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.