosity and friendship.   Margie was a good host. We went through a lot of pictures but  there were no pictures of Jimmy taken before he had met Margie after college.  Claude and I secretly winked at each other several times to confirm that Jimmy had shaken the habit and had gotten himself down to wearing only one pair of pants.

All of a sudden, a little four-year old tornado blew into the room.   It was little Jimmy Jr. and to our surprize he was wearing two pants!