The behavior of shirts

I recently came to the agonizing yet liberating decision to have Joe's shirts sent out for cleaning and pressing. Did I do this because we have an excess of funds and can't think of anything more interesting to spend them on? No. Did I do this because I am lazy? Partly. But mainly, I did it because dress shirts exhibit supremely frustrating behaviors when I am trying to iron them. Let me illustrate.

First, there is mortal animosity between my iron and a dress shirt. For its part, the iron shows this animosity by hissing at the shirt -- or at me, as the agent of its maneuvering -- and the shirt responds by stubbornly refusing to give up any of its wrinkles. Or, in another of its favorite tricks, the shirt yields up one wrinkle, only to form another in some other part when I am not looking. When I get all the way around the shirt, it looks like I have not even started. Shirts frequently exit my ironing process with more wrinkles than when they entered it.

Further, all the parts of a shirt do not stay on the board at one time. A sleeve, or the neckline, or the hem is going to be dragging on the floor at any given moment; almost always it is a part that I have just ironed. This not only tends to restore any wrinkles I may, by sheer luck, have removed, it also tends to make the shirt dirty again.

The sleeves, in particular, are ornery to the extreme. I always start on the back of a sleeve, with the expectation that any mistakes (and there will be mistakes) can be ironed out on the front, where it really matters. But the sleeve simply refuses to lie flat. I stretch and press and smooth it out, only to find when I turn it over that there is an enormous new crease cutting diagonally across the sleeve. If I try to iron out that crease, a new one is inevitably created on the back of the sleeve. At this point I generally give up altogether.

So at the end of a long, arduous ironing process, with a hot iron hissing at me in unexpected bursts, I am rewarded with a dirty, wrinkled shirt -- which is precisely what I had before I washed and ironed the shirt. So the idea of ironing is what, exactly? To make me certifiably crazy? Multiply these frustrations by about 12 shirts -- I usually put the task off as long as I possibly can, until the only thing Joe has left to wear to work is his pajamas -- and you will understand that I have come perilously close to insanity.

The situation is helped none by using wrinkle-free shirts. Upon entering our home, such shirts are immediately corrupted by the non-wrinkle-free shirts, with the result that any shirts that are "Guaranteed to Not Wrinkle!" are certain to be just the opposite.

I confided my dilemma and solution for it to a family member, who declared that she has always sent her husband's shirts out, stating most emphatically that "I wouldn't know what to do with them." Incidentally, this is also basically Joe's argument for why he does not iron his shirts.

After two years of wrestling with misbehaving shirts, I have come to the conclusion that I don't know what to do with them, either. What they need, I decided, is Boot Camp. And the dry cleaning lady is just the one to run it. If anyone can subdue those wrinkle-prone shirts, it is her. One look from her and they won't even think of wrinkling. They will stand at attention, as crisp as if they'd been starched. I'm hoping that someday, after they've been in Boot Camp long enough, all I will have to do is just threaten to send them back there, and they'll shape up.