When I was a kid, it seems that my mother was gaslighting my father, at times. She cleaned so incessaantly that everytime he put something down, she picked it up and put it away.

Now, dad was a simple man. He had a week’s worth of work clothes, two decent suits, maybe ten pairs of dress socks, and about thirty thousand pair of white BVD’s. Come to think of it, Dad did have more hunting clothes than regular clothes, too. Anyway, dad was obsessive about clean underdrawers, and there were always packages of them in the car, under the seat of the truck, in his locker at work, in his damned toolbox. We found fresh 3-packs of dad’s underdrawers as far as three years out after his death, stashed all overe the place.

Socks, as I said, he had few. White ones for work, seven pair, black ones for church. he’d take ’em off, put them down the hamper, and they seemed to disapear.

Anyway. I must have been about ten, gramma was still alive and living with us. Mom was at work, and dad was attending a funeral for a co-worker in the middle of the week. I had been my usual ten year old self, whcih meant that Gramma was about a hairsbreadth from slicing my head of with a bread knife; she was not in a mood to be trifled with- and as I was hiding from her in the window seat under the living room window, she was fit to be tied.
Dad wanders into the room, fully dressed but for his missing socks, and says “Mom?” (my mother’s mother, actually, but we were a close family) ‘Do you hjave any idea where bernie has put my socks?”

My gramma, right on the razors edge of snapping, turs to him and says “If they were up your ASS you’d KNOW!”.

There was dead silence in the room, and I peeked out from under the cushion of the window seat. Dad was standing there looking at grandma, a thin grin starting to show on his face, and Gramma, who had just seen me peeking out from under the seat, was beginning to turn beet red. Dad left before he laughed out loud, Gramma grabbed me by the ear and lifted me bodily from my hiding place, and from that point on, anytime anyone says “Have you seen my ____” I am prompted to say ‘If it were up your ASS you’d KNOW!”
Thanks, Gramma.