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Clothing Makes the Man
I am not fashion conscious but I have been wearing clothes for my whole life as have most people.
My earliest foray into clothing was probably the cloth diaper and the safety pins, no pampers yet. At night there were the green pajamas with feet and on the feet were implanted more tiny feet to keep me from slipping on the floor and falling on my bum, though I don’t know why I called it a bum as it’s always been my rear end, my butt, my tush, hiney, tuchus, the part that went over the fence last or just my ass.
As I matured, so did my clothing. Gone were the diapers and on were the white underpants, otherwise known now as tighty whiteys although in later years I vacillated between boxer shorts because Marlon Brando wore them and back to tighty whities though I don’t know why I have long resisted wearing more fashionable colored undies and I never understood why I would care what my undies looked like as nobody but my wife and the guys in the gym would see them, unless I was hit by a car in which case the first aiders would see but I would be unconscious and wouldn’t care what they saw.
There were always issues with winter clothing. As a kid, my black, rubber boots had to fit over my shoes and I was always sweating by the time I got them on and by then it was a bad idea to go out in the cold with sweaty hair or I would catch a cold even though I am told you don’t catch colds from the cold but from a virus, the rhinovirus being the most common culprit. The boots had buckles that were nearly impossible to snap together.
Coats were always with zippers which would come apart from the bottom up and then the lining of the coat would get caught in the zipper making it impossible to zip and especially disturbing if the zipper was caught in the middle and there was no way to get the coat off other than actually letting it fall to the ground and stepping out of it, no easy feat.
Pants or slacks as my mother called them, were pretty nondescript and I always cringed when my mother would take me to buy pants and ask loudly for the whole store to hear, “Where is the husky clothing?” Husky was another word for chubby and was supposed to make me less self-conscious.
Gloves were never easy. They were always woolen and when wet they shrunk and exposed the skin above my hand to the freezing old and the snow and occasionally they would get stuck to a snowball and off went the glove with the snowball. It wasn’t until later years that I got my hands on leather gloves but they would be quickly ruined by the wet snow.
Hats. First they had flaps that tied under your chin. Then I went through a period wearing just ear muffs which were fine only your head got wet and cold in the snow and there you go getting another cold. When I was older, there were periodic flings with cowboy hats which you couldn’t really wear in the car unless you bent down and that is not optimum especially if you are the driver.
I had a few berets which I wore backwards for reasons that are no longer clear. And there were baseball hats or caps as some call them and hoods from sweatshirts.
Socks were always important to me but invariably there were holes in one or more of the toes or on the heel and it was always challenging to twist the sock in such a way as to avoid sticking a toe or toes through a hole or holes and also to turn the sock so the hole in the heel is on top of the foot, causing no noticeable discomfort. And socks always lost their elastic so they fell down which created aesthetic concerns along with exposing your ankles to the elements especially if they fell into your shoes.
Shoes. I recall always wanting a pair of PF Flyers sneakers but never achieving them and instead wore cheaper white sneakers. Shoes were fairly nondescript until I got my first pair of shiny black fashionable PFCs, short for the totally politically incorrect Puerto Rican Fence Climbers because they had pointy toes which could be used to more easily climb over chain link fences, something that I personally never did. Laces remained a bane of my existence, always breaking or coming undone at inopportune times like when I was running to my bike after school. A high water mark was learning to double knot the laces.
Later I moved on to cowboy boots to go along with my cowboy hat and rawhide cowboy jacket and belt embedded with the native American turquoise jewelry. I was into that look for a while and wore my cowboy boots down to the bone, inserting cardboard to cover up the holes in the sole and to protect my feet from the elements.
There were skinny ties and fat ties, tie bars and tie tacks and later I wore an ascot and sport jacket and smoked a pipe while driving along Forest Avenue and listening to Sinatra on the radio.
I had my share of dashikis and denim cover-alls which I wore to go along with my afro hair style, something that was rather odd looking back as I am white.
White tee-shirts were when I was younger and later rolling up the short sleeves to hold the pack of Marlboros and as years passed I rotated to all kinds of colorful, tie-dyed tee-shirts and shirts with all kinds of logos and sayings like “Make Whirled Peas.”
And lastly a few words on bathing suits, which were originally the tight-fitting kind and later cut-offs and still later the loose fitting kind which I still wear to this very day.