Old Shirts and Tight Pants 

 Have you seen the TV spots where a teacher is schooling a small group of men and women in ‘how not to become your parents’? My lovely wife says I need to take that class to avoid dressing like my father. She is referring to that period when Leisure Suits were a big fad and my father became a devoted follower, wearing one of his leisure suits 20 or 30 years after the fad had disappeared. “That’s you,” she mutters, loud enough that I can hear despite my hearing aids and their penchant for broadcasting only the things I want to hear. 

 She is referring to my practice of wearing old clothes. I don’t like the modern style of wearing pants that are so tight I can’t comfortably put them on without contorting my feet to impossible angles. Taking them off is equally disturbing especially when I forget that they are too small at the cuffs to pull over my shoes. I generally remember this too late, so it is back to hitching them up again to remove the shoes before starting the removal process all over. And wearing the overly tight things is no picnic either as they pinch and pull some of my essential equipment to the point that I want to holler out loud as I am now doing.

 So, I stick with my old trousers that she says are too bulky, out of style and easily wrinkled with their pleats and cuffs sashaying along as I walk. But I like ‘em. They are comfortable, easy to put on, and they have big pockets where I can keep my essentials of a knife, batteries for hearing aids, spectacles, money, and whatever other equipment is needed for the day. You can’t have big pockets on pants that are so tight you can barely reach into them. And besides, I tell her, there is a lot of wear left in my favorite old trousers that I have worn for the past twenty years or so. 

And forget about new shirts. I have an entire closet of them and I don’t know how they got there. Some of them I don’t recognize so I suspect someone has been slipping them into my closet when I am gone. The culprit is probably like me, over clothed, handling some of the shirts no more than once yearly when I rearrange my closet to put the summer things in the easy-to-reach shelf and consigning the winter things to the far reaches of the closet. I suspect I haven’t worn some of these old shirts haven’t been worn in years. 

 

In the mode of full responsibility, I must confess that one of the clothing culprits is me. During the height of our square-dancing days, I purchased any number of western shirts that are decorated with horse shoes, saddles, spurs, pistols, long guns, sheriff’s badges and other symbols of the old west, not to mention the extensive embroidery. The excessive number of these shirts stems from an attempt to match the shirts with pants of the same color. And, I remind the Missus, sometimes we just had to have matching clothes between the two of us. All of these old shirts were hand-made, meaning that they were expensive. Now they command a large share of my closet, too distinctive to wear as normal attire, but too valuable (in the memory banks at least) to be taking up space in a landfill. Instead of wearing a pretty shirt, I often find myself reaching for a comfortable sweat shirt. My favorite is an old one, slightly oversized, with a large label on front, “Hartwick Pines” in an old style of lettering that must have been popular in World War I where Edward Hartwick died. The advantage of this shirt is that it meets fashion standards where I live. Most men in my area of the north woods consider the wearing of sweatshirts or camouflage clothing suitable fashion for most any event, including funerals. 

Such details about acceptable fashion for funerals are important to me since attending funerals has become a major pastime for the wife and I. I can’t say I enjoy them so much but I feel obliged to attend. One of my problems in attending a wake is that I am always uncertain what to say to the closest relatives of the dead person. The only thing that comes to mind is something along the lines of “She looks really nice in her casket, doesn’t she?” That doesn’t seem to fit the occasion when the fact of the matter is that, at least to me, she mostly looks just dead. 

Maybe my sudden inability to find an appropriate and consoling statement to gathered mourners is a consequence of my clothing. Sometimes the Missus prevails and I am forced to remove my Hartwick Pines sweat shirt and matching loose trousers in favor of a more current style. Those darned too-tight pants, and stiff shirts with the necktie choking me must be the cause of my intemperate thoughts as I gaze into an expensive casket adorned with a dead body. Maybe you can suggest some more appropriate pronouncements about dead people that I could memorize and have at the ready for the next funeral. 

Bill