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My Washing Machine Has a Demon
by Jamie Buckingham
After years of theological debate, I finally discerned why our thirteen-year-old Ripmore washing machine has been losing socks. It's possessed. I mean, possessed as in demons. In short, I am convinced we have a sock-gobbling demon in our washing machine.
Now every kingdom person knows that mere recognition of the fact that you have a demon is ninety percent of the deliverance process. Most folks would rather have cancer than have a demon. My Ripmore has that, too, but it's the sock-gobbler that really got my attention. My wife disagrees. She comes from the theological school that says Christians (or washing machines owned by Christians) can't have demons. I, on the other hand, believe a washing machine can have anything it wants to have.
"If there really is a sock-gobbler," Jackie asked, "why does he eat only one sock out of a pair? If one sock fills him, why doesn't he eat the spare sock his next meal?"
I had no answer. I only knew he was there. To prove it I went up to my dresser, opened my sock drawer and pulled out the seventeen unmatched socks that I've been saving-widowed victims of the sock-gobbler. And that's just today's count. Each month or so I take a census. Like our church in Florida, the widows seem to be increasing in number. In fact, looking out over our congregation Sunday after Sunday, it seems we're producing more widows than new babies, but maybe that's because the new babies are always in the nursery and widows seem to bunch together, like raisins stuck in the bottom of the box or socks in the back of my sock drawer. That's the reason I hate to throw away the singles. Every time I start to do it I think, "Now if you were left without a mate, would you want someone to throw you away?" And I think about the running dialogue on worthlessness I used to have with Jackie during her monthly three-day, nobody-loves-me period.
"The only reason anyone tolerates me is because I'm married to you. If you were to drop dead-people would forget I even exist."
I kept reminding her I planned to live to be 100. Facts, however, never faze a woman during her monthly three-day, nobody-loves-me period. And that's the reason I can't ever bring myself to throw away any of those widowed socks which keep increasing after every wash. In fact, I've been thinking recently of putting my underwear in the same drawer with the knit shirts I can't wear any more since our Ripmore shrank them all to grandchild size and then of setting up an entire drawer for single socks. I mean, churches used to have widows' pews, and we have a singles' group that meets on Tuesday nights, so why not a separate drawer for my recently bereaved socks?
The real reason I keep my unmatched singled, however, is that I keep hoping their mates will somehow reappear. It never happen. each month or so I take them out of the drawer and sadly line them up across the bed, looking vainly to see if I can match any of them with each other. I never can. Expensive racquetball socks, formal blacks, blues, greens, grays, fuzzies- all were favorites, but without mates they're useless.
So I gently stuff them into the back of my sock drawer and wonder if I should form a club: Socks Without Partners.
At first I thought it was Jackie's careless washing procedures.
" The reason my socks don't come out even is you don't put them in even!" I howled when my most expensive and favorite pair of socks become a single. "Not so," she argued. "I gathered them two by two. Believe me, Noah didn't do a more complete job. I took two pairs from your shoes under the bed, a pair of wet ones out of your boots, a stiff pair from the ceiling of the closet where you had kicked them when you came in from racquetball, a mud-caked pair from under the front seat of your pickup, a moldy pair from under the dryer-"
A-ha!" I screamed. "I bet the rest of the mates are under the washing machine." However, my search turned up nothing but a bucketful of lint, three green pennies, two rusty washers, a twelve-year-old skate key and a flea collar from our cat, Mrs. Robinson, who preferred to scratch rather than be in legalistic bondage.
"Inside this washer is a little trap door that pulls in one sock from each pair and holds them captive," I concluded. "Somewhere in this machine is a secret treasure chest of mismated sock."
Several years ago I was greatly embarrassed when I stepped off the plane in Washington, D.C., for a book editorial meeting and discovered I was wearing one blue sock and one gray one. I explained to my snickering friends that these were the only ones in my drawer when I got up that morning to catch the early flight.
A week later I received a package in the mail from my friend John Sherrill, who had been at the editorial meeting. It contained a little mesh nylon bag with a zipper across the top. "Put your socks in this before you put them in the machine," John wrote. "Then the sock-gobbler can't get at them." (John, you see, agrees that
washing machines can have demons.)
