Clothes Speak to Me
Some time back, I discovered a pair of pants in a closet (I have clothes in multiple closets), which were neatly folded and hanging on a standard, wire clothes hanger. Don’t ask me why I still have them.
They say (whoever “they” is) that fashions just cycle around and you can just save your clothing because sooner or later they’ll be back in style. I think these particular pants could be saved until Gabriel blows his horn and they wouldn’t be back “in.”
I won’t even talk about the waist size issue. If pale yellow, cuffed, bell bottom pants are ever in again, I’d never fit into my pair. Back in the day, I loved those pants.
Those pants were hanging on a wire hanger which had newspaper draped over the bottom wire so as to create a rounded surface from which my slacks could hang. I immediately remembered where I had learned that trick.
In the sixties, my Boy Scout leader took our troop on a field trip one night to B – L (read that: B Bar L) a clothing store in Richfield. Bill Toomer, the “B” of B – L gave the rough and tumble boys of Troop 601 a seminar on taking care of our clothes.
You can imagine how excited we were about that. It ranked right up there with the table manners and proper grammar seminars.
We were shown all sorts of things including shoetrees, clothes brushes, different types of fabric, and, most importantly: pants hangers. We were informed that wearing wrinkled pants was in the same league as being carriers of mumps, measles and diphtheria.
Successful people don’t wear wrinkled pants. Wrinkled pants are the sign of a wrinkled intellect and eroded morals. America’s arch enemies Chairman Mao and Premier Khrushchev want you to have wrinkled pants. I’m not totally sure if that’s what was said, but that was the message I absorbed.
The advice that saved me that night from a feeling of being thrust down to “pant wrinkle hell” was Bill’s tip about putting newspaper on wire hangers. “If you can’t afford special hangers, use this trick,” he said as he demonstrated.
This was great news. Most of us felt lucky to have the few pairs of pants we had, let alone the extravagance of special, wooden, hinged hangers. So, I joined the anti-wrinkled pants crusade that night. Who says kids don’t’ listen?
I know you’re dying to know what newspapers I found on the hanger under the “historical pants.” One section of newspaper was part of the sports page from a May 1975 edition of the Contra Costa Times. The other was the “Sunday Scenes” section from the April 27, 1975 edition of the San Francisco Examiner.
I was in college at that time. I worked a summer job doing door-to-door sales in the “Bay Area” and lived in Walnut Creek.
I leafed through the papers. It was strange. As I turned the pages, I thought back to the times of learning to hang up pants and a summer in Northern California. I also decided to try the Mint Pull Taffy recipe from the Examiner.
A concept emerged. It’s not a new concept, but one that lingers under the surface for many of us. It’s that memories are often tied up in seemingly insignificant objects we accumulate. Some of these objects are with us purposely and some are collected just by happenstance.
A clothes hanger, an old record album that used to belong to a friend, a seashell, a pebble from a mountain stream, a ticket stub, a dried rose, a dog collar – the list could go on and on.
Look around you. See what is squirreled away in special places and in not so special places. There may be things that “speak” to you. If the words spoken are important enough, you may want to tell someone else about it. Or better yet, write something down about it.
It may be that you’ll just want to keep the message close to you and reminisce in private. In either case, you’ll know yourself just a little bit better as a result. — Merrill
P.S. My wife sometimes complains that I wear wrinkled clothes. “Get rid of some of your clothes and make some room in that closet so things aren’t so crowded.” My reply now, “But dear, those clothes speak to me.”