T-Shirt Party

Saturday Wash

A long, long time ago Mary and I were visiting her sister and somehow I noticed that my brother-in-law was wearing cotton flannel athletic shorts and a tee-shirt as bedtime wear.  That shouldn't have surprised me as Dave played quarterback in college, albeit at a relatively small school, and we routinely participated in pick-up volleyball, touch football, and basketball when visiting.

I made an instant decision to change from wearing my underwear to sleep in to mimicking Dave, no matter that my fighter-pilot friends would think I had given up any pretense to a macho self-image. The decision has done me well over the years.  I think I am on my third set of shorts and recently had to bow to wifely pressure to choose a new tee-shirt from amongst those without holes under the arms.

This was not an easy choice.

Before I had my hip operation a few months ago, I was a runner for almost fifty years.  I ran in some 5-k and 10-k races and, if I didn't collect all that many trophies, I did have a goodly supply of tee-shirts, some of which still fit.  And, in my second career as a Dental Insurance Director, I went to many conferences and gathered event tees.

Red Dress Run

Oh, did I mention I have run with the Hash House Harriers in several states and countries with commemorative tee-shirts at almost every one, most of which cannot be worn in polite society.

So, it wasn't a matter of not having choices, it was more a matter of choosing the correct replacement for my 1997 "WellPoint Olympics" shirt with the underarm ventilation.

Hash Boy Archive

I really have two outfits, and sometimes three sets of shorts, based on how hot or cold the weather is where I travel.  The second set is just for that...travelling. The tee-shirt for that is from the same brother-in-law, who used to have a business promoting Canadian tourism: The All-Canada Show.  Its Spartan front contains only a small logo, but the back proudly announces the Show and the year I received it: 2011.  It has been dutifully packed in the lower left corner of my bag on almost a monthly basis since that time.

In the end my choice came down to either the fire-engine red Angry Bird shirt my grandchildren gave me on our annual family trip to Wisconsin, which I think was their way of parodying my fixation with the game I learned on that trip, or a very quiet white tee, that was less likely to frighten Mary, should she awaken in the night, staring at my chest.

I chose the white, and one of the reasons was that it came from a Las Vegas event put on by the America's Health Insurance Plans organization on a year filled with insurance foreboding: 2000; when all the computers were supposed to crash.

Of course that never happened and I suppose the incredible amount of money and manpower that went into the efforts to avoid it might have had something to do with it.  But I have a sense of irony in my choice of tee shirts because the Affordable Care Act has been touted as almost an equal danger.

Perhaps it too, will prove to be less a doomsday threat.

My next post should be fun to write and hopefully equally fun to read.  I am intrigued by the lengths we go to explain common states that surround us: like the gauge of railway tracks and why some people can trigger a sneeze by looking at the sun.  The facts may surprise you.