But he misjudged. The sock-gobbler not only ate my socks, but it also ate the bag. "The machine is possessed!" I screamed at Jackie.
"Oppressed," she said, trying to straighten out my theology, "not possessed. See, your maroon socks always come out perfectly."
She's right. I hate the maroon pair. The elastic is stretched out and they have a big crease across the top, so every time I put them on they rub a blister on the toe next to my big toe. They come out of the washer even when you don't put them in. In fact, I distinctly remember dropping them in the trash one night after my wife had gone to bed. The next evening I was in the den watching the news on television when Jackie came out of the utility room with an armload of clothes. I couldn't believe my eyes. On top of the stack were those ugly maroon socks. I knew then I was dealing with something more than trap doors. Oppressed, possessed-this was no time to get hung up on theological semantics. The machine had a demon and needed deliverance.
The next morning, after Jackie had gone to a Bible study, I went upstairs and pulled out my mismatched socks. I laid them on the bed. The only socks left in my drawer were some black fuzzy ones that had shrunk up until they looked like those little things golfers pull over the heads of their clubs, two pairs of racquetball socks with the tops stretched out so they looked like shopping bags and, of course, the maroon pair.
I went out the next day and bought ten pairs of new socks, all the same size and color. Then I stopped by the church office to see if someone with a deliverance ministry would come out to the house. The church secretary suggested I switch to a Maytag. She grew up in the Church of God and doesn't believe a washing machine can have a demon either, especially a born-again Ripmore with a sanctified lint-trap. She told me frankly that, if I wanted the demon out (assuming there could be a demon, of course), I would have to exorcise it myself.
I was reminded of the British statesman who, on his deathbed, was counseled by his priest to "renounce the devil."
"Sir," the dignified old sinner answered, "when you're in my position you can't afford to agitate anyone."
I decided to leave the Ripmore alone-it just might start in on my underwear. Since Sears doesn't make the kind I like any more, I can ill afford to lose any underwear.
Not long ago Ann Landers wrote about sock-gobblers. Nearly 8,000 readers wrote back saying they had the same problems. One fellow from Nyack, New York, wrote that the socks die and are reincarnated as wire coat hangers. If you don't believe it, just go look in your closet.
Another said it had bothered him for years because he was sure his wife had a lover with one leg. He finally determined it was UFOs with magnets that drew his socks into outer space. No one, so far, has been able to disprove his theory.
A woman from Billings, Montana, said she called the repairman and he found twenty socks wrapped around the motor of her Ripmore-a discovery which saved her sanity since she felt for years she had been going slowly nuts.
When I got brave enough to expose the sock-gobbler in one of my magazine columns, people from all over the nation were set free. Most of those who wrote said that they had been in bondage for years to the false theology that washing machines can't have demons. Scores told me that, armed with the truth I had given them, they went boldly into their utility rooms and cast the demon out of the machine. Several said they distinctly heard it leave the machine and go down the drainpipe.
Not all were so spiritual, however. About half a dozen-humanists, no doubt-said it was simply a matter of the socks getting separated and being swept away in the spin cycle. Two of those, who I assume were Roman Catholics, said the missing socks were now abiding in sock purgatory in my backyard septic tank.
Three others sent me packages of little plastic rings that were made specifically to keep socks from being separated in the washing machine. You pull the toes of your socks through the little teeth inside the rings and drop them into your Ripmore. I tried it. The rings came off and got down inside the whirling mechanism of my machine. I was upstairs when it happened but heard the house beginning to vibrate. By the time I got downstairs to the utility room, the washing machine had come off its rubber feet and had clunked its way over to the fiberglass sink on the other side of the room, bashing all the plumbing out from under it. There was water everywhere. The washer was making a horrible noise and it smelled like burnt rubber. I was ashamed to tell the nice Ripmore repairman, who arrived nine days later, what had happened. But I did determine that the cure was worse than the disease--which is what I now call the sock-gobbling demon since my mother-in-law moved in. She's a Primitive Baptist who doesn't believe in demons at all. (It's far more respectable, I've discovered, to have a disease than it is to have a demon.)
Of Course, the sock-gobbler hasn't touched the plastic rings. (Maybe it was because he couldn't chew them up.)
