Sock it to me

I am, generally, a slob and the most under-dressed person in whatever room I happen to be in. For many, many years I would buy a bunch of dark socks, preferably all the same color, making it easier to sort through and pair them up randomly after doing laundry.

At some point, maybe 8 or 10 years ago, I decided I wanted to start wearing more colorful socks, and I bought some that were striped or patterned. But I still had plenty of dark socks, and as some of the colorful socks lost their mates (in the way that socks tend to do) I gradually slipped back into my old ways. I would occasionally buy some goofy novelty socks I ran across (weirdly, Walgreens often has them), featuring Looney Tunes, or themed to St. Patrick’s Day, or what have you, but for the most part I’ve been mainly wearing the dark socks.

I noticed a hole in one of the dark socks the other day and I decided I needed to try the colorful-sock thing again. I went to Walmart Tuesday night, to kill some time between a county meeting and the weekly restaurant trivia night with friends from church, and I looked for colorful socks. There were plenty of novelty socks — featuring The Simpsons, or Dr. Pepper, or what have you, but that’s not exactly what I was looking for. I just wanted colorful socks. There were a few muted colors, but not really what I was imagining in my head.

Later that same evening, I happened to run across a Facebook ad for The Good Store’s Awesome Socks Club.

Brothers Hank and John Green, who I’d heard of briefly but were not deeply familiar with, are video bloggers, authors, influencers and philanthropists. Hank Green’s first novel, “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” was a New York Times best-seller, and I remember seeing the book cover. I don’t read much fiction, but it looked interesting and I thought I might check it out some day. John Green’s young adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars” was adapted into an acclaimed movie.

The Green brothers started the Awesome Socks Club in 2020 and have used it as a fundraiser for a maternity hospital in Sierra Leone, which had one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the world.

That caught my attention; I went on a mission trip (more education than evangelism) to Sierra Leone in 2016. It was a frustrating trip in some ways, for a variety of reasons it would take too long to explain here, and because of some things that were out of anyone’s control we didn’t get to experience as much of the country or the culture as on some of my other comparable trips. But there were also a few high points, and I felt a personal connection to the country just because I’d been there.

Sierra Leone has both Christians and Muslims, and is known for the fact that the two faiths co-exist quite peacefully. Our host pastor (who had political ambitions) went out one day, and took me with him, to deliver a pop-up canopy tent as a gift to the local tribal chief. The local imam was there as as well, and the tent received prayers of dedication from both the pastor and the imam, so it was blessed by two different faiths.

Anyway, The Awesome Socks Club sends you a new pair of artist-designed socks each month as a subscription. You can get ankle socks or crew socks in several sizes. They also now do underwear, but my underwear needs are much more basic and I’m not interested in that wing of the club.

The club has been folded in with several of the Greens’ similar fund-raising activities into a website called Good Store, selling various products including coffee, tea, and soap, with all of the net profits going to charity.

Well, to stop an already-long story before it gets even longer, I signed up for a subscription. You can, I need to point out, also buy all of their past releases individually, a la carte, without signing up for a subscription. But I like the idea of getting a new pair of colorful socks each month. My first order has shipped; I’m assuming it’s the July release, “Sock Ness Monster,” designed by artist Meg Hunt.

I’ll have to wear them to something like my Tuesday night trivia game where I will have an opportunity to show them off. I thought about holding on to this post until my pair arrived and I could take a photo of my own socks on my own feet, but I think I’ll go ahead and share it now. By “now” I mean tomorrow; I am finishing this up at 11 p.m. Thursday. Even though my posts are nowhere near as well-thought-out or planned for SEO as the Green brothers, experience has taught me that I don’t get a lot of attention from late-night posts. So I’ll set this to post during the day on Friday.

I’ll try to remember to share a photo, or even an unboxing video, of my new socks as a note once they come in.

We will see how this works out in the months to come, as I phase in the colorful socks.