Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

I needed a - something.  Something more than a shirt, but not quite a jacket - something for the sudden breezes and fogsnaps that wouldn’t bulk me up too much when the sun shone again and I had to lug it around.  I supposed they sold such things, but I really didn’t feel like shopping for one.  I guess I figured it would just show up in a natural process of needs-fulfillment.  As if the universe really worked like that.

Turns out, that’s exactly how the universe works - or how it worked then, anyhow.  Kel came home from work one night with sartorial booty (in addition to the booty she usually hauls around with her).  She works at a good-sized organization and I guess they had some sort of unclaimed objects repository where she’d gone browsing.  I think she got a desk chair, some dog toys - and the Marcucci shirt. 

This was an oversized garment of heavy fleece, with flap pockets and a substantial collar.  It was the color of wet sand, thatched in brown and grey with a simple, open plaid.  Wearing it was like wearing a sleeping bag, warm and comfortable and insulating.  I never much cared how it looked on me, or how I looked in it.  It kept me warm and I’d expended no effort whatsoever to obtain it.  I didn’t feel like asking questions about it. 

One thing about this garment did cause me pause, however - the return address.  Well, more of a phone number and a name: Marcucci.  These were imprinted on a small cotton strip that had been ironed into the collar.  It’s no mean feat to iron fleece without melting it, and someone had gone to a fair amount of trouble to print the damn things up in the first place.  The phone number was local.  Those two datashreds brought the orphan heritage of the shirt into my immediate awareness each time I wore it, and reified that otherwise anonymous owner who’d let it go however many years ago.

In fact, it has been years.  This I know because I’ve kept this shirt for three or four years or more myself.  I have no idea how long it had sat in lost-n-found before Kel liberated it, but the likelihood is, it had been quite some time.  Even as I found this garment very comfortable physically, my tenuous claim to it disconcerted me a bit on an ethical level.  Not so much as I’d do anything about it, of course - just enough to notice.  I’d call it a low-grade irk. 

I enjoy this shirt.  It’s easy.  It takes punishment.  It’s light, but warm and voluminous.  It hides stains.  It dries fast.  I have worn it frequently and gratefully.  The tan fleece shirt-jac: it works just fine - stolen or not. 

Cut to a few weeks ago: a local alt-rock station held a big concert in the park near our house, so we all trucked down to see Cake.  We got to the meadow where the concert was being staged 40 minutes before Cake took the stage, so we sat around just watching Zach learn how to walk.  It was a chilly, overcast day with fog thick enough to bead on my glasses.  Kel and Z were properly layered, but all I had was Mr Marcucci’s shirtjac - and I was doing fine.  My hands and face were cold; my arms and trunk, not at all.  I considered it a power performance by my own outerwear.

But I did notice something, in my 90 minutes or so out there: plaidlessness.  Though thousands of hip young people were thronging the meadow, I only saw three or four plaid shirts in that whole time, apart from my own.  I saw hoodies, pullovers, blazers and ponchos; all permutations of tees and tanks; jackets, shells and coats… and they were in solid colors.  Black, grey, navy; reds and browns; pale blues and forest greens… logos and pomo-meso-amer-asian designs abounded.  A big woven all-over pattern like mine, though - not so much.  Big time.  And they dudes who were wearing the plaid – they didn’t impress me as upstanding citizens, if you get my drift. 

So now I’m a bit self-conscious about the shirt-jac.  I wonder if I want to replace it at long last with something more contemporary, something of my own choosing.  I ask myself if I’ve grown unduly attached to it; riposte myself with whether I’m just trying to justify unnecessary commercial activity - buying stuff I don’t actually need for no reason but compulsive slavery to fashion. I do think I could do better in the open market.  I don’t know if I want to.  After pondering for long enough on these subtleties, I don’t even know if I care.

I know who could clear this up for me, of course. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, were I to call the Marcucci number ironed into the collar of the item in question, the phone would be answered by the person who ironed that label in the first place.  I’m picturing a matronly woman in her 60s or 70s, a proud and generous woman with a rigid sense of propriety and an absolute devotion to her family, on whose behalf she undertook even such mercies as the labeling project in anticipation of just such a call as I might make. 

I’d ask about a missing tan plaid shirt and she’d know exactly what I was talking about immediately; I’d be able to tell instantly from her reaction how the owner felt about his loss those many years prior.  I’d know if he’d let it go without a second thought or if a week didn’t go by when he didn’t wish he still had it.  Whether he had moved on, or whether he was still mourning the disappearance of the one garment that had made his life worth living.  He might need to be reminded that he’d ever even owned it.  He might cherish its memory with a searing flame of love forsaken.  I can’t know unless I call. 

But such a call would be fraught with peril and moral ambiguity.  First, I’d have to lie about where I got the shirt, and when - saying, for example, that I’d just picked it up.  I’d have to hope that this lie didn’t come back like all lies to bite me on the ass, but I just don’t think I could admit to keeping and wearing another man’s coat for four years - not to the man who owns it, anyway, and especially not to the hausfrau who’d lovingly maintained it for him.  It’s just not done. 

And however that conversation might turn out, it could only result in a loss for me.  If the owner wants it back, even after all my years of ethically-questionable use, I’ve lost something precious - either the shirt itself, or (if I refuse to return it) any real comfort I might take from its swaddling folds.  I wouldn’t be able to relax in it any longer.  It might keep me from being cold, but it could never warm me again.  And if Marcucci does not want it back, that’s even worse - that means that it wasn’t worth having in the first place. 

So instead I just let it hang in the closet, silently reproaching me.  And when the summer fog blows in all crisp and blustery I still put it on - but I try not to think about it.  I ignore the outmoded style, and I blot from my mind the identifying label.  I don’t think I’m a slave to fashion, but I might just be a slave to guilt.