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OF A MAN'S CLOSET
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When a wife surveys your closet, prepare to suffer
of TheColumnists.com
Like most male chauvinists, I take great pride in my ability to maintain my cool when the going gets tough, although I do admit to bending a bit occasionally. But once in a while the pressure becomes too great, and I surrender. Unconditionally.
Like last weekend when my wife, thoughtfully appraising the shirts jammed together in my closet tighter than runners at the start of the Boston Marathon, gently tendered the opinion that I might want to cull the frayed and the faded, the outmoded and the unappealing from my lineup.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned after almost 40 years of marriage to the same woman, it’s that any suggestion so innocently posed demands immediate attention.
“Sixty shirts are a mite too much,” she advised as she cuddled up against my arm while we surveyed my closet together.
But I caught her eyeing one of my Hawaiian shirts--the one with so many colors it would shame a rainbow--with such hostility that the hula girls started quivering, the surfer dudes started tumbling and the fronds started falling from the palm trees.
Astounded, I realized for the first time that behind that benign banter and manner dwelt an inimical Wardrobe Warrior.
I blanched as if doused in a bottle of Clorox. It wasn’t the tattered and torn that she had targeted. Or even the number of shirts. What she really wanted was my favorite shirt, and a few others of its genus, taken out--permanently--even though I had made a number of concessions to keep that shirt alive and well the past few years:
*
I never wear it when we are together, even while watching TV
at home.
*
I am never, ever allowed to wear it to a public gathering, whether
she is with me or not.
*
I cannot even wear it under a sweater on a cool evening when
we’re together because the collar would betray its presence
louder than brown shoes striding below a black suit.
I’ve been more or less restricted to wearing it during my daily two-mile walk, provided I’m walking alone.
Lest I be taken for a dandy and in all fairness to myself, I must make public that those 60 shirts represent the past 25 years of my life. Most were bought red-tagged off the rack at season’s end. So, foppishly fashionable I am not, unless I could re-live the previous year.
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crummy wardrobe. Now he's gone and become a cross-dresser! Worse yet, he has a lot more stylish dresses than mine!" |
I pointed out to the Missus that 60 shirts--about equally divided among short-sleeved and long-sleeved--accumulated over 25 years averages out to only 2.4 shirts purchased per year. Moreover, I reminded her, I wash my own clothes; therefore, I can go 30 straight days, even in the warmest and coolest months, without having to use the clothes washer. Consequently I save on electricity and water because I stuff the machine to capacity every month.
Besides, I bragged most magnanimously, my shirts have versatility. During most of those 25 years I ascended greatly in size--not up but out--from a large to an extra large to an extra-extra large to bordering on a 3xXL.
But what goes around, comes around, I added. Now that I am descending in height, courtesy of the aging process, and am working diligently to deflate the inner tube that had ballooned about my mid-section, I am able once again to fit comfortably into an extra large. And a just plain large looms in the not-too-distant future. But I won’t have to go out and spend money to buy new shirts because I already have enough in stock and can shrink those that now are too large. Therefore, I have saved us even more money.
As a matter of fact, if I keep progressing downward as much in the next year as I have in the past two, I might even be able to replace the illusion of slimness suggested by vertical stripes and dark colors and once again don horizontal stripes and light colors. Who knows, I may even start tucking my shirts inside my trousers again instead of letting them hang loosely on my hips to camouflage my girth.
Today my clothes closet is bereft of two outlandish (her word, not mine) short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts, three once-hip (my opinion, not hers) long-sleeved paisleys, and one loudly-striped red, white, blue and gray long-sleeved shirt that even provoked my kids to laugh.
Six purged already. That’s 10 percent in one fell sweep.
Now, if my loving Wardrobe Warrior never bothers to check what’s hidden under my sports coats, my awesome six might come alive to adorn this torso again some future day. Maybe they’ll even be fashionable by then. Maybe the six-inch-wide ties I’ve secreted away for 35 years will become trendy again, too.
I should live so long.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The drawings
are from IMSI'S MASTER CLIPS COLLECTION, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted
Aug. 7, 2006.
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