This Old T-Shirt

My husband has never worn a suit to work. He has never had to interpret "office casual." His entire working life has been spent in uniforms, sometimes with his name embroidered in italics on a breast pocket patch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Jobs requiring uniforms are just as honorable as suiting up. Toilets gotta flush; cars gotta run; product gotta ship. My husband has never spent money putting together a work wardrobe.

He has a funeral/wedding suit and a button-down collar shirt to go with it. He has a pair of dress shoes, and up until recently when I converted him to Skechers, he always had three pairs of Reboks: lawn-mowing Reboks, work Reboks (when he wasn't required to wear steel toe boots), and dress Reboks. They were all the same shoe, just in different states of wear.

Instead of office casual, his non-work wardrobe is life casual. He has a week's worth of jeans in two sizes, fat jeans and thin jeans. He used to have several pairs of Dockers, but after 10 years with the tags still on them, I gave them to charity.

He has never bought a T-shirt, and yet the last time I counted, he had 75. T-shirts are accumulated free so often, it'd be foolish to buy one. His T-shirts are a lifelong habit. His siblings are dressed up in their school photos. He's in sci-fi movie T-shirts. For a pricey Olan Mills studio portrait, he shows up in a Close Encounters T-shirt.

When I first met him, he wore shirts that advertised his state of mind. He often showed up for our dates in a shirt that said, "Ask Me If I Care." It was more nihilistic than romantic. Another favorite shirt presented a quandary: what do you call a bear with deer antlers?

A beer.

Another was philosophical, outlining the "four stages of tequila: I'm rich. I'm good looking. I'm bullet-proof. I'm invisible."

After we married, the shirts disappeared. Must have been some kind of laundry accident, I would say. But I can't make his entire wardrobe disappear. He wears shirts that advertise music festivals and events long past. Twenty-two, in fact. Whenever someone in his family goes on vacation, they bring him back a souvenir T-shirt, so there's all these shirts from places we've never been. Some of them have disappeared, like the one from the Outer Banks that says, "Got crabs?" I just don't want to go out to dinner with someone wearing that shirt. Some advertise colleges he's never attended. Several are tie-dyed. A couple of dozen advertise products he has sold, shipped, or purchased at one time or another.

Four are Redskins shirts that are only worn on game days because it helps the team. That's what I hear.

Sixteen shirts promote bands he's played with or roadied for and some of his favorites in that category are so thin, you can see your hand through them, but they can't be thrown out because of the "memories." They can't be worn anymore either to protect the fabric that's left. I can't think of any clothes I have that gets the museum artifact treatment. Okay, maybe my wedding dress. I still have that. But he still has his Stiff Richard band t-shirt from 1992 with a cartoon of a bare-assed boy holding his penis. Somehow it's not the same.

He spends his life as a walking billboard for bands, products, businesses, schools, and resorts, and for no more compensation than the shirt on his back, literally. Like the side of a bus, he travels around town emblazoned with a message.