Not Lovin' It

An elderly couple, octogenarians, are sitting, as they for several years have sat, at their local McDonald’s, having a mid-afternoon snack, talking, planning, remembering, enjoying, he says, a “sweet time of fellowship,” a communion of husband and wife that has underwritten their more than six-decade-long marriage.  An employee begins cleaning in the area around their booth.  The restaurant is mostly vacant—a few customers occupying a couple of the tables, a few off to the side using the free WiFi.  Nonetheless, the employee begins sweeping under and around the elderly couple’s table. 

 

The couple undoubtedly find the bustle intrusive. Dust kicked up by the sweeping is settling on their food.  Other, customerless, areas could easily be cleaned first.  The wife complains, archly, perhaps, but not humorlessly.  The employee tells the manager.  The manager tells the couple that they have overstayed their welcome, that they have exceeded the half-hour eating-time limit and have to leave.  There is no sign on any wall that announces a 30 minute customer limit.  The WiFiers were in place and plying the Internet when the elderly couple entered the restaurant.  Yet, the elderly couple must leave.  The franchise has disenfranchised them.

 

They are determined, at first, to dismiss the incident, to laugh it off as one of those sometimes strange, sometimes embarrassing things that just happen, one of those many rasps of living one periodically encounters.  But the husband, concerned that future customers not be so belittled, writes a letter to the editor of the local newspaper.  The letter is not indignant, is not rancorous, does not chafe or accuse, expresses no outrage.  No, it simply explains what transpired, and articulates the intimate significance he and his wife attach to their mid-afternoon being together.

 

The letter goes viral.  The manager apologizes, the franchise owner reinstitutes an employee training program, and McDonald’s corporate, by way of apologizing to the beleaguered couple, sends them two coupons for a free small coffee.  The couple sends the coupons back.  They continue to enjoy their mid-afternoon snack, but at another McDonald’s.

 

*     *     *

 

So, beyond the heart-leap and hurrah of an elderly pair of Davids overcoming a fast-food Goliath, what does their story point to?  For what deeper issues does it stand as an emblem?  For one, this: the McDonald’s manager is a bully.  Perhaps he was having a bad day.  Perhaps he was simply following his training, cleaving to a cleaning schedule that, like the food preparation process itself, like the flow and placement of bun and burger and sauce and condiment, is thoroughly rationalized, certain areas spic-and spanned at certain times, no exception, the whole thing regimented, all graphed and charted, all factor-scored and tabulated.  Perhaps he was struggling to find in what he does some intrinsic value, something true.  Perhaps he was feeling a sting of bitterness, remembering that, at one time, his aspirations soared higher than managing a fast-food restaurant, farther than being a small man in a small job doing small things by rote and rule, none of which catalyze his intellect, none of which quicken his imagination, all of which palsy his self-respect.

 

And to poultice that self-respect, to leave his littleness behind, he turns to cruelty.  He intimidates.  He becomes a bully.  He devises an ad hoc rule, perhaps the only creative act the rule-governed can conjure, to move the couple out, get them out of the way to ease his day and keep the cleaning on schedule. The couple is old, after all, and he is young and can use his youth and whatever managerial authority he has to impose his rule and coerce their departure.   Cruelty, as George Eliot says, requires only opportunity, and he seizes it.

 

And then there is the stupefyingly flat-souled and diligently dismissive gesture of apology by McDonald’s corporate.  We’re sorry, and, to show our distaste for the indignity you suffered, to show how sincerely we value every one of our patrons, here are coupons for two small coffees.  How is this anything more than a glancing drive-by of a mea culpa?  How is this not just a departure from concern, but a severing of all ties with it?  What novocained sensibility could possibly think that coupons for two small coffees would be within five time zones of appropriate?  How is this anything more than an apology erased by its staggering triviality?    How does this indifference do anything more than invalidate the elderly couple, humiliate them, discard and disregard them, treat them as unsecond-thoughted?

