Paul would tell me stories when I was a kid about hosteling thru France on a bike. One of his tales told of the ease to which folks would go to the beach and change out of their “work clothes” and into swimming attire in plain view of everyone. He said intially it surprised him; but that no one made a big deal about it. They just did it… no hoopla, no fanfare.
I always liked the thought of that.
And when I got older, there was a time when Paul and I were driving back from Woodmont, and a stretch of beach & water looked just too good to pass up, it was no big deal when we pulled off the road, took off our tousers and took a dip in our boxers.
And I make no special deal when I bring a change of shirt to work for my Wine Dinners. Not that changing a shirt is particularly revealing… however, the act has produced comments about the condition of my t-shirts… which John has described as looking like “bad pieces of Swiss Cheese”.
I have to shake my head and smile… this part of the story goes way back as far into my childhood as I can remember. I would never throw out my t-shirts… regardless of how ratty they became. And as a kid I wore t-shirts exclusively when the weather became warm. Back then, I should add, t-shirts were not coloured, nor did they have clever sayings or pictures. T-shirts, quite simply, were white.
One day my father decided to take matters in hand. It would have been a Sunday. And we were in our breakfast room (a separate dinning nook that was adjacent to both our kitchen and dinning rooms) and he would have been getting ready to go to Racebrook for a round of golf with Ike Miller. I was dressed in my usual summer time attire… shorts, white socks, sneakers & a white t-shirt… a white t-shirt with several holes in it. My father called me to his side, and laughing he put his finger in one of the holes, and much to my amazement he casually ripped the shirt to smithereens… and then he said, “OK Jimmy, now you can put on another shirt… I think we can afford it…”
So last week when John commented on whether the t-shirt I was putting on was “lucky”… perhaps that was why I hadn’t thrown out something that looked worse than a rag… And I flashed back to the breakfast room on 25 Alston Avenue, and thought that the only reason why I hadn’t thrown it out was because my father wasn’t there to rip it off my back.
Lucky t-shirt? Sure! Always lucky to remember my Dad.