Many sympathetic people, hearing of my need, have written helpful notes advising me how to solve my problem. Some say I should pin my socks together, others say tie them together, and one woman said she always stuffs them into the pockets of her husband's pants. One woman from Hendersonville, North Carolina, even wrote a poem entitled "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Is the Other Sock?" (Sung--at least every other line or so--to the tune of "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?")
They're under the bed or caught in the casters,
Or clinging to the basement rafter.
Trapped in the plumbing, stuffed in a shoe;
In darkened corners hiding from you.
They've gone to the camp, returned alone,
Been kicked off by the telephone.
An argyle lined a starling's home,
A striped sock found its way to Rome.
Perhaps there is an "odd sock" elf,
Who takes them to some woodsy shelf.
But truthfully I know their fate,
The dirty ones disintegrate.
I'm grateful for all the people who across the years have shown concern for me in my affliction. I am now convinced that Paul's mysterious "thorn in the flesh" was in actuality a sock-gobbling demon that accompanied him on all his missionary travels, causing him to be the laughingstock of churches throughout Asia Minor. It's embarrassing, you know, to show up for a catacomb meeting wearing one brown sock and one blue one. And when all your shoes are open sandals, there's no way to hide the fact that, while your preaching may be saintly, your washing machine is definitely possessed.
It is doubtless for this reason Paul began washing out his socks by hand. This was especially important after he arrived in Macedonia because the Greeks would never have submitted themselves for deliverance to a man who obviously could not exorcise the demons from his own washing machine. (Several renowned theologians interpret Acts 16:13, which in most Bibles reads, "On the Sabbath day we [Paul and Luke] went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer, " more accurately to mean "where we expected to find a place to wash our socks.")
Recently I've decided to follow Paul's example, washing my socks out by hand and hanging them on the shower rod. However, our oldest son, who lives with us, wears socks the same size as mine. Each time he wears them they disappear completely. Not just one, but both of them--before they even get to the machine. Early in the morning he comes in and gets mine off the shower rod, stretches out the tops, tears holes in the toes and leaves them on the back porch stuffed into his shoes when he comes in from work.
Like the folks in my church in Florida, old socks never die; they just fade away.
Submitted by Richard
by Jamie Buckingham
After years of theological debate, I finally discerned why our thirteen-year-old Ripmore washing machine has been losing socks. It's possessed. I mean, possessed as in demons. In short, I am convinced we have a sock-gobbling demon in our washing machine.
Now every kingdom person knows that mere recognition of the fact that you have a demon is ninety percent of the deliverance process. Most folks would rather have cancer than have a demon. My Ripmore has that, too, but it's the sock-gobbler that really got my attention. My wife disagrees. She comes from the theological school that says Christians (or washing machines owned by Christians) can't have demons. I, on the other hand, believe a washing machine can have anything it wants to have.
"If there really is a sock-gobbler," Jackie asked, "why does he eat only one sock out of a pair? If one sock fills him, why doesn't he eat the spare sock his next meal?"
I had no answer. I only knew he was there. To prove it I went up to my dresser, opened my sock drawer and pulled out the seventeen unmatched socks that I've been saving-widowed victims of the sock-gobbler. And that's just today's count. Each month or so I take a census. Like our church in Florida, the widows seem to be increasing in number. In fact, looking out over our congregation Sunday after Sunday, it seems we're producing more widows than new babies, but maybe that's because the new babies are always in the nursery and widows seem to bunch together, like raisins stuck in the bottom of the box or socks in the back of my sock drawer. That's the reason I hate to throw away the singles. Every time I start to do it I think, "Now if you were left without a mate, would you want someone to throw you away?" And I think about the running dialogue on worthlessness I used to have with Jackie during her monthly three-day, nobody-loves-me period.
"The only reason anyone tolerates me is because I'm married to you. If you were to drop dead-people would forget I even exist."
I kept reminding her I planned to live to be 100. Facts, however, never faze a woman during her monthly three-day, nobody-loves-me period. And that's the reason I can't ever bring myself to throw away any of those widowed socks which keep increasing after every wash. In fact, I've been thinking recently of putting my underwear in the same drawer with the knit shirts I can't wear any more since our Ripmore shrank them all to grandchild size and then of setting up an entire drawer for single socks. I mean, churches used to have widows' pews, and we have a singles' group that meets on Tuesday nights, so why not a separate drawer for my recently bereaved socks?
