The crime of the broken hanger

I wrote this column, and almost immediately kind friends and neighbors started bringing us bags of hangers. My friend Dennise left this bag of hangers on our front porch!

The miscreant came out of his brother’s room with a broken plastic hanger, and I lost my temper. House laws had been violated.

I turned my venom upon 16-year-old Nathan: “Your mother, who washes your clothes for you, spends hours of her life every single day wandering around this house in a desperate search for hangers on which to hang your clothes – your clothes! – and here you’ve gone and broken one of these precious hangers!”

It’s true, too. When I hear the buzzer go off on the dryer, I know that shortly I will see my frazzled wife going from room to room in a desperate hunt for hangers. Wire hangers, plastic hangers, hangers with paper on them, hangers that are bent out of shape – it doesn’t matter, she just needs hangers on which to hang the boys’ clothes.

It frustrates Jean to no end to find hangers bent and broken when they are such a precious commodity.

“How on earth did you break this hanger?” I demanded of Nathan. It was the hanging part, the part with the curved top that goes on the clothes bar, that he’d broken off.

“I was hitting Robert with it,” Nathan confessed.

“Hitting Robert with a hanger?” I asked, incredulous. Hangers are so scarce in our house, that he might as well have been hitting his brother with an original Monet canvass.

My youngest son, 14-year-old Robert, now emerged from his room. Small welts were raised on his arms and back. He was laughing, because this is how teenage brothers amuse themselves – smacking each other with their mother’s precious hangers.

“What are you laughing about?” I demanded from Robert.

“Nate was smacking me with the hanger and it broke,” he said.

I felt like my head was going to explode. How can they live in this house and not understand how valuable hangers are to their mother?

“It’s not funny!” I shouted at him.

I snatched the broken hanger from Nathan’s hand and gave them both a firm whack with it.

“Your mother spends every waking moment doing your laundry for you,” I said. “She picks it up off your floor where you carelessly discard it. She washes, dries, fluffs and folds your laundry. She hangs up your shirts. All she asks is that you occasionally collect some hangers for her.

“And to show your appreciation to this poor, downtrodden woman whose entire life revolves around these bent and twisted pieces of wire, you break one of her hangers! And it’s one of the nice, plastic hangers! Well, it’ll be your own fault when your shirts are wrinkled because there are no hangers.”

Nathan and Robert quit their laughing and hung their heads in due shame.

“I’m sorry I broke the hanger by hitting Robert with it,” Nathan said.

“I’m sorry I’m so strong that when Nathan hits me with a hanger the hanger breaks,” Robert said.

I suppose in some households, the crime would be smacking each other, regardless of the weapon used. But I think it’s probably true that a society can be judged by the things it decides to outlaw. And in our house, the crime is breaking a hanger.

And I think it would be fair to judge us by our concern over the broken hanger rather than the welts on Robert’s back and arms.

In a house with three boys (and I include my oldest son, Harrison, because even though he’s now a college student and we seldom see him, he still occupies a bed in our house and contributes to the piles of laundry), the occasional competitions of strength and sibling rivalry are to be expected.

If my sons suddenly stopped hitting each other with foreign objects or body slamming each other into the couch, then I would be suspicious that some real trouble was taking place.

It’s true, too, that my sons are a constant source of dirty laundry. They always have dirty uniforms, ripped shirts, spill stains. Robert came home from work the other day and he’d spilled about two gallons of rusty water on himself. I don’t think – in their lives – any of them have ever had on the same clothes at the end of the day that they started the day wearing.

So in our house, little things like assault and battery are minor offenses, but a broken hanger is a serious matter.

Rob Peecher is author of “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings,” available at Amazon.com.