 

Perhaps nothing more can be expected from a corporate culture.  Its perspective is narrow despite the massiveness of the enterprises it directs.  Perhaps a failure of imagination is built in when the primary value is market-share expansion and its connection to customers is remote and sluiced through datafying analytics. There is no way, no need, really, to lift the lid on customers’ lives; no way to understand the world they experience, its felt texture, its palpability, its heart-stings and heart-joys.  No way to be human, despite being a person.  No way to recognize the couple and, thus, no way to feel sympathy, gratitude, indebtedness.  No way, no way at all, to know what it was like to be that elderly couple, hoping only to savor another afternoon together. 

 

No way at all to understand how the cynicism of a thoughtlessly reflexive “give them coupons and they’ll be happy” protocol repudiates the couple.  And probably no way to understand, in sending the coupons back, the couple refused to be released from memory and, thereby, repudiated their repudiation.

Cold and Old

Each year, when the earth tilts 23.4 degrees away from the sun, a battle begins.  It features no frontal assaults, no marching fire and charges, no close quarter skirmishes, no blitzkriegs—no bold and brazen tactics of any kind.  It is, rather, guerrilla warfare, a furtive combination of shoot-and-scoot and sabotaging raids, covert insurgency, and just as covert counterinsurgency.  The battle field is my house.  The particular site of combat is the thermostat.  My wife Kathy likes the temperature cool.  I like it warm.  Under cover of darkness, or when she is occupied in another room, I slink to the thermostat and execute a clandestine upping of the temperature.  Under the same conditions, Kathy executes a stealth lowering.  When my fingertips begin lose all sensation, I know I have been Yukoned.  Kathy has maneuvered her way to the thermostat.

I have no tolerance for cold.  During that time of year when the trees are “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” the boughs aren’t the only thing to “shake against the cold.”  Every winter is my winter of discontent.  I find no delight in the frolic geometry of frost pasted on my windows, no joy in the keening cantos of a furying north wind.  The cold is neither bracing nor invigorating, and the only thing it stimulates is the galloping retreat of blood from my extremities.  I dress not in layers, but in strata.  When it’s cold, I wear a T-shirt, covered by a long-sleeve thermal T-shirt covered by a hoodie, covered by a winter jacket rated for 20 below zero.  When it’s very cold,  I add a full-length black leather coat given to me years ago by a rock-and-roller friend.  When it’s cold, I wear two pairs of thinsulate-stuffed gloves, thermal socks, 40-below-zero-rated winter boots, and a wool knit cap under the hoodie’s hood.  When it’s very cold, I add down mittens, another pair of thermal socks, and a fleece ear band.  

And to that bundling, that upholstering in cold-repelling materials, I add, for its warming somatic echo, thoughts of the dog-dayed summer, hot and humid, toilet-tank condensation hot, arm-sweat-on-the-table humid, the white-sunned swelter of July, the sultry embrace of August, the very basin of summer when simply forming a thought sprouts beads of  forehead perspiration.  Hamlet may have implored the heat to dry up his brains, but mine scamper lively enough.  John Ruskin asserted that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” but I beg to differ.   I do not fear “the heat o’ the sun,” but I do dread the “furious winter’s rages.”  Then my brains freeze dry, and even the prophetic Shelley’s “if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind” holds cold comfort, the deluded hope of a herald-seeking romantic.

Of course, the cold war quietly rages on during the summer.  Kathy likes the air conditioning at levels that slow molecular motion.  I dislike wearing sweat pants and a sweater in the house when it’s flirting with equatorial temperatures outside.  So slyly, oh so slyly, with ninja-like silence, I ratchet the temperature down, just a notch, then another notch, just a tad, just a smidge, thinking my ambient alterations so subtle she will never notice the difference.  Of course, she does, and is less than sly, or subtle, at reversing my reversal.  Really, the crevices of time before spring and fall gather the full strength of summer and winter are the only cease-fires in our relentless conflict.

