sweaters

Yesterday afternoon was spent at Primo's indoor track meet. If you have never been to an indoor (aka winter) track meet, it is the sporting equivalent of a three-ring circus. Without animals, unless you are counting teenage boys, in which case: tons of them.

I get it: an indoor track takes up a lot of space, and you need to utilize every spare inch. So you have high jumpers at one end, shot put at the other, long jump in the middle, masses of kids running around and around and around the track on the outside (because being indoors, it is shorter than an outdoor track), barely any room for spectators along the edges, and utter chaos prevailing throughout.

And the odor. Thank goodness the photo isn't scratch and sniff. You can only imagine the gallons of sweat pouring off every athlete, especially the ones that were going outside in the pouring rain to "warm up" and them coming back inside with steaming wet clothes.

On the smell-o-scale, it is along the lines of "dear lord, I can barely breath for the humid stench."

It brought to mind a recent e-mail from my mother, with an explanation she had unearthed of the origin of the term sweaters in the US. In Britain, they are known as "jumpers" but somehow that term has never crossed over the ocean. The yankee name is allegedly derived from their original use by team athletes in competitive sports, who dubbed the striped team-colored garments "sweaters" in homage to the effect they had on their physiology.

So yes, the smell could have been worse. I have nothing but sympathy for the poor woman (and you know it was a woman) whose job it was to launder those articles of clothing, especially in the days before deodorant. Nylon singlets today are bad enough.