July 13th 2010    Tim Candler

    Sometimes it is necessary to get new shoes and two new shirts.  But I have to think of it as a capital investment, rather than repair, because shoes and shirts stand by themselves.  They are a part of another, rather than a part of me.   And I have worn these things everyday for so many years, that sometimes I begin to think of them as belonging to me.  Which is an error, because I was born without a shirt and I was born without shoes.

      There could be a future time when a species will be so properly advanced that its members enter the world already attired.  I can imagine the tumult such a circumstance will produce should this species have developed from the ashes of our own species.  I suspect bowties for the male of this future species and Alice Bands for the female.    And naturally there will be good money to be made by cosmetic surgeons.   

   The daft thing is I have clothes aplenty.  Very few of them however achieve scrubbed down respectability.   Instead they have character and history, and most of them when new were prepared for life on the back of another.   Oddly enough my favorite shirt was first worn by a United States Senator.   He had had his name tags sown into the label.

     It was Egyptian cotton.  Soft as thighs.  And whenever I wore it I felt important.  In the end it became a rag.  It's final days cleaning dipsticks.  Now most likely it is safe in a landfill.

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