No doubt age plays a major part in all this.  Cold and old are longstanding fellow travelers.  They never bicker.  They maintain a shivery relation of goosebumpery—always have, always will.  Mr. Old sets the stage: he slows my circulation and basic metabolic rate, thins my fat layer, toggles my hormones, haywires my chemistry and then, like some arrogant and audacious graffitist, attaches those pesky methyl tags to my DNA to mark his tissue-aging work.  All the while, Mr. Cold has been circling, his orbit drawing ever closer, setting up bivouacs along the way, observing with relish the shocks that flesh is heir to, until, finally, the ground is ceded and he swaggers in with an icy sneer, gives Mr. Old a high five, and together they establish a permanent camp.

It can’t be helped.  Biology writes a hack-proof script that we are compelled to follow.  We are, as novelist William T. Vollman says, “shadowed by finitude’s despotism.”  And it’s so despotic that it’s become a stereotype: old men grow colder; old women grow warmer.  So Kathy and I wage surreptitious war at the thermostat.  But here’s the thing:  I hate following scripts.  I hate conforming to a stereotype.  I hate being average.  I’d rather be special.

So, here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it:  my unspecialness is special.  I may be average, but I’m pretty darn good at being it.

Van Winkled

When he awakens from his gin-induced slumber high up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Rip Van Winkle does not realize that he has slept for twenty years, nor does he realize that while he slept the American Revolutionary War has been fought and won.  He drifted into sleep a British citizen; he awoke an American.  He drowsed off a colonial subject; he arose and made his way back down the mountain the sovereign subject of a democracy.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Rip is bewildered when he returns to his village home.  The place has undergone a singularly disorienting transformation.  Time seems out of joint.  The village’s accustomed demeanor of phlegmatic snugness and timeless tranquility has been transformed, into the clangorous babble of disputatious voices using baffling words like citizens’ rights and Congressional elections and liberty.  The male bastion of Nicholas Vedder’s inn has disappeared and, in its place, stands the Yankee Jonathan Doolittle’s ramshackle Union Hotel.  The inn’s sheltering tree has given way to a liberty pole from which waves a flag bestrewn with stars and stripes.  The inn’s sign, too, has changed, revised to portray General Washington rather than King George.  Rip himself, formerly a village favorite, goes unrecognized, is mistaken for his son, and suspected of being a Tory spy, is threatened with violence.

Confronted with such confounding change, driven to his wits’ end end, Rip comes undone, his sense of identity upended: “I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, . . . and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”  Eventually, however, Rip’s identity is affirmed by the village’s historian, and displacement replaced by replacement, he settles into a new role, a storyteller, a chronicler of the pre-war past, and comes to be revered by “the rising generation” as one of the village patriarchs.

It’s likely that Washington Irving intends Rip to represent the socially ameliorative role the artist can play by suturing the historical past to the cultural present.  But rereading “Rip Van Winkle” as autumn enters the not-to-be-denied bear-hugging embrace of winter, has got me thinking instead about change.

E. B. White says that “The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change – and we all instinctively avoid it.”  I have been such an avoider, I would rather listen to 18 straight hours of 120-decibeled Norwegian Black Metal music than make peace with change.   And gazing at the mounting evidence outside my windows of winter implacably choking autumn’s song in its throat, I find myself resonating to Robert Frost’s claim that such a change of season is, somehow, nothing “less than a treason.”

But then there is Irving’s ending to the story, that accommodation Rip makes, his détente with change, his capacity to roll with it, submit to the rhythm of it, use it, finally, to sculpt out a space in which he can attune it to his specifications rather than become its relic.

Rip is resilient.

*     *     *

Stability is undeniably comfortable; predictability, convenient; the settled, dependable.  Change can seem a snap-jawed disruption that cannot be halted.  Its signature is scrawled across the world in indelible ink.  Change happens, has happened, will continue to happen.  It time-warps our conception of the world and our function and fit into it. Change never stops, and to think it does, or to want it to, is a fantasy romanced by illusion.

Muttering to ourselves at the dusty rear of the caravan is no place to be.

The very fact that disruption erupts, however, means that it can be accounted for.  We cannot control the events and circumstances of the world, but we can control how we think about them, how we react to their turbulence.  There is the fact of change, but there is also the fact of my purposeful response to it, the fact of my pro quo for its quid, my imposition on its imposition. A world sunk in stability is a determined world, a world suspended between tock and tick.  In such a world, we never really reach childhood’s end.

