I saw a dude in his thirties today at Einstein Brothers Bagels (I wore a mask) whose faded 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics T-shirt had so many holes in the back and shoulders it looks like it had survived a shotgun blast. The fabric was worn so thin that it wouldn’t have qualified as clothing if it had been on a woman. The collar ring had frayed clear through in places. I couldn’t resist complimenting him and it. He told me his mom had even had to sew up some of the bigger holes to keep it wearable. 

Do you have an item like that? Do you have a favorite shirt? Or an oldest shirt? Or something that’s both? It doesn’t have to be a shirt. A ratty old pair of jeans that “still fits” despite the fact that you’re not remotely the same size?

For decades, I owned my dad’s freshman football practice “jersey“ from Siena College. It was a double layer cotton T-shirt:  blue with yellow letters/yellow with blue letters. They  could flip inside out to identify practice squads. My dad was a freshman in when John F. Kennedy was elected. I don’t remember dad wearing  it much. It must have lived in his drawer until Jim was big enough to wear it. When Jim went off to college, I inherited it. I probably used it more as a sleeping shirt. I have no idea how it ever fit my dad, because it was always too small for me.  But every once in a while I would wear it to work out in my 20s until it became so threadbare that each time I put it on I could feel a seam in the collar or armpit start the fray. After that it just lived in the bottom of my drawer, as a totem I would look at or touch from time to time. About 10 years ago I contacted somebody on Etsy to make “duplicate“ shirts and gave one each to Jim and Dad and myself. I gave the original to  my nephew Jordan. I don’t think I properly explained that I had freighted him with such a historic memento. If he still has it, I doubt he knows where it is.

I know that items like this are just shirts, or jeans. However, we live in an age when I myself have thrown away a microwave oven because replacing it will cost me $80 and repairing it will cost me twice that. I think the things we chose to mend tell us something about ourselves, and others. It’s not just frugality or laziness. Those very closures are actually windows into something important. Like a visible scar on skin, I know there must be a story behind a stitched piece of cloth. I am drawn to those stories.