More Michael madness

I have mentioned before my tendency to be a wee bit compulsive. I thought of this yesterday as I was putting away clothes after washing and drying them.

We use plastic hangers for shirts and things, wood for pants. No wire hangers, of course. (Do they still make wire hangers or did Joan Crawford frighten the industry into bankrupcy?) Anyway, the plastic ones come in assorted colors. 

Back when Tom used to iron our shirts -- that's a story for another day -- , he would hang his shirts on white hangers and mine on colored hangers to make it simple to sort quickly.

This is not compulsive so much as it is orderly and efficient. Or so he claimed.

Over the years, however, when I wound up doing my own ironing -- I was already doing the rest of my laundry -- , I got in the habit of matching the color of the shirt to the color of the hanger. When I hung up shirts that did not have to be ironed, I did the same thing. Red shirt, red hanger. Blue shirt, blue hanger. Yellow shirt ... well, you get the idea.

I never went so far as to hang all the blue stuff together, all the red stuff and so on. Although I admit that I did hang knit shirts separately from woven, long sleeves separate from short sleeves, sweatshirts separate from shirts -- but that's just the right way to do it. But matching the colors became enough of a deal that I would get a little uneasy when I did not have a brown hanger for that one rust brown long sleeve tee. Or a purple that was too blue and not red enough to match the shirt.

No, I did not go out and buy more hangers. (I am more compulsively cheap than anything else.) Though I was tempted. Perhaps I could have put that on my Christmas list: five golden hangers, four orange hangers, three rose hangers, two brown hangers and a wooden hanger on a coat tree.

As I say, not a personality disorder, just a charming idiosyncrasy.

Right?