DAD’S TWEED COAT // WEARING YOUR MEMORIES

DAD’S TWEED COAT // WEARING YOUR MEMORIES

It’s just a tweed jacket that’s old before its time, but I hate to let it go. I’ve been wearing it and wearing it and wearing it, and it feels as good as my skin, and besides, who needs a new tweed jacket when you’ve got one that feels this nice? I usually wear it all during the cooler months, most of the time with jeans and tennis shoes or khaki pants and tennis shoes.
Sometimes I vary my wardrobe and wear something besides a black shirt—my usual apparel. Get the shirts at a priest boutique—one of those little stores selling religious stuff. I like ’em because they don’t have buttons showing and because nobody else (but priests) wears them.
So, you’ll usually find me going to the post office and the drugstore and the office on a workday (everyday) wearing that old baggy tweed coat, the black or gray priest shirt, and those dirty old tennis shoes complete with clean underwear and an old leather belt and jeans or trousers of some kind. The closest I ever come to dressing up is to dredge out my previous-life dark suit, my current-life red bow tie and one of those priest shirts, along with the standard black shoes and socks that once were mired deeply in corporate intrigue, corporate sin.
The tweed jacket belonged to my father. Since he died, I’ve taken him with me via the old jacket to such places as relatives’ homes; Washington, DC; Radford, Virginia; Cuba, Alabama; Lookout Mountain,Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and home every day, to have him comfortably near the family as we go about our funny and furious business of living.
The old tweed jacket was nice and new looking when I first put it on after the funeral, and I’ll have to retire it to the closet after a time, since Daddy wouldn’t have liked thinking his clothes ever looked shabby in public. The good memories of my father I can wear all the time, anyhow, so I’d best be about the business of weaning myself and remembering the times before I donned this nice old piece of cloth.
The important stuff my father left me isn’t shabby at all