Hawaiian pants play an important role on the Chet and Bernie series – this paragraph from A Farewell to Arfs sums it up. But now my friend Bob sends me the image you see here with the comment “Bernie was ahead of his time.” It got me thinking.

A very bothersome fact is that one of those self-storages is ours. You’ll never guess what’s inside so I’ll tell you: Hawaiian pants, stacked from floor to ceiling, balled up on shelves, hanging from wall hooks. Hawaiian pants are just like Hawaiian shirts, except for being pants. Plus—and this is pretty much the reason our finances are what they are, if we leave out the tin futures play, perhaps for a later time—there’s another difference. A lot of guys, Bernie included, love Hawaiian shirts but it turns out that none, not even one lone dude, loves Hawaiian pants. How does that make any sense? I still remember the moment Bernie snapped his fingers and said, “Hawaiian pants! Chet! We’re rich!” After that things happened fast and soon a whole boatload of Hawaiian pants arrived, made special in some far off place. Then things began to happen slow—actually not at all, meaning we didn’t sell one single pair, and selling them was part of the plan from the get-go, as I later learned.