Posted By crates on January 1, 2010

     Recently I was going through my chest-of-drawers in a long-delayed effort to clean them out.   As I sorted through some of the clothes I realized that my entire way of thinking about clothes has changed over the years.  I have always kept any clothes that I had until they literally fell apart or were outgrown.  After I reached adulthood, I would go for years without a size change, so I ended up with some very old clothes.

   I found to my chagrin and horror that there were clothes here that I acquired back in another era of my life.   Here was a t-shirt that I bought for a dollar in a street fair on Massachusetts street in Lawrence, Kansas back in 1972!  And here was a t-shirt that I had bought at about the same time that had the “ecology flag” emblazoned on the front.  I remember wearing that shirt on a Mammalogy field trip to Dodge City, Kansas in ’71.  In the back of the drawer I pulled out more relics of bygone times.

        One was a white undershirt with a picture of a duck riding a football and with the inscription “The Ducks Take to the Air” printed on it.  I remember somebody I knew who was leaving the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 1977 and was about to throw the shirt away and offered it to me.  I took it of course.   Here was a peculiar fuzzy sweater that I had received as a gift for Christmas in 1972.  And there in the back corner of the drawer was a t-shirt, stained with the smoke from an apartment fire that I had in ’81 which I remember buying in the summer of 1965!

    I gathered all these past mementos up preparatory to throwing them away or giving them to Good Will.  I put them into a gym bag which my grandparents had given me in 1962.  To this I added an old pillow which I had never liked which I had acquired for green stamps in the fall of 1967.  I sat there looking at the pitiful pile of stuff that I would never use again.  I busied myself with newer clothes that I never wore.  Afterwards I came back to the pile of old stuff.

    I put these all away again, telling myself that perhaps I would throw them out during the next cleaning.  For some reason the longer I possess something, the harder it is to get rid of it.  My New Years resolution is to get rid of new clothes— less than fifteen years old or so.

Categories: Miscellaneous, Personal Stuff
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