The question is, which Rip will we be: the Rip garrisoned by sleep, impervious to the goings on going on, or the Rip who improvises and adapts, the Rip who intuits that roles change, but the need for one never does.  Do we settle with change or settle for it?  Do we work it, integrate it, or do we avert our eyes and practice careful unnoticing? Can we, even in small, quiet ways, shake the burrs of habit off our clothes; Houdini ourselves from rigidity of thinking and acting; learn what’s necessary, what to engage, what to let pass by?  I think the better part of wisdom says we should, must.  “Prudence keeps life safe.” Samuel Johnson says, “but does not often make it happy.”

Oh, and that relentless change from autumn to winter?  Seasonal change never changes, but I can winterize both house and wardrobe.  And, perhaps, myself:  I find myself itching for a snowball fight, and I’ve retrieved, from its long exile atop a dusty basement shelf, the box that contains my ice skates.

 

Replay It, Sam

Language geek that I am, I of course have a favorite word:  “syzygy,” which refers to the alignment of the sun, earth, and moon.  It is not, however, the astronomical phenomenon that makes the word interesting to me; rather, it the word’s sheer oddity.  It’s an outlaw, an outlier, a renegade in the clubby, stuffed-chair company of English words.  It’s a muscular word, ripped and vascular and six-packed, a word that could clean and jerk an Audi.  It’s a martial word, a word with a soldierly march and Spartanish austerity, three syllables of two letters only, each containing “y” clinched to a consonant, a word as stalwart as Leonides at Thermopylae, a word undaunted  by its union of consonant-vowel clusters that appears at the beginning of no English word.   And then there’s the sound-sense bonus, the no-nonsense, military procession of syllables suggesting the alignment the word denotes.  It almost seems a made-up word, though it in fact combines two Greek words, syn, meaning “together” and zagon, meaning “yoke.” 

But my language geekdom extends beyond having a favorite word.  I have a favorite prefix: “re,” from Latin meaning “again,” “back,” “anew.”  “Re” attaches itself to verbs to indicate that the action is redone, revised, revamped, reiterated.  “Re” is the Xerox of prefixes; “re” is a keen edged coulter that turns the encrusted up and back and over; “re” is a verbal do-over make-over.

*     *     *

Sometimes, to purposefully renounce our self-awareness is to restore it.  Sometimes, we are reprieved from memory, rekindled by a seizing impulse, released into the swelling urgency of a moment.  Sometimes, like old recordings, we are remastered, recapturing the rhythmed tune that sings us.  Sometimes, we are bitten by remorse.  Sometimes, we are maladied with no remedy but resilience, retrenchment, rebellion, or the recuperative strength of renewed resolve.  Sometimes, religion ligatures us to an expression of reverence or a renaissance of wonder; sometimes, it redeems, buying us back to ourselves; sometimes, it resurrects us with a resurgence of hope and gratitude; sometimes, it reveals what we already knew by heart but could not find the words to utter.  Sometimes, we reject regret, repress repression, reserve our reserve, reproach our reproach.

*     *     *

I witnessed a retreat that was a resolute act of courage.  In a meeting of academic division chairs and department heads, my Humanities Division colleague presented and defended a proposal that received a dour reception. The discussion quickly regressed into contentiousness. Objections were raised, dire implications prophesied, tangents expounded, tangents of tangents were recounted.  Voices grew loud, angry. My colleague responded, calmly answering objections, pointing out misreadings and clarifying misconceptions, but moment by moment the mood of the meeting was fast unfastening. 

Suddenly my colleague stood up and said, “I’m going to step out into the hallway for a few minutes.  I’m finding myself growing angry at your anger, and I don’t want to say something I’ll regret later.  I’ll return when I’ve cooled off, and maybe then we can reconsider this issue more deliberately.”  He left, we sat silent, he returned, we deliberated.

My colleague refused to react by re-enacting, refused to reflect a resentment he did not feel, refused to recoil into a motion not his own, refused to reciprocate that meeting’s heat, retaining, instead, a steady temperature of his own.  For me he redefined what I thought I knew of rectitude, resolution, and resilience.

