Monday, July 21, 2008
Pinkie - RIP is not an acronym
The weekend was a mixed bag, I’m pleased and sorry to say. The fridge bulb has been replaced but still does not illuminate; it looks like a more complicated problem. Ditto the non-functioning a/c in the car - “wiring” is involved. No exercise was performed, I had disturbing dreams, and many household tasks were not accomplished. On the other hand, many household tasks were accomplished, including repairing the stroller and painting the hallway. We attended a rumaki-laden party at the homes of delightful friends, and I got plenty - plenty! - of sleep.
But then, I found out about this, advertising the upcoming opening of the long-awaited film version of a graphic novel that actually led me to tattoo my living flesh, and it has put me in a contemplative frame of mind. The Hegelian dialectic will govern my opinion of the weekend. I had my share of theses and antitheses, and now I’m ready to synthesize. It’s sort of complicated unless I bring it down to concrete examples, so let me offer this one, jotted initially a few weeks ago on my beloved 38L:
I hesitate at my notebook. Shall I edit, or write something new? A notion for an essay springs to mind. But editing is fun. The empty seat beside me is suddenly taken by a woman in a vibrant fuchsia sweater. That settles it: I’ll write about the pink shirt. It couldn’t be any more obvious, and it does seem fitting.
The pink shirt now falls into a range of items I’ve mentioned here before - the clothes I’ve worn completely out. These include my original jeans jacket(s), the “serial killer” trench coat from college, several old t-shirts, and many other items I’ve worn to rags over my storied career. I hadn’t heretofore realized that the pink shirt had deteriorated to that level but it appears I’ve been fooling myself. The pink shirt needs an eulogy now. Who better than me to give it?
The late ‘80s were not a time of great self-awareness for your correspondent. Law school, Los Angeles, living with my dad - a whole constellation of circumstances built up, leaving me unaware of my own unawaredness for a pretty decent span of years. Bar prep and seven years of scrambling for a practice didn’t help much on the back end, but this was the beginning, when I had no idea what lay before me. I grew my hair long, wore batik and straw hats, tried to be wry by being cynical. It certainly wasn’t the apex of my creative self-engagement, that’s for sure.
I think I was shopping at Buffalo Exchange but that’s not necessarily true except in a generic sense. It was one of those stores on the secondary boulevards, full of used clothes, smelling like industrial detergents, old cardboard and old people. Circular racks stood stuffed like giant Elizabethan ruffs, and a sufficiently indolent browser could blow a whole afternoon ensuring that there was nothing to buy there that day - but you’d still have to come back two days later to see if anything new had turned up. For LA, this business model seemed to be fairly novel, but unaccountably au courant as well. To my intense gratification, thrifty was chic - and I was thrifty.
Anyway, I went to the store, I bought the shirt. Short sleeves, small collar, little pearlescent buttons, cut straight at the bottom with no drooping tail. It was woven of Egyptian cotton, very well broken in, with a pattern of small pink paisley shapes on an off-white field. According to the label, the original purchaser had been a patron of J.C. Penny; according to my best guess, that would have been around 1978. It was, in its time, whenever that was, a pretty low-key shirt, and so it had remained - a soft, wrinkle-free garment suitable for casual occasions, such as dinner with family, or a rave. It was fortuitously cut so as to accentuate what I considered my best features, and to minimize my worst ones. It also hid stains, went with everything I owned, and withstood the rigors of the top-loader. Although I had initial reservations about its pinkishness, these proved unfounded. The pink paisley button-up wound up being a truly key garment during that late ‘80s phase.
Me and it contined to have some seriously quality times together after law school, too, through my “moving to SF” phase, my “job seeking” phase, my “job slogging” phase, my “job switching” phase, and everything else since then. In the interim, some pretty good shirts have come and gone, but the pink paisley button-up was stalwart througout. If I just wanted to look like myself and feel good about it, the PPB was haning in my closet for me for 20 years, ready to mellow things out - sartorially if not otherwise as well.
A few weeks ago Kel saw me slip the PPB over my head as we prepared to do some local shopping in my uber-casual neighborhood. Her attention focused on the shirt and I immediatrely sensed danger. “That shirt....” Her voice wavered with the hesitation of one who is totally sure of what she’s going to say but does not know exactly how to broach the subject. “...It’s probably only good around the house anymore.”
I looked down at myself in disbelief. “And not,” she continued, certainty ringing in her voice, “around guests.”
“What do you mean, ‘guests’?” It was a lame diversionary tactic to what I suspected was already an inevitability.
“It’s a great shirt,” she assured me comfortingly. “I love it. You love it. But it’s been around for too long. It’s done now. You’ve got to let it go.” Her eyes shone with sympathy and earnestness. I told her I’d think about it, begrudgingly. Then I changed my shirt.
I held off on the decision, even though a critical daylight appraisal demonstrated amply to me that the PPB was indeed now seriously faded, starting to fray at all the hems, and was virtually transparent in places. Still, it felt comfortable and hung flatteringly on me. It filled a niche. It was the only pink clothes I owned. I wasn’t ready to let go.
Which brings us to recently: I was wearing lounge pants and pinkie (as the PPB allows only me affectionately to call it), reading on a sunny Sunday morning. I shifted on my sofa and the shirt slid over me. I heard a sound, a tiny sound but one I knew only too well: a rending. As of fabric.
I had to remove pinky before I could find the rip - it’s fairly small, right under the collar. One might have hoped it was too small to make any difference, but I couldn’t delude myself. A small rending will soon grow large, and what was once my favorite shirt had just become irrevocably a shmata.
Pinky’s now in the “archive” pile behind the big laundry hamper in my closet. I need to clean that pile up but I’m not about to wear anything out of it. Those things aren’t clothes anymore - they’re mementos. Speaking of which: remember that old pink shirt I used to have? Yeah… good times....
(turns out I got it at Jet Rag. whoodathunk.)