The real reason I keep my unmatched singled, however, is that I keep hoping their mates will somehow reappear. It never happen. each month or so I take them out of the drawer and sadly line them up across the bed, looking vainly to see if I can match any of them with each other. I never can. Expensive racquetball socks, formal blacks, blues, greens, grays, fuzzies- all were favorites, but without mates they're useless.
So I gently stuff them into the back of my sock drawer and wonder if I should form a club: Socks Without Partners.
At first I thought it was Jackie's careless washing procedures.
" The reason my socks don't come out even is you don't put them in even!" I howled when my most expensive and favorite pair of socks become a single. "Not so," she argued. "I gathered them two by two. Believe me, Noah didn't do a more complete job. I took two pairs from your shoes under the bed, a pair of wet ones out of your boots, a stiff pair from the ceiling of the closet where you had kicked them when you came in from racquetball, a mud-caked pair from under the front seat of your pickup, a moldy pair from under the dryer-"
A-ha!" I screamed. "I bet the rest of the mates are under the washing machine." However, my search turned up nothing but a bucketful of lint, three green pennies, two rusty washers, a twelve-year-old skate key and a flea collar from our cat, Mrs. Robinson, who preferred to scratch rather than be in legalistic bondage.
"Inside this washer is a little trap door that pulls in one sock from each pair and holds them captive," I concluded. "Somewhere in this machine is a secret treasure chest of mismated sock."
Several years ago I was greatly embarrassed when I stepped off the plane in Washington, D.C., for a book editorial meeting and discovered I was wearing one blue sock and one gray one. I explained to my snickering friends that these were the only ones in my drawer when I got up that morning to catch the early flight.
A week later I received a package in the mail from my friend John Sherrill, who had been at the editorial meeting. It contained a little mesh nylon bag with a zipper across the top. "Put your socks in this before you put them in the machine," John wrote. "Then the sock-gobbler can't get at them." (John, you see, agrees that
washing machines can have demons.)
But he misjudged. The sock-gobbler not only ate my socks, but it also ate the bag. "The machine is possessed!" I screamed at Jackie.
"Oppressed," she said, trying to straighten out my theology, "not possessed. See, your maroon socks always come out perfectly."
She's right. I hate the maroon pair. The elastic is stretched out and they have a big crease across the top, so every time I put them on they rub a blister on the toe next to my big toe. They come out of the washer even when you don't put them in. In fact, I distinctly remember dropping them in the trash one night after my wife had gone to bed. The next evening I was in the den watching the news on television when Jackie came out of the utility room with an armload of clothes. I couldn't believe my eyes. On top of the stack were those ugly maroon socks. I knew then I was dealing with something more than trap doors. Oppressed, possessed-this was no time to get hung up on theological semantics. The machine had a demon and needed deliverance.
The next morning, after Jackie had gone to a Bible study, I went upstairs and pulled out my mismatched socks. I laid them on the bed. The only socks left in my drawer were some black fuzzy ones that had shrunk up until they looked like those little things golfers pull over the heads of their clubs, two pairs of racquetball socks with the tops stretched out so they looked like shopping bags and, of course, the maroon pair.
I went out the next day and bought ten pairs of new socks, all the same size and color. Then I stopped by the church office to see if someone with a deliverance ministry would come out to the house. The church secretary suggested I switch to a Maytag. She grew up in the Church of God and doesn't believe a washing machine can have a demon either, especially a born-again Ripmore with a sanctified lint-trap. She told me frankly that, if I wanted the demon out (assuming there could be a demon, of course), I would have to exorcise it myself.
I was reminded of the British statesman who, on his deathbed, was counseled by his priest to "renounce the devil."
"Sir," the dignified old sinner answered, "when you're in my position you can't afford to agitate anyone."
I decided to leave the Ripmore alone-it just might start in on my underwear. Since Sears doesn't make the kind I like any more, I can ill afford to lose any underwear.
Not long ago Ann Landers wrote about sock-gobblers. Nearly 8,000 readers wrote back saying they had the same problems. One fellow from Nyack, New York, wrote that the socks die and are reincarnated as wire coat hangers. If you don't believe it, just go look in your closet.