*     *     *

At the age of 22, Benjamin Franklin resolved to reorient his life by pursuing “the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”  After all, he reasoned, because he knew right from wrong, he “did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”  But rescinding faults and reinforcing virtues entailed more than simple resolution.  To succeed, moral rehabilitation required a method. It must be actionable, not merely speculative.  So, he created an 18^th century version of an app: a spreadsheet designed to promote his behavior to incorruptibility.

First, he chose 13 virtues, sequenced such that success with one leveraged success with the next: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.  Then, for each virtue, he created a page with seven columns, one for each day of the week, and thirteen rows for each of the virtues.  Focusing on one virtue per week, he marked every relapse with “a little black Spot” in the appropriate cell.  He anticipated the pleasing visual evidence of his having repelled fault and reinforced virtue.

“I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining,” Franklin confesses.  Life intervened: business and public affairs intrude and divert his attention.  Habit resists reform; inclination repulses principle; conjured ideals exceed the time and attention we have to give—the littoral shelves against which most resolutions founder.  And yet, for me, the most important word Franklin utters is “arrived,” for that means he started.  We always, like Franklin, fall “far short” of perfection, and while that can occasion regret, it is no reason for resignation. Franklin says, “I was by the Endeavor a better and a happier Man than I otherwise would have been, if I had not attempted it.”  The launching forth, the enterprising itself, the heart-deep reluctance to settle for being only what we already are—these repurchase us from reproach and recrimination. 

*     *     *

Periodically, mom decided the furniture in the living room needed to be rearranged.  Dad and I, knowing this reorganization would require our physical labor, plaintively inquired, “But why?  It looks fine the way it is.”  Mom gave no reason beyond “it was time” but beyond that beyond she intuitively knew what Dad and I could not comprehend:  things need to be repositioned, regrouped, reshuffled, reconfigured, recombined, repositioned, rerelated, reinvigorated.  Space needs to be respaced, reshaped.  Things need to be jostled into fresh dialogues of color and form.  A room, like a life, needs to speak in a fresh dialect, a repatterned idiom, if it is to impart a renewed nuance.

*     *     *

“Re”—just a chip of language, really, but brimming with linguistic power.  “It is a mischievous notion,” Emerson says, “that the world was finished a long time ago.”  “Re” is “plastic and fluid;” it confutes fixity and baffles the encumbrance of the given.  It pitches woo to the remodel and recast.  It says the made can be remade, the done, redone, and that means the made and done can be made and done, differently, better.

 

 

 

 

 

A Halloween Tale

He could not sleep so he went for a walk.  The winter-crisp night was windless.  A full moon candled a sky pebbled with stars.  He remembered the Ibo proverb in Achebe: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”  And what was that story that described each pinpoint of starlight as the cold cry of an anguished purgatorial soul?  He walked.  He had no destination in mind, no place he particularly wanted to go.  He just walked.

Crossing a snowy field he came upon boot tracks.  The punctuation of another night walker.  He followed them until suddenly they stopped.  Just disappeared, as if the walker walked up into the night sky.  Ascended into the pale energy of the white moon.  The night massed.  Something, he felt, lay in wait, lay just out of sight, clamped and lidded, hidden perhaps beyond the tree line ahead or in the seam of shadow and light or behind the moon--some summons, some surging epiphany, some something that would send him spinning, out over the field, over the town, over the horizon.  The cold deepened, entered his flesh and rippled him with shivering. He felt he might be unraveling.  He turned and followed the two sets of tracks until they became only his set of tracks.  He followed his tracks back across the field and returned home.

He snugged himself under a comforter, sealed himself to keep from untangling.  He slept.  But he did not dream. 

