My Life in T-Shirts
March 16, 2010
Pamela wears one of her favorite t-shirts
T-shirts are the sartorial scrapbooks of our lives. Unlike any other apparel, t-shirts express our thoughts, preferences and aspirations to the world at large. We buy t-shirts to commemorate significant moments of time, but all anyone sees is one person, one shirt. To understand the whole of someone, we must view his or her entire t-shirt collection.
I’ve saved many of my t-shirts over the years, the ones I don’t wear anymore but are too precious to toss. I keep them in a see-through box on a closet shelf. They tell my stories.
One of my tees is a reminder of the year I took up running. I ran the same route around a park every day, gradually lengthening the number of circuits. A neighbor, a pro-athletic type, began to run with me. He insisted I stretch before we set out and he encouraged me when I grew tired. After I ran two miles for the very first time, he presented me with a bright yellow t-shirt that reads: “I Am A 2-Mile Woman.”
I have my sorority tee, Alpha Omicron Pi, and a worn army-green tee that reads: “Chase Me Charlies” (no apostrophe). That’s the name of a bar I worked at one fun summer. A favorite t-shirt is the purple-and-white number I wore while marching in Washington, D.C., for the “We Won’t Go Back” pro-choice rally on April 5, 1992.
My husband, Arnie, likes t-shirts that depict our travels. I’m not so big on that. I tend to pick up arty souvenirs, like the oil painting by a riverbank artist in Ukraine. Getting it home was interesting. Before we left the U.S., we’d been erroneously advised to pack bath towels and toilet tissue. We didn’t use them for their intended purposes, but they nicely cushioned the painting in the center of my suitcase.
Arnie and I wore matching white t-shirts to the family pizza dinner we hosted the night before we got married. Mine spells out ”Bride” in cursive black script, and his says ”Groom.” My three nephews sang us a song they made up: “Happy Wedding to You,” to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”
Tell me about your t-shirts.