Another said it had bothered him for years because he was sure his wife had a lover with one leg. He finally determined it was UFOs with magnets that drew his socks into outer space. No one, so far, has been able to disprove his theory.
A woman from Billings, Montana, said she called the repairman and he found twenty socks wrapped around the motor of her Ripmore-a discovery which saved her sanity since she felt for years she had been going slowly nuts.
When I got brave enough to expose the sock-gobbler in one of my magazine columns, people from all over the nation were set free. Most of those who wrote said that they had been in bondage for years to the false theology that washing machines can't have demons. Scores told me that, armed with the truth I had given them, they went boldly into their utility rooms and cast the demon out of the machine. Several said they distinctly heard it leave the machine and go down the drainpipe.
Not all were so spiritual, however. About half a dozen-humanists, no doubt-said it was simply a matter of the socks getting separated and being swept away in the spin cycle. Two of those, who I assume were Roman Catholics, said the missing socks were now abiding in sock purgatory in my backyard septic tank.
Three others sent me packages of little plastic rings that were made specifically to keep socks from being separated in the washing machine. You pull the toes of your socks through the little teeth inside the rings and drop them into your Ripmore. I tried it. The rings came off and got down inside the whirling mechanism of my machine. I was upstairs when it happened but heard the house beginning to vibrate. By the time I got downstairs to the utility room, the washing machine had come off its rubber feet and had clunked its way over to the fiberglass sink on the other side of the room, bashing all the plumbing out from under it. There was water everywhere. The washer was making a horrible noise and it smelled like burnt rubber. I was ashamed to tell the nice Ripmore repairman, who arrived nine days later, what had happened. But I did determine that the cure was worse than the disease--which is what I now call the sock-gobbling demon since my mother-in-law moved in. She's a Primitive Baptist who doesn't believe in demons at all. (It's far more respectable, I've discovered, to have a disease than it is to have a demon.)
Of Course, the sock-gobbler hasn't touched the plastic rings. (Maybe it was because he couldn't chew them up.)
Many sympathetic people, hearing of my need, have written helpful notes advising me how to solve my problem. Some say I should pin my socks together, others say tie them together, and one woman said she always stuffs them into the pockets of her husband's pants. One woman from Hendersonville, North Carolina, even wrote a poem entitled "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Is the Other Sock?" (Sung--at least every other line or so--to the tune of "Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?")
They're under the bed or caught in the casters,
Or clinging to the basement rafter.
Trapped in the plumbing, stuffed in a shoe;
In darkened corners hiding from you.
They've gone to the camp, returned alone,
Been kicked off by the telephone.
An argyle lined a starling's home,
A striped sock found its way to Rome.
Perhaps there is an "odd sock" elf,
Who takes them to some woodsy shelf.
But truthfully I know their fate,
The dirty ones disintegrate.
I'm grateful for all the people who across the years have shown concern for me in my affliction. I am now convinced that Paul's mysterious "thorn in the flesh" was in actuality a sock-gobbling demon that accompanied him on all his missionary travels, causing him to be the laughingstock of churches throughout Asia Minor. It's embarrassing, you know, to show up for a catacomb meeting wearing one brown sock and one blue one. And when all your shoes are open sandals, there's no way to hide the fact that, while your preaching may be saintly, your washing machine is definitely possessed.
It is doubtless for this reason Paul began washing out his socks by hand. This was especially important after he arrived in Macedonia because the Greeks would never have submitted themselves for deliverance to a man who obviously could not exorcise the demons from his own washing machine. (Several renowned theologians interpret Acts 16:13, which in most Bibles reads, "On the Sabbath day we [Paul and Luke] went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer, " more accurately to mean "where we expected to find a place to wash our socks.")
Recently I've decided to follow Paul's example, washing my socks out by hand and hanging them on the shower rod. However, our oldest son, who lives with us, wears socks the same size as mine. Each time he wears them they disappear completely. Not just one, but both of them--before they even get to the machine. Early in the morning he comes in and gets mine off the shower rod, stretches out the tops, tears holes in the toes and leaves them on the back porch stuffed into his shoes when he comes in from work.
Like the folks in my church in Florida, old socks never die; they just fade away.
Submitted by Richard