Bead Counting

For almost six years, a rosary has hung from the brass shade bracket of my banker’s desk lamp.  It has been five decades since my fingers trundled along the beads of a rosary’s five decades;  five decades since, as one of the “poor banished children of Eve,” I sought the merciful intercession of the Mother of God by praying the five sets of ten Hail Marys, each punctuated by an Our Father;  five decades since Sister Mary Joseph told us the etymology of the word “rosary”—rosarius, a crown of roses—“Mary’s flower, you know,” Sister said, and told us a story of Mary appearing to a monk praying Hail Marys and transforming each prayer from his lips into a rose with which she wreathed her head; five decades since I contemplated, with each uttered decade of Hail Marys, one of Joyful or Luminous or Sorrowful or Glorious mysteries of the Catholic faith; five decades since I had used a rosary for the purpose for which it was designed.  Yet, I still use it.

The rosary, in a white velvet pouch, lay, with dozens of others, in a basket marked “Take one, please” located in the narthex of the church at which my mother’s funeral mass was said.  The priest misidentified my mother in the opening prayer, confusing her with a woman whose funeral mass was to be said in the afternoon.  An attending deacon whispered in the priest’s ear, he apologized, correctly identified my mother, and began the mass.  No doubt, he was a busy man.  But this was my mother he had misnamed.  I seethed.  I expected a priest who was present in the clarity of right now, a priest more mindful that he was saying a mass for my mother.

At the cemetery he conducted the burial wearing a Green Bay Packers knit cap and gloves.  I got it.  He was a regular guy, a Packer Backer, and in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi has been canonized and various players from the legendary 1967 “Ice Bowl” NFL Championship win over Dallas have been beatified, not to display one’s Packer loyalty is an act of apostasy.  Perhaps, as it was a cold November morning, that hat and those gloves were the warmest he owned.   Perhaps, being busy, he simply grabbed on the run whatever was handy.   And yet, and yet . . .  I wanted a priest, not a Packer fan, not a regular guy.  I wanted a man “configured to Christ,” a man through whom Christ acts, a man whose ordination aligns him in an arc of religious history stretching back to the Apostles. 

It was ungenerous and selfish thinking, angry thinking, unfastened, unshelved, unanchored.  I took offense, and the impulse of my displeasure supplanted thinking, understanding.  I churned with an unpoulticed resentment wholly unfit for the occasion, a maladied spirit my mother would have found foreign, and certainly mortifying in her son.  I wanted to treasure the light of my mother’s life and the solemnity of its passing, not the darkness of my smoldering and bitter indignation. After the funeral, I drove back to the church and took one of the rosaries.  It hangs on my desk lamp as a memorial, and as a self-rebuke, perhaps, even, a spun thread of atonement.

All things invoke; all things conjure.  All things gesture beyond their thingness, point away from themselves, away from their function and use, to an elsewhere, to a something other, to another meaning, more tacit than the thing.  They are charged with social assumptions and perceptions; they say things about us, about others.  They are inlaid, infused, with a social significance, with impressions and interpretations and feelings beyond their application.

Some things, however, go beyond even this beyondness and become sacramental objects.  They address us, hail us, as we hail Mary, to tend, to attend, to not defraud ourselves and give part of ourselves away. They act as talismen, media for a transcendent “herenow,” not a vaguely somewhered “hereafter.” They make moral claims, take us beyond choice and will and calculation, confront us with the force of passionate love, sublime beauty, profound tragedy, shearing sadness; transfer us out of our hermetic monologue and its all-immersive self-regard.   The rosary that hangs on my desk lamp, for all its cheap translucent plastic beads and its tinny chain, makes me stand outside the inhospitable, uncharitable anger I felt at my mother’s funeral, unannexes me, takes me to a place beside myself, a place where my opacity surrenders to my own gaze, where I see myself, what I was, did, could and should have been and done.

Maybe, just maybe, I am, after all, using it for the purpose for which it was designed.

 

Baring Threads

 

Take no thought . . . for the body, what ye shall put on.                     

Luke 12:22

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.                              

Henry David Thoreau

Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.         

Epictetus

 

I walked into the kitchen and said to my wife Kathy, “Look at this.”  I held up a sweater I had found in the bottom of the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers.  My mother had sent it to me some 15 years earlier.  “A perfectly good sweater; why haven’t I worn it?”

