Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on StockSnap

It happens when you're an old fart. You just sort of doodle along, until one day you open your dresser drawer and there is only one pair of shorts left in there and when you put them on they sort of droop and barely hang on, the elastic shot from too many washings. Back when I was married such things just wouldn't have happened, my wife would have replaced my worn underwear as part of her wifely duties. Seriously, that's how she thought of such things – wifely duties.

Don't get me wrong, that's not sexist or anything – she just had certain ideas from growing up with her parents that were a bit old fashioned. When we were first married she was uncomfortable with me doing household chores. Not so uncomfortable that she didn't appreciate me sweeping up or doing the dishes, but her parents had a pretty strict division of labor. Dad mowed the lawn, Mom kept the house – that sort of thing.

So we shared the household chores (and she even mowed the lawn sometimes) but one chore we never shared was laundry. Remember those ingrained ideas from her mother? Well, the proper way to do laundry was chief among them. Me? I looked at the label and did what it told me to do when the clothes needed cleaning. Her? All T-shirts had to be inside-out and washed in cold water so they didn't fade. They got hung up to dry in the air – heat was a no-no. No matter that that advice was from an era long ago before modern dyes and mordants made for non-fading and non-bleeding colors. Those little tags with care instructions? She knew better. So I gave up any thought of washing clothes and left it to her.

Then came Covid. With me it was a nasty cold, with her it was a death sentence. I became a widower at sixty-four. I more-or-less stumbled through the next few months blindly. Nothing had meaning any longer. Work was meaningless, so I took early retirement and just sat at home and turned into a vegetable. With my lack of interest in housekeeping I soon had enough dirt around the place that I could have rooted myself in it. Things got pretty bad. If it wasn't for Facebook I might have been there still, buried under my own indifference and trash.

Seriously. I was sprawled in my recliner and listlessly scrolling through Facebook on my tablet when I hit a cartoon. Actually, the cartoon pretty much hit me. There was this guy in a recliner surrounded by pizza boxes and beer bottles and a caption that was sarcastic about how men were just plain pigs.

That was me and I didn't like it. I woke up from my pity party and started to clean the place up. It took a good week, but by then I was exhausted but sleeping on clean sheets and eating something besides Door-Dash fast food. Hell, I even had fresh vegetables in the fridge. I can cook, dammit, but I was too self-centered and lazy after losing my wife to give a damn.

So that's how I ended up in a big box store in search of new underwear. It probably won't surprise you to find I was in the women's section. In my depression I had run out of underwear and settled on using a pair of my wife's panties, the ones I had been too depressed to give away. This turned out to be a rather good thing, not only did it double my stock of clean underwear, but I found I actually liked her full-cut panties better than my old tighty-whities. Actually, as my mind cleared along with the debris in the house I kind of liked having colorful panties. After almost a year of the gray blahs the colors sort of symbolized the new me.

So there I was, trying to decide which pack of panties suited my fancy best, when I overheard a conversation in the next aisle – the one with all the bras hanging in it.

"Jesus Sally, you'd think with all these bras hanging here I could find one, single, solitary comfortable bra. The wired ones poke my boobs in places where I don't want to be poked. The sexy ones are no good for everyday wear, I'm afraid a good bounce on the bus will smack me in the eye."

"Honey, with those melons that's a valid concern. I should have such problems."

"You interested in a boob job? I'll donate half of mine and they can do a transplant."

"No way, my bras are pretty comfortable as is."

"And I have to have six hooks on the back of mine to stand the strain and the straps need half an inch of padding to support the load. If I can't find a comfortable bra I'm seriously considering reduction surgery."

"I suppose it couldn't hurt."

"Of course it would hurt! Some sucker taking a knife to my boobies and scooping out the filling. Its not like dishing up ice cream."

"I do not want that image in my head. I am going…"

At that point they moved on and I never did find out what she was going to do to remove the image from her brain. I rather wish I had, because now that image was firmly planted in my brain.

I eventually selected a package of panties that pleased my aesthetic sense and continued on to pick up the rest of the things I needed. As I headed for the checkouts I again passed the Ladies Intimates section and glanced at the aisles of bras. Just what would a comfortable bra feel like? How would a guy like me know? I had never worn a bra. I had never had anything that needed the support of a bra, right?

But here I was wearing my wife's panties and about to purchase twelve new panties in multiple colors. Some of them had polka-dots or butterflies, fer cryin' out loud. Could I find a comfortable bra that fit me?

I mean, don't guys fantasize about bra-and-panty sets? At least removing bra-and-panty sets from some sex kitten forty years too young for someone my age to be thinking about?

I was not a complete novice about selecting a bra, after forty odd years of marriage I had watched my wife pick out bras more than a few times. Even with this second-hand experience, there were a bewildering array of the things to choose from. I knew my chest size and obviously I would want the smallest cup size available. Turns out they don't make training bras in my mature size, so I tried for a AA cup. Hey, I know for cup sizes, I'm a child of the sixties where such things were discussed freely. No AA cups either, so for this experiment I found a 38A bra in the the plain, old boring boxed white bras.

But would it be comfortable? Comfortable implies a choice, in which one of the choices is not comfortable. Let's try that pink lacy one and the blue one with the stripes. Three ought to be enough, right?

So I arrived at home with my brand-new panties and bras and changed my underwear. Turns out that after a couple of hours the plain white bra wasn't all that comfortable. I guess my anonymous lady with the big boobs knew whereof she spoke.

The next morning I donned the blue striped bra and a pair of blue panties that sort-of matched. After a couple of hours I almost forgot I was wearing a bra, except every once in a while the band shifted or the strap pulled and reminded me. I t was a rather nice and gentle reminder that I was wearing a comfortable bra.

Downright silly, but I liked wearing a bra. The next day I tried the pink one and it, too, was comfortable. That evening I returned to my friendly neighborhood big box and I now have a good dozen comfortable bras to wear and I don't have to worry about running out of bras or panties if I'm a bit slow doing the wash.

Only one question remains. Up at the top of the page where I found these stories there is almost always an ad with a sexy lady with obvious breasts. I wonder if I could find a comfortable pair of breast forms?