If the clothes make the man, then the memories must make the clothes. The T-shirts tell the tale of where you’ve been and where you’re going.
Every fundraising walk you attend, you receive a new shirt. Every vacation stop, you pick up a memento. Every shirt you wear brings you back to where you were when you got it or wore it.
Like any memory, nostalgia can overtake your practical nature if you’re not careful.
We’re tossing some T-shirts and other stuff this weekend, as we embark in the time-honored tradition of fall cleaning. It’s not as popular as its spring cleaning cousin, but perhaps it’s even more important.
In the spring, you’re cleaning things up after a few months of cabin fever so you can enjoy yourself outside for the rest of the summer. In the autumn, you realize you’ll be stuck inside a while, so you should probably make it feel as comfortable as possible.
It’s easy enough to rid yourself of most junk. If a table breaks and you can’t fix it, you toss it to the curb. If a spring in a cushion becomes a weapon, you eliminate it from your home. Old TVs find their way out of sight within minutes of giving up.
But T-shirts get more chances, for some reason. If there’s a grease stain, it becomes a shirt for working outside. If there’s some discoloration, you just hold onto it to wear at night when you’re not heading anywhere. You start dividing them between “good” T-shirts and “bad” ones, a funny distinction for something with screen-printing.
My drawers are full of old shirts from different times in my life.
Every shirt we’ve ever worn on a diabetes fundraising walk over the past seven years remains. I still have the gray shirt we wore as a softball jersey for a suburban Columbus newspaper, where I stopped working a dozen years ago. Hidden elsewhere is the football team T-shirt from my senior year, even though time, changing styles and an extra 50 pounds makes it unwearable.
Sometimes I don’t even think about it and wear something out of the house that clearly shows a date from a decade ago. At that point, it’s not retro, distressed or rustic. It’s just old.
Sure, you can just hide these memories in a box in the closet. Maybe the one thing worse than skeletons in your closet is a boxful of memories in there.
I average about one T-shirt worn per day, something relaxed to put on after I return home from work. But I certainly don’t need dozens of these shirts. With regular laundry use, a handful could really get me through.
So what will stay and what will go? Will team shirts stay, while vacation ones go? How old can a shirt be before it’s too old to keep? How much stretch can a neckline exhibit before it’s destined for the trash heap? These are important questions that must be answered this weekend.
Wish us luck, as nostalgia and practical matters cross paths. We’re going to simplify our lives, one shirt at a time, and nothing could be more uncomfortable than the impending fate of these comfort-inducing relics.
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