COLUMN: Some things never change with 24-year-old sons around

Some things never change.

Take last weekend. My two 24-year-old boys were groomsmen in a wedding.

Simple enough you would think.

One son called me Saturday morning to say that the tux coat he had rented was too short. He wanted to know if he could wear my tux coat.

No big deal, except I had told him before he went out and charged his rental tux on my credit card that he could wear my tux. It was exactly the same as those the groomsmen were wearing.

But he was worried a button might be a slight shade darker or, worse yet, my tux coat might be too short because his arms are longer than mine.

Be that as it may, he wore the rental tux coat. The whole outfit was the same as my tux and another one in the closet that my other son could have fit in.

Now, we have to get ready for a wedding, don’t we?

The way for one son to do that is to dash into my shower without his own towel, turn the shower on and then forget to turn it off so that when I leaned over to turn it on the next day I got a good dousing of cold water.

And what about the towel?

No problem. Dad’s clean towel will suffice. It was soaking wet by the time he dried his drenched bod and doubled it up on the towel rack. It wouldn’t have been dry as I write if I hadn’t thrown it in the dryer and turned said dryer on its highest cycle.

Of course, we need to brush our teeth.

“Dad, who broke my toothbrush?” he asked me the next day. This was after he strangled the tube of toothpaste and left toothpaste streaming out of the tube into the sink. And why bother to put the top back on the tube after you’ve strangled it?

Back to the broken toothbrush.

The broken one was mine. I broke it by accident Friday night after brushing my choppers a little too vigorously. It was still usable until I could remember to buy another one.

His toothbrush was exactly where he left it on the sink the last time it was used. The only difference was it was spiffed up with a little more dust and dog hair since I have a fan blowing into the bathroom.

Now comes the day of the wedding. My phone rings. Son one wants to know if I have a pair of black socks he can borrow.

Yes I do.

Two minutes later, son two calls and wants to know if I have a pair of black socks he can borrow.

Yes I do.

Four minutes later, son two calls and wants to know if I have a pair of black socks one of the groomsmen can borrow.

Yes I do.

Two minutes later, son one calls and wants to know if I have a pair of black socks another groomsmen can borrow.

Yes I do.

Now I have one pair of black socks I’m clinging to that I will wear to church Sunday with my blue seersucker suit. Getting close to Labor Day and I’ve got to get all the use out of that suit and the white bucks that go with it before the seersucker season is over.

The wedding goes off without a hitch. All the groomsmen look handsome in their tuxes. Those wearing my black socks stand out even more.

And the boys even made it to church Sunday wearing seersucker suits with my bow ties and the black socks I loaned them.

And, yes, son two — the one who used my broken toothbrush — looked just as dapper as he could in my extra seersucker suit, my freshly pressed white shirt and the last pair of clean drawers I had in my dresser.

Life just can’t get any better.

— Staff writer Dwight Dana can be reached at (843) 317-7259.