Worn Out.

As we were heading out to pick up Duck, I glanced down at my pants.

Now I knew these favorite pants were tired. I didn’t know they were flat out worn out, shredded, and deceased. They had been pressed so energetically when they were new that they had a permanent, hard, crease in the front. There I sat staring at the holes which had spouted all along this crease. Worn out holes. Rough edged holes.

Amazing. “I have actually worn out a pair of pants,” I told G.

These kakis were a gift from Ba over ten years ago, and were brand spanking new when she gave them to me. I have pictures of me in them at my fiftieth birthday party. Now they are worn out. Holey. Frayed at the corners and along the seams.

Perhaps they are a symbol of my recovery….or the recovery of my wardrobe. I hadn’t paid much attention to what I wore these first years of sobriety. I painted and got paint all over every thing. I went to yard sales, to thrift stores, and to estate sales. I was always dirty, always dusty.

Ba brought those pants into my life the year before the big birthday. She awoke my sense of clothing and led me down a lane of boring and clean and neat and very unexciting. I didn’t remember any better. Kakis will do that to you sometimes. Maybe I needed to be boring and neat and clean versus paint covered until recently.

Today I put fuchsia on my feet: I put fuchsia on my top. We forayed out into the world first to find a home for Ducks chair then to find some new kakis. I think I shall force myself into flamboyancy and away from the staid and boring. Perhaps I have gotten too caught up in getting to the bus to see the bus.

Philip Marlowe was wrong. Wearing my trousers rolled has deep meaning. Why get them wet….why be staid and like all the others wandering the beach. Why not be different. “Do I dare to eat a peach…” Oh yes, with the juice running passionately in rivulets down my front, ruining my shirt, advertising my wantonness, adding to the sparkle in my eye.

Sometimes I feel like such a prig that some one needs to dynamite me outta my rut. Like Jenny Joseph, I can learn to spit again. I practiced today. That’ll do for a beginning.

T. S. Eliot

When I grow old…

Priggishness