Worn Out

 As a point of departure: I have spent the last fifteen months assiduously avoiding wearing a shirt with a collar. To that end, I made a point of wearing each and every T-shirt I own. No repeats. That lasted for several months. I matched these with a pair of jeans, or a pair of shorts during the warmer months. This was essentially the same uniform I wore when I was teaching PE before the pandemic hit. And on the weekends. So it was a lot like having a fifteen month weekend, wardrobe-wise. The variants to this pattern used to be those days which took me into the classroom to teach, which brought out the collared shirts, and the khakis. There were also the periodic social events that my wife would insist required a sport jacket or (gasp) a tie. That seems like such a very long time ago. Partly because it was, and also because it was so very easy to simply fall into the routine of wearing the concert T-shirt of my choice and a pair of jeans that may or may not need a belt depending on which of three pairs I pulled from my closet. 

When it came time for fifth grade promotion this year, the only change I made to that template was I wore an orange safety vest over the aforementioned casual attire. I was the parking patrol. Not the fashion police. Then it was summer vacation. Returned to the place of comfort once again. 

Except for one thing: The looming wedding at the end of June. The one that actually came with a suggested dress code. My first inclination was to imagine how I might stretch my wool sport coat and khakis over one more event. Not long after that, my wife reminded me that our son was in dire need of something other than the jeans and T-shirts he had been wearing since he had been laid off from Best Buy. It was no sure thing that his bright blue polo shirt with name tag affixed would have been suitable for his cousin's nuptials, so the topic of purchasing new clothes not acquired at the merchandise table at an auto show or rock concert came to the fore. It was determined that we were at a place in our collective history where buying new suits for both of us made sense. 

We didn't know how to argue against this assertion, in spite of how foreign it seemed to my son and I. Resistance, we understood, was futile. So we went to Men's Wearhouse. That's a play on the word "warehouse" there, in case you missed it, but I shouldn't cast aspersions because the friendly gents there were more than happy to find us what we wanted, and complimented us on our good taste and sold us a couple of suits. And some shirts. And a tie. For my son. Oddly enough, I have a wide array of neckwear, but have not made a practice of wearing them. 

A footnote here: My son and I are holding out for the possibility that we might be able to get some fashion-forward Converse All-Stars to wear with our new duds. Like the ones that dad wore to his own wedding so many years ago.