a de-pantsing

Wednesday afternoon I found myself in a rather uncomfortable position. I was crouched at the rear of my bicycle desperately trying to rip my skirt free from the bicycle’s rear axle, while also desperately trying to keep the majority of my undergarments unexposed.

Not 5 minutes prior, I had set out from my apartment in a long, green skirt that I had had since I was 16. The sun was shining, I was looking good, and I was excited to be heading to my Japanese class in Gifu, a nearby city.

Sure, I knew that there were risks involved when I hopped on my bicycle and started pedaling: I could get hit by a car, blow a tire, run into a person, or just have some minor mechanical mishap. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought that my skirt could nearly be ripped from my body in a matter of seconds.

So there I was, crouched in the street, fearing that at any second a student of mine would happen upon me during his or her happy trip to the station.

I worked feverishly at the skirt, alternately yanking fabric free and rotating the tire in reverse. About 8 minutes passed and I had missed my train, been honked at by two cars that thought I was not close enough to the side of the road [2-way Japanese roads are often just a mere 15’ wide], and was no more fully clothed than I had been when I first became trapped.

After a while, an elderly man slowly rode by on his bicycle. I didn’t say anything to him as I was hoping to be able to hold out until a nice middle-aged woman came by. A middle-aged woman did not show up, however, so when the old man rode by again I solicited his help.

With me steadying the bike and him yanking at the skirt, we made considerable progress. Just as the man was ripping free the last bit of skirt, a woman in her late 50’s or early 60’s pulled up in her car. We all had a good laugh as I tried to knot the rents in the skirt together for a more modest look than the bicycle had left me with.

Luckily, the woman had a friend in the area. She parked her car in the friend’s driveway and went to the door. After they both had a good look at me, the woman scurried off and returned with a long, flowing, black skirt. The other woman suggested that maybe another skirt wasn’t what I needed, so the friend left and returned with a pair of black pants.

When I saw the pants, my heart sank. My lower body’s proportions are drastically different than the average Japanese woman’s—especially the average 60 year old Japanese woman’s. Reluctantly, I pulled on the pants and found to my surprise that even though they were terribly short, they didn’t fit too bad. I wasn’t going to have to walk home in my panties after all.

After a few compliments from the ladies and assurance that the friend had no plans to ever wear the pants again because they were too small for her, I decided to go to Japanese class even though I would be 1/2 an hour late.

My teacher was thrilled when she heard the story of how I got my “saburina pantsu” [the Japanese name for Capri pants—it’s a reference to the Audrey Hepburn movie] because it played right into the verbs we were about to learn: “agemasu” – to give, and “moraimasu” – to receive.

There is not a soul in my Japanese class that doesn’t know how to say, “A woman gave Adele pants,” and “Adele received pants from a woman.”