“That’s easy,” Kathy said.  “It was new.”

“Well, that’s ridicu—“ I began, until, with a kick-drum thud, I remembered I had yet to wear the T-shirt, fiery red with a stylized blue and white scene of sailboats on the bay, I’d bought in San Francisco in 1987.  Or the six years’ worth of T-shirts from the 10K Bellin Run in Wausau, Wisconsin, back in the 1980s.  Or the three Graceland University T-shirts I received for three Julys, 2002-2004, I’d spent manning the academic table during Iowa Private College week.  Or the Eddie Bauer slippers I’d received in 2009, or several pairs of slacks, at least three sweaters, probably half a dozen dress shirts, three neckties, one belt, one University of Iowa hooded sweatshirt, a Green Bay Packer windbreaker, a leather overcoat, one package of ankle socks, and a Titleist golf cap.  As usual, Kathy was right.

The fear of clothing is called “vestiphobia.”  The fear of the new is termed “neophobia.”  Could it be I suffer from “neovestiphobia?”  Is it possible I’ve been Cotton Mathered to the point of renouncing new clothes, fearing an apostate capitulation to “the creature,” the things of the world, not wanting to take my eye off the ball of more redemptive pursuits?  Am I simply indulging in a self-delusion, flattering myself on my frugality and wise clothes management?

I can safely say that my reticence to wearing new clothes is not the result of being deprived of them when I was a child.  I think I’m on firm ground affirming that my superego is not laying  siege to my ego, or that I haven’t erected a defense against repressed impulses—at least I think the ground is firm, though, really, when it comes to the uncontinented ocean of the Freudian unconscious, how would I know?  I will admit that I tend toward sameness and routine. I will concede that I do not like to draw attention to myself—I should probably add scopophobia, the fear of being stared at, to my list of fears—and would be basketed by anxiety that, in displaying myself in new clothes, I would appear a vain, exhibitionistic poser trying desperately to pull off some look.  I’ll cop to being unduly influenced by an article I read in AARP: The Magazine that advised always and everywhere to dress age appropriately, which, I take it, means staid, muted, and absolutely no skinny jeans.  And I’ll concede to being haunted by the 37-year-old memory of donning a brand-spanking new pair of burgundy double-knit trousers only to have the pet cat leap onto one leg, clinging by its claws and rendering the slacks unwearably pilled. 

For whatever reason, I have this idea that I should wear out the old, threadbare it, consume it until it fades, tatters, and becomes rag-bag ready, before putting on the new.  Giving myself over to the seduction of something new while the old retains its use value strikes me as being a moral kneecapping.  It’s imprudent, it’s impudent, it’s prodigal, it’s profligate.  I simply cannot bring myself to slip into those Bauer slippers, for instance, until the demise of my current slippers, which, calculating by age, condition, and use, should occur on or around mid-March, 2015.  Alternatively, I’ll tell myself that I’m reserving the new for a suitable occasion.  Strangely, however, that occasion never seems to arise.

Mostly, though, I suspect my reluctance to wear the new lies precisely in its newness.  The new is magical; it lies in a crucible of suspended time and pluralled possibility.  It is crisp, unwrinkled, frankincensed.  The new loiters in the bright morning of conceivability, of the unencumbered perhaps.  It is unfallen.  But newness doesn’t last.  Nothing new ever does.  Something can be new only once and only in one way; used, it tocks and ticks, frays and     tuckers, becomes way-worn and, finally, laid away.

How, you may wonder, did I manage to accumulate so many new clothes?  My life has been blessed with generous women who possess what I conspicuously lack: a keen eye for fashion.  They have taken it upon themselves to do what I cannot: dress me, and in a manner that at least shares the same zipcode with the stylish.  The process usually happens like this: on some present-giving occasion, when they ask what I’d like, I reply “I don’t know; there’s nothing I really need or want,” and by default they give me clothing. 

Obviously, I need to provide a more specific response to their query.  If I don’t, it’s likely that by this time next year I’ll be adding G. H. Bass loafers, a Ferragamo military-style jacket, and ck one jeans to the list of the unworn.