June 2021

My family sometimes makes fun of me. It’s gentle fun, but fun nonetheless.

I change my clothes often, usually two or three times a day. However, it’s not that I put on clean clothing – rather, I change clothing depending on what I am doing. If I am working in the garden, for example, I have old torn pants that I will put on for that. If I am sitting and writing, I have old, worn clothing that I wear for that – what I consider my ordinary everyday clothing. If people are coming over, or I am going out of the house, I have good clothing that I put on for that.

I do this because wearing ‘good’ clothing to do tasks where they might become dirty makes me deeply uncomfortable. As a result I have clothing that is categorized by how good it is, and whether I

I sat down and thought about this the other day when I got a new t-shirt from a well known manufacturer of quality clothing. I had not bought clothing from them before, in part because I have a lot of trouble spending on clothes. And true to everything that I had read about this company, the t-shirt is very well made. It is exquisitely comfortable. It looks pretty good as t-shirts go. It should last a long time.

And when I went to light the charcoal grill for dinner, I changed it for an old one that is worn thin and bare, the logo cracked and half missing.

I thought about it: why did I do that? Why do I do that, change my pants and shirt two or three times a day? Wearing the old, worn stuff for multiple days between washings?

I realized that this goes back to when I was very young.

I used to think that we were middle class. Not rich, I thought, but pretty well off. There were poor people, and there were rich people, and there was everybody else – they were middle class. We were middle class.

When I look back on it now, I realize that we were not middle class. We would probably be classified now as working poor – my mother worried about money constantly. She managed to scrape up enough to get me, the oldest, new clothing from the Sears catalog every August ready for the school year: one or two outfits. She managed to find enough to get each of my younger brothers something new if I had stained or torn something, but otherwise they got my hand-me-downs. My sister, the only girl, got new clothing, but she had hand-me-down pants and shirts as play clothing.

My mother went absolutely insane if I got grass stains on my school clothing. Eating, playing… I learned to be careful. Back then, parents controlled their children by beating them.

There are other artefacts of this in my personality. I fuss about windows and doors being open or closed. I do this because we ran out of heating oil a few times when I was young. I remember those times, when a visit from the oil truck was a major expense, and I find that I abhor the waste of heat or cool.

And what drives me is fear. The fear of losing something that I can never get back – if I ruin this shirt, there isn’t another one. Heat is expensive… so expensive. If we run out, we could be in the cold.

Even as I write this, I am wearing a t-shirt with a hole under the armpit. It has a few old stains near the hem. I can eat in this shirt, I can sit in my office room and type. I have three newish, nice t-shirts upstairs. I will change into one of them to go out for lunch. I’d like, one day, to get beyond this, but I don’t think it likely.

I’ll also change my pants. My wife will roll